“Your generation has to decide whether organized human society is going to persist or not,” said Chomsky, long an outspoken critic of capitalism and U.S. foreign policy. “We have to decide right now whether this process of self-destruction and species destruction is going to continue—and if it does, it’ll reach tipping points that are irreversible—or whether we’re going to make the efforts that are possible, feasible, within our grasp, to ensure not only human survival, but better lives for everyone.”

The webinar was hosted by Fordham’s new political union student club, alongside its counterparts from Columbia University, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. In an hour-long discussion, student representatives from each school, including Billy Harrison, the Fordham club’s co-founder and president, asked Chomsky about his opinion on crucial issues hurting the U.S. and the world at large. 

The American Working Class and Anti-Vaxxers 

In today’s economy, many Americans lack steady, regular jobs and live a “precarious existence,” Chomsky said. To make matters worse, over the past four decades, much of the world’s wealth has transferred from working people to concentrated private capital, he said. It has become more difficult for labor unions to successfully mobilize and strike, thanks to updates in labor laws and administration. But he said he sees a positive shift in labor union perception with Joe Biden in the Oval Office.

“He’s the first president in a long time to say something positive about unions. Actually, Dwight Eisenhower was probably the last president to do that,” said Chomsky, who has witnessed 17 American presidencies during his lifetime. “My own feeling is that unless the labor movement is reconstituted, redeveloped, as it happened in the 1930s, we’re not going to have much progress on other fronts. Labor has been on the forefront of positive changes for the general population ever since the earlier stages of the Industrial Revolution.” 

In talking about the pandemic, Chomsky criticized rich countries for monopolizing vaccines instead of sharing them with poorer countries. He also stressed that anti-vaxxers need to be won over with argument and discussion, rather than force.  

“We want to encourage people to think for themselves, deliberate with others, come up with reasonable solutions to their problems and concerns,” said Chomsky, a chair and laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. “You don’t want to browbeat people into accepting your views … You want people to accept them because they see the logic and the evidence for them.”

A More ‘Frightening’ Problem Than the Pandemic

Chomsky said there are far more serious issues than the pandemic that will plague humankind past his lifetime, especially climate change. 

“If we look at public attitudes on this, it’s frightening,” he said, citing a recent poll from the Pew Research Center where only 14% of Republicans cited climate change as a big problem in the U.S. “Illegal immigration and the federal deficit are [their]most urgent problems. Global warming, which is going to destroy the prospects for human life on Earth, is not a serious problem.” 

Chomsky said we need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and reduce their usage in yearly increments—roughly 5 to 6%—until they can be completely replaced with greener alternatives, including nationwide electrical grids and redesigned homes.

“I live in Arizona, where the sun is shining all the time. When I moved in, I put up solar panels. Basically, I get free electricity. I don’t have to feel guilty about running the air conditioner when it’s 110 degrees outside, and I also don’t have to pay thousand-dollar electric bills like my neighbors do,” Chomsky said. “It can be done on a massive scale.”

A “doubly dangerous” threat to society—“doubly” because no one discusses it, said Chomsky—is the increasing threat of nuclear war. 

“Anyone who’s looked over the record over the last 75 years knows it’s a near miracle that we’ve survived this far, and it’s getting much worse,” said Chomsky, who was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. 

Chomsky also reflected on the degree to which colleges and universities should regulate free speech, especially when dealing with racism. He emphasized that regulation of speech is the worst way to deal with these issues. Instead, students should be encouraged to bring their peers together to assess their ideas and educate themselves on divisive issues. 

“College should be a place where students are willing to face challenging, questioning ideas,” said Chomsky, who recently authored a new book, Chomsky for Activists (Routledge, 2021). “Not run away from them, not finding safe spaces where they don’t hear them.” 

The full recording of the event is below:

“She’d cast her vote and I would get to pull the lever,” said the Southeast Bronx native. “I would always look forward to that.”

Today, the Fordham College at Lincoln Center sophomore has taken on a bigger role that is bringing him closer to his public service ambitions. Westbrook-Lowery is a member of Bronx Community Board 9, which supports the Bronx River, Castle Hill, Clason Point, Harding Park, Parkchester, Park Stratton, Soundview and Unionport communities.

The 20-year-old political science major represents an ongoing effort by local council members to get youth to apply for board membership.

“A host of people saw that young people could prove themselves, handle the responsibility, and meet the demands of the job,” said Westbrook-Lowery, who serves on the board’s executive team. “They knocked down the doors so that people like me could come and work for our community and make our communities a better place.”

In 2015, Bronx President Ruben Diaz Jr. appointed Westbrook-Lowery, who was 17 years old at the time, to be one of the youngest executive board members of Community Board 9. He was named to the youth and education committee after the New York State Legislature voted to lower the minimum age for board membership from 18 to 16 years old.

Though he was enthusiastic about his appointment, Westbrook-Lowery, who has interned for New York City Council member Ritchie Torres, state assemblywoman Latoya Joyner, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, had some concerns that he would be pigeonholed into “the young issues.”

As an advocate for affordable housing, health care policy, LGBTQ rights, education, and issues related to labor and employment, he wanted to focus on matters that affected everyone—not just youth.

