Human Rights

On Civility

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Alex Wong/Getty Images

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders went to have dinner at a local restaurant the other day. The owner, who is adamantly opposed to the policies of the Trump administration, politely asked her to leave, and she did. Now (who says human behavior is hard to predict?) an intense discussion has broken out concerning the role of civility in public discourse and our daily life. The Washington Post editorial board, in particular, called for public officials to be allowed to eat in peace, and people have responded in volume.

I don’t have a tweet-length response to this, as I think the issue is more complex than people want to make it out to be. I am pretty far out to one extreme when it comes to the importance of engaging constructively with people with whom we disagree. We live in a liberal democracy, and we should value the importance of getting along even in the face of fundamentally different values, much less specific political stances. Not everyone is worth talking to, but I prefer to err on the side of trying to listen to and speak with as wide a spectrum of people as I can. Hell, maybe I am even wrong and could learn something.

On the other hand, there is a limit. At some point, people become so odious and morally reprehensible that they are just monsters, not respected opponents. It’s important to keep in our list of available actions the ability to simply oppose those who are irredeemably dangerous/evil/wrong. You don’t have to let Hitler eat in your restaurant.

This raises two issues that are not so easy to adjudicate. First, where do we draw the line? What are the criteria by which we can judge someone to have crossed over from “disagreed with” to “shunned”? I honestly don’t know. I tend to err on the side of not shunning people (in public spaces) until it becomes absolutely necessary, but I’m willing to have my mind changed about this. I also think the worry that this particular administration exhibits authoritarian tendencies that could lead to a catastrophe is not a completely silly one, and is at least worth considering seriously.

More importantly, if the argument is “moral monsters should just be shunned, not reasoned with or dealt with constructively,” we have to be prepared to be shunned ourselves by those who think that we’re moral monsters (and those people are out there).  There are those who think, for what they take to be good moral reasons, that abortion and homosexuality are unforgivable sins. If we think it’s okay for restaurant owners who oppose Trump to refuse service to members of his administration, we have to allow staunch opponents of e.g. abortion rights to refuse service to politicians or judges who protect those rights.

The issue becomes especially tricky when the category of “people who are considered to be morally reprehensible” coincides with an entire class of humans who have long been discriminated against, e.g. gays or transgender people. In my view it is bigoted and wrong to discriminate against those groups, but there exist people who find it a moral imperative to do so. A sensible distinction can probably be made between groups that we as a society have decided are worthy of protection and equal treatment regardless of an individual’s moral code, so it’s at least consistent to allow restaurant owners to refuse to serve specific people they think are moral monsters because of some policy they advocate, while still requiring that they serve members of groups whose behaviors they find objectionable.

The only alternative, as I see it, is to give up on the values of liberal toleration, and to simply declare that our personal moral views are unquestionably the right ones, and everyone should be judged by them. That sounds wrong, although we do in fact enshrine certain moral judgments in our legal codes (murder is bad) while leaving others up to individual conscience (whether you want to eat meat is up to you). But it’s probably best to keep that moral core that we codify into law as minimal and widely-agreed-upon as possible, if we want to live in a diverse society.

This would all be simpler if we didn’t have an administration in power that actively works to demonize immigrants and non-straight-white-Americans more generally. Tolerating the intolerant is one of the hardest tasks in a democracy.

 

 

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Guest Post by Alessandra Buonanno: Nobel Laureates Call for Release of Iranian Student Omid Kokabee

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buonannoUsually I start guest posts by remarking on what a pleasure it is to host an article on the topic being discussed. Unfortunately this is a sadder occasion: protesting the unfair detention of Omid Kokabee, a physics graduate student at the University of Texas, who is being imprisoned by the government of Iran. Alessandra Buonanno, who wrote the post, is a distinguished gravitational theorist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the University of Maryland, as well as a member of the Committee on International Freedom of Scientists of the American Physical Society. This case should be important to everyone, but it’s especially important for physicists to work to protect the rights of students who travel from abroad to study our subject.

Omid Kokabee was arrested at the airport of Teheran in January 2011, just before taking a flight back to the University of Texas at Austin, after spending the winter break with his family. He was accused of communicating with a hostile government and after a trial, in which he was denied contact with a lawyer, he was sentenced to 10 years in Teheran’s Evin prison.

According to a letter written by Omid Kokabee, he was asked to work on classified research, and his arrest and detention was a consequence of his refusal. Since his detention, Kokabee has continued to assert his innocence, claiming that several human rights violations affected his interrogation and trial.

Since 2011, we, the Committee on International Freedom of Scientists (CIFS) of the American Physical Society, have protested the imprisonment of Omid Kokabee. Although this case has received continuous support from several scientific and international human rights organizations, the government of Iran has refused to release Kokabee.

Omid Kokabee

Omid Kokabee has received two prestigious awards:

  • The American Physical Society awarded him Andrei Sakharov Prize “For his courage in refusing to use his physics knowledge to work on projects that he deemed harmful to humanity, in the face of extreme physical and psychological pressure.”
  • The American Association for the Advancement of Science awarded Kokabee the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Prize.

Amnesty International (AI) considers Kokabee a prisoner of conscience and has requested his immediate release.

Recently, the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS), AI and CIFS, have prepared a letter addressed to the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei asking that Omid Kokabee be released immediately. The letter was signed by 31 Nobel-prize laureates. (An additional 13 Nobel Laureates have signed this letter since the Nature blog post. See also this update from APS.)

Unfortunately, earlier last month, Kokabee’s health conditions have deteriorated and he has been denied proper medical care. In response, the President of APS, Malcolm Beasley, has written a letter to the Iranian President Rouhani calling for a medical furlough for Omid Kokabee so that he can receive proper medical treatment. AI has also made further steps and has requested urgent medical care for Kokabee.

Very recently, the Iran’s supreme court has nullified the original conviction of Omid Kokabee and has agreed to reconsider the case. Although this is positive news, it is not clear when the new trial will start. Considering Kokabee’s health conditions, it is very important that he is granted a medical furlough as soon as possible.

More public engagement and awareness is needed to solve this unacceptable case of violation of human rights and freedom of scientific research. You can help by tweeting/blogging about it and responding to this Urgent Action that AI has issued. Please note that the date on the Urgent Action is there to create an avalanche effect; it is not a deadline nor it is the end of action.

Alessandra Buonanno for the American Physical Society’s Committee on International Freedom of Scientists (CIFS).

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Ze Is Zir Own Person

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With the increasing acceptance of gay marriage, there’s a temptation to think that we as a society have basically done away with all relevant forms of discrimination. “Hey, we abolished slavery, gave women the vote, and let gay people get married! Perfect equality has finally been achieved.”

Then you read something depressing like this opinion piece in The American Conservative, and are jolted back to reality. It spins off an NPR piece on, naturally, those crazy college youths and their mixed-up ideas. Margot Adler reported on the trend among students to identify themselves not only by their name, but also by what pronouns they like to be called by.

Depending on what street corners you hang out on, you might not be aware that pronouns are an issue. Guys are he/him, and gals are she/her, right?

Of course that only makes sense if you buy into the idea that there are guys, and there are gals, and that’s just about all there is. But the reality is much more richly complex — and that’s a reality to which our society has not yet caught up.

My lovely wife Jennifer has a new book coming out next year — Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. One of her chapters is on gender and sexuality — what it is, how it comes about, and how it gets expressed. Once you actually look at the science behind it all, rather than assuming that the categories bequeathed to you as a child represent universal truths, you quickly realize that this stuff is as complicated as all get-out. (That’s how the youths these days talk, right?)

tesseract Talking with Jennifer as she wrote her chapter (which, as usual for her, involved reading a pile of technical papers as well as interviewing many experts) led me to propose the Gender Tesseract. (I’m hoping this becomes a symbol of inclusiveness and understanding, and we sell bushels of T-shirts and bumper stickers.) A tesseract, as readers well know, is the four-dimensional equivalent of a cube. And roughly — very roughly, because these ideas arise from the human desire to stick things into categorical boxes, not from any fixed nature of reality — there are four important dimensions of gender/sexuality to be considered:

  • Gender Identity: how you think of yourself.
  • Gender Expression: how you dress/act/present yourself to the world.
  • Sexual Orientation: to whom you are attracted.
  • Biological Sex: what body parts you have. (Forgot about that one, didn’t you?)

Eddie-Izzard-Dress-to-Kill-8x62 In principle, all of these can be completely different for an individual person. Comedian Eddie Izzard, although he tends to perform in “boy mode” these days, has frequently appeared in women’s clothing — his gender expression (at least as far as clothes were concerned) was female. But he isn’t gay; his sexual orientation is toward (biological/self-identified) women. There shouldn’t be any problem imagining a person (for example) who is biologically female and wears what we think of as women’s clothing, but who thinks of themselves as male and is attracted to women people who are biologically female. All the vertices of the tesseract are open for business.

And of course the reality is infinitely more complicated than that. There’s no reason to locate one’s self at a vertex of the tesseract, rather than somewhere in the interior; yes, Virginia, there are bisexuals. And indeed there are asexuals and pansexuals and countless other variations. Even before I open my T-shirt store, the Gender Tesseract is hopelessly out of date. (Perhaps we should think of functions defined on the tesseract, rather than simply points within it.) As a member of the most boring, socially normative category, I try to keep in mind that I’m not an expert on other people’s sexuality and identity, and listen to what they have to say rather than telling them how to behave.

Which is tricky, because society loves telling you how to behave. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes indirectly. The most powerful indirect tool society has is language.

The idea of a unique gender binary — men, women, no other categories — is built into English and many other languages. Women are “she,” men are “he,” and there aren’t any other possibilities. Perhaps you don’t know whether a person you are talking about is male or female, in which case society has a rule for you: assume they are male, and refer to them as “he.”

That last one is actually pretty easy to fix. For a long time now, many people have used “they” as a singular pronoun in cases where the person being referred to is of unknown gender. I started using it years ago, and it works fine. (Following in the footsteps here of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, so I’m not exactly a trailblazer.) But what about when you know exactly who you are talking about, and that person doesn’t want to accept a simplistic gender binary?

Thus the quest for gender-neutral pronouns. This is a very tricky subject, as language always is — especially for something so anarchic as English, where there isn’t any central governing body that lays down the law. In English, anyone is allowed to just make up words, so people certainly have. One choice that is popular in the transgender community is to substitute ze for he/she and zir (pronounced “zeer”) for him/his/her. These neologisms can seem strained at first use, but there’s a chance they will catch on and eventually seem perfectly natural. I was intrigued (and pleased) to learn that some college kids are pushing the idea forward. We’ll see how it goes.

Rod Dreher, author of the American Conservative piece, was less pleased. It is in the nature of conservatism to resist change, so that shouldn’t come as much of surprise. What’s depressing is the sheer lazy stupidity of the “critique.” Actually there’s not much critique at all — Dreher merely points at something he doesn’t understand, and kind of giggles uncomfortably. He labels the students “deeply confused people,” and the sum of his counterargument is one word: “Honestly?”

Yes, honestly. Language matters, and matching how we speak about people to how they think about themselves is an important part of human dignity. I don’t know what the best linguistic solution is for the knotty realities of human gender and sexuality, but I welcome the attempts to do better. Perfect equality has not yet been achieved, but I like to think we’re moving in a good direction.

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Bias, Bias Everywhere

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Admitting that scientists demonstrate gender bias shouldn’t make us forget that other kinds of bias exist, or that people other than scientists exhibit them. In a couple of papers (one, two), Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh have investigated how faculty members responded to email requests from prospective students asking for a meeting. The names of the students were randomly shuffled, and chosen to give some implication that the students were male or female, and also whether they were Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese.

And the inquiries most likely to receive positive responses were the ones that came from … white males! You should pause a minute to collect yourself after hearing this shocking news. Here are the fractions of students who didn’t even get a response to their emails, and the fractions who were turned down for a meeting. (Biases aside, can you believe that over half of the prospective students who asked for a meeting were turned down?)

The results pretty much speak for themselves, and help to highlight the kinds of invisible biases that are impossible to detect directly but can end up exerting a large influence on the course of a person’s career. As previously noted, the first step to eradicating (or at least lessening) these kinds of distortions is to recognize that they exist. (Although a quick perusal of our comment sections should suffice to convince skeptics that the biases are very real, and oftentimes proudly defended.)

Interestingly, the studies didn’t only look at scientists, but at academics from a broad variety of disciplines, with dramatically different results. …

Bias, Bias EverywhereRead More »

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Fang Lizhi

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We’re a little bit late here, but I wanted to note that Chinese physicist Fang Lizhi died on Friday in Arizona at the age of 76.

Fang’s research area was quantum cosmology, but he was most well-known for his political activism, fighting against repression in China. Originally a member of the Communist Party, he was expelled for protesting some of the government’s policies. The NYT obituary relates an amusing/horrifying story, according to which Fang attracted the government’s censure by co-authoring a paper entitled “A Solution of the Cosmological Equations in Scalar-Tensor Theory, with Mass and Blackbody Radiation.” Seems pretty innocuous from where we are sitting, but in Communist China the Big Bang model was considered to be a challenge to Engels’s idea that that the universe was infinite, and therefore was deemed heresy. Googling around brought me to this 1988 article in Contemporary Chinese Thought, which shows what Fang was up against. The abstract quotes Lenin, and says in all seriousness “with every new advance in science the idealists distort and take advantage of the latest results of physics to “prove” with varying sleights of hand that the universe is finite, serving the reactionary rule of the moribund exploiting classes.”

In the late 1980’s Fang helped organize resistance to China’s authoritarian regime, in the lead-up to the Tiananmen Square protests. He was fired from his job as a professor, and sought refuge in the American embassy. He was finally permitted to leave the country and emigrate to America in 1990. He finally settled down at the University of Arizona, but continued his work campaigning for human rights.

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Brutality

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You’ve probably heard that protestors at Occupy UC Davis were pepper-sprayed by police during a non-violent protest. (It’s very likely that you have heard but it hasn’t registered, as there have been many similar events nationwide and it’s hard to keep track.)

After the incident, UC Davis police chief, Annette Spicuzza, had this to say:

“There was no way out of that circle. They were cutting the officers off from their support. It’s a very volatile situation.”

Imagine in your mind the kind of “volatile situation” to which this description might apply. Now here’s the picture:

Having never been pepper-sprayed, I have no idea what it’s like, although it doesn’t seem pleasant. But these protestors can take some solace in the idea that this kind of display will bring more support to their movement than a million chanted slogans. The police were obviously badly trained, but the ultimate responsibility lies with UC Davis Chancellor Linda Kaheti, who ordered them in. It’s a horrifying demonstration of what happens when authority is unchecked and out of touch. I’m not sure where the propensity of local authorities to call in police dressed like Storm Troopers started, but it has to end. This isn’t what our country is supposed to be about.

Here’s the video:

Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis

Update: On the question of since when are all protests met with police in riot gear freely dispensing pepper spray, Alexis Madrigal has researched the answer, which is: since the 1999 WTO/anti-globalization protests. Apparently police training is not flexible enough to accommodate the fact that different situations call for different responses.

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Life Under Dictatorship

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As the fighting continues in Libya, the Gaddafi government has invited foreign reporters to Tripoli, as long as they stay in the Rixos hotel. They are barred from leaving to report on actual events, but occasionally get to hear government statements or get taken on organized tours for propaganda purposes.

That tightly-controlled system was violated this morning when Eman al-Obeidy, a Libyan woman from the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, escaped from two days of imprisonment at the hands of Gaddafi’s militia. She managed to flee to the Rixos, where she told reporters about her ordeal. According to Obeidy, she was tied up, beaten, and raped by 15 men, who also defecated and urinated on her. She pleaded for her friends who are still in custody, and showed a number of bruises and injuries on her body.

Being surrounded by international media did not keep her safe, as she was soon confronted by security forces as she told her story. Despite resisting frantically and some attempts at intervention by journalists, she was taken away in a car. Hotel employees sided with the security forces, threatening Obeidy and using knives to hold off journalists who were trying to help her. Soon thereafter, government spokespeople accused her of being drunk and mentally ill, claiming that her story of rape and abuse was a fantasy.

Here’s a video of Obeidy being taken away. Warning: intense and very real.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adOYtk_bY60

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A Mixed Day for Basic Human Decency

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Nothing focuses the mind of an elected representative like the prospect of their vacations being cut short, and Congress has been busy in the days leading up to the Christmas holiday. The big news today:

  • “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is being repealed. DADT was the ugly political compromise that allowed gay and lesbian soldiers to serve in the military, as long as they stayed in the closet. It was opposed by the military, most Americans, and even most members of Congress. Repeal was only difficult because of the bizarre filibuster rule that allows 40% of the U.S. Senate to gang together to block legislation they oppose on the basis of fundamental principles, such as the principle that homosexuals should be discriminated against. Oh, and the energetic opposition of Crazy John McCain, who was a longtime opponent of DADT until he decided it was politically expedient to switch sides. (“There will be high-fives all over the liberal bastions of America,” he said, taking the nonpartisan high road.) The legislative strategy for repeal is a hard-won victory for Obama, who could have overturned the policy by executive order, but argued that passing a law would yield a much more solid and lasting result.
  • The DREAM Act has failed. Again, not because it couldn’t get a majority, but because it couldn’t muster the votes to overcome a filibuster. (A handful of Democrats joined with the Republicans on this one.) In this case, the principled objection was to a bill that allowed non-citizens who were brought to this country illegally as children (when they were younger than 16) to attain citizenship if they graduated from high school and either completely two years of college or joined the military. Obviously we wouldn’t want people like that in our country.

Sorry to be snarky, truly. I much prefer having polite discussions about honest disagreements. But these aren’t examples of that; opposition to these measures arises from combinations of craven political posturing and straightforward bigotry. Nothing principled about it; just politicians preying on people’s fears. And I honestly believe that we have a more healthy political dialogue by admitting that outright, rather than pretending that opposition to bills like this is in any way honorable.

DADT repeal is a big deal. Congratulations to all the servicemen and -women who no longer have to live a lie (at least not because of official government policy; informal discrimination is harder to eradicate). High fives all over!

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Abortion and the Architecture of Reality

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George Tiller, a doctor and abortion provider in Kansas, was shot and killed outside his church on Sunday. The large majority of people on either side of the abortion debate are understandably horrified by an event like this. But it sets up a rhetorical dilemma for anyone who takes seriously the claim that abortion is murder. If George Tiller really was a “baby killer” comparable to Hitler and Stalin, it’s difficult to express unmitigated sadness at his murder. So we get Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, admitting regret — but only that Tiller was a mass murderer who “did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.”

On those rare occasions when they attempt to actually talk to each other, people on opposite sides of the abortion debate usually end up talking past each other. Supporters of abortion rights speak in the language of the autonomy of the mother, and her right to control her own body: “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.” Opponents of abortion speak in terms of the personhood of the fetus. (Yes, Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! — “A person’s a person, no matter how small” — is used to teach this point to Catholic children, over Theodor Geisel’s objections.) Opposition to abortion rights can also be a manifestation of the desire to control women’s sexuality, but let’s concentrate on those whose opposition is grounded in a sincere moral belief that abortion is murder.

If someone believes that abortion really is murder, talk of the reproductive freedom of the mother isn’t going to carry much weight — nobody has the right to murder another person. Supporters of abortion rights don’t say “No, this is one case where murder is completely justified.” Rather, they say “No, the fetus is not a person, so abortion is not murder.” The crucial question (I know, this is not exactly an astonishing new insight) is whether a fetus is really a person.

I have nothing original to add to the debate over when “personhood” begins. But there is something to say about how we decide questions like that. And it takes us directly back to the previous discussion about marriage and fundamental physics. The upshot of which is: how you think about the universe, how you conceptualize the natural world around us, obviously is going to have an enormous impact on how you decide questions like “When does personhood begin?”

In a pre-scientific world, life was — quite understandably — thought of as something intrinsically different from non-life. This view could be taken to different extremes; Plato gave voice to one popular tradition, by claiming that the human soul was a distinct, incorporeal entity that actually occupied a human body. These days we know a lot more than they did back then. Science has taught us that living beings and non-living objects are the same kind of things, deep down; we’re all made of the same chemical elements, and all of our constituents obey the same laws of Nature. Life is complicated, and rich, and fascinating, and not very well understood — but it doesn’t obey separate rules apart from those of the non-living world. Living organisms are just very complicated chemical reactions, not vessels that rely on supernatural essences or mystical élan vital to keep them chugging along. Except “just” is a terribly misleading adverb in this context — living organisms are truly amazing very complicated chemical reactions. Knowing that we are made of the same stuff and obey the same rules as the rest of the universe doesn’t diminish the value or meaning of human life in any way.

…

Abortion and the Architecture of RealityRead More »

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Silence is the Enemy

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Sheril at the Intersection has put up a brave post, using her own experience with sexual assault to bring attention to the plight of victims of sexual violence in Africa and elsewhere. She and Dr. Isis are organizing a campaign of bloggers to urge people to speak out, write to Congress, and donate to charities that working to help victims of sexual violence.

Rape is a problem no matter where it happens, but conditions in Africa have grown desperate, especially in the Congo, Sudan, Rwanda, and Liberia. In Liberia alone, over the course of the civil war, it is estimated that 75% of women were raped. Three out of four. Children are especially vulnerable: in Liberia, 28 percent of rapes involve children 4 or younger. These aren’t typos.

The numbers are from a recent column by Nicholas Kristof. Sexual violence isn’t about sex; it’s about power and domination, and in this case it’s being used as an instrument of war. And it’s nothing peculiar to Africa; rape has always accompanied war, and was a major part of violence against Muslims in Bosnia, not to mention Japan’s invasion of China. It’s an ancient tradition; as the Bible says in Zechariah 14:2:

For I [God] will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city shall be taken and the houses looted and the women raped.

Here is Kristof’s report on Jackie, a 7-year-old girl who was raped by a security guard at her school.

As Kristof says,

The evidence is overwhelming that the best way to deal with rape — whether in Darfur or Liberia, or even in the United States — is to demystify it, dismantle the taboos, and address it directly.

Let’s do that.

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