“I’m the son of a social worker and a trade unionist,” he said. “So, whenever we talk about raising the minimum wage, making sure that people have retirement and security, overtime pay, and health care for workers, those issues have always been immensely important to me.”

He was able to flex his leadership muscles when he was appointed vice chair of the social services and housing committee a year after he joined the board. In the role, he is helping to communicate community concerns and interests to the New York City Housing Authority, Department of Homeless Services, New York City Human Resources Administration, Department of Aging, and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

In addition to organizing a health fair to help educate members in the community about mental health, this summer Westbrook-Lowery is working on a symposium that connects elderly residents with important health benefits.

But his civic duties extend beyond the boardroom: He wants to motivate other young people to be agents of change in their communities.

“Young people are very open to learning, open to seeing new things, hearing different arguments, and trying to decide what the best course of action is,” said Westbrook-Lowery. “We as young people can be just as rational as older folks are, and there are some people that see that.”

But what parallels can we draw from the landmark text in a global society?

Through a series of lectures from Dec. 10 to Dec. 15 at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science, examined Deleuze and Guattari’s pioneering theories through such a political lens.

Tampio, who specializes in the history of political thought, contemporary political theory, and education policy, spoke of Deleuze’s political vision and how it sheds light on think tanks and intercivilizational dialogue.

Xia Ying, a philosophy professor at Tsinghua, invited Tampio to speak at the leading research university founded more than 100 years ago. Stephen Freedman, provost of Fordham University, said many Fordham faculty have scholarly activities with key universities in China—which is an important priority for Fordham.

“For each lecture, I talked for about an hour, and then everyone asked for clarifications or shared their thoughts, for instance, on how to diagram Chinese political thought,” said Tampio, author of Deleuze’s Political Vision (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

Among Deleuze’s most thought-provoking concepts was his model of the rhizome. Based on the botanical rhizome or “mass of roots” which spreads from a tree, the theory is akin to political multiplicity.

“On one hand, the goal of the lectures was to share my knowledge about Deleuze, but on the other hand, I wanted to discuss the relevance of Deleuze’s ideas in the Chinese context,” said Tampio.

Though China follows capitalistic economic principles and operates as a one-party system, Tampio said he wanted to foster discussions about Deleuze’s philosophical approach amid China’s evolving role in international politics and business.

“It was exciting to see the audience in China thinking about the ideas of the rhizome, and what it would mean to have a multi-polar world where there is no tree trunk of centralized power but where countries have to interact to address shared concerns,” he said.

Tampio, who had never been to China before, said Chinese citizens tend to be more sympathetic to the notion of centralized authority because of their own political system.

“In the West, we have a vibrant public sphere and civil society where people are free to disagree with the government,” he said. “But nearly everyone I met in China spoke English and was interested in talking. China does not have the same tradition of free speech; at the same time, the Chinese I met were curious and open to learning and sharing ideas.”

In the process of sharing knowledge about Deleuzian liberalism, pluralism, and comparative political theory, Tampio said he returned to America with new perspectives.

“China is an economic powerhouse that wants to play a larger role on the world stage, economically and politically,” he said. “We have to take China and Chinese political thought seriously.”

Jim: Tell us about your course.

Bob: We’re exploring this idea of how we use humor, not just for entertainment but to communicate in personal relationships, in advertising, in persuasion, in all of the ways we use humor in addition to entertainment. I think that’s actually the most important part of humor.

Jim: So, humor is a communication tool?

Bob: Sometimes it is used in communication to say things we ordinarily couldn’t say. Because in humor we can say “Hey I was only joking!” Often people have different agendas. You don’t know the other person’s agenda, they don’t know yours. So, one part of humor is social probing. Are you playful? Is your mind flexible? If you tell a joke on a certain topic, I can tell pretty quickly if you are liberal or conservative by who you’re making fun of. So there are all these dynamics that go into the use of humor in life and in communication.

Jim: Has stand-up created a new lexicon in comedy?

Bob: Yes, it has. And it’s one of our strongest forces now in comedy: stand-up as a means of communication, as a means of expression and as art form. The history of stand-up probably comes from [monologues that were done in] vaudeville.

Jim: There were ethnic comics in vaudeville who did accents of the immigrant classes.

Bob: Oh yeah, there was all of that. This is terrible, but I have to say there was the Jew routine: the heeb; the Irish routine: the mick; and Italian: the wop. These are all obviously ethnic insults. But that’s what these routines were called. And there were worse that I won’t go into, but it was partly a heterogeneous society’s way of dealing with its own immigrant conflicts rather than killing each other. Epithets aren’t good but they are much preferable to extermination.

Jim: Right, it was a way to process the dissonances and the conflicts of having a hundred different ethnicities in one city or in one country.

Bob: And that comes right out of vaudeville. But our ideas about humor have changed, in that we want to feel more participatory. You know, back then in Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife—please,” you’re not really participating.

Jim: You’re letting the jokes wash over you.

Bob: And he took that form to its extreme, like, “I’ve got an encyclopedia of jokes, just sit back, if you don’t like one, I’ll give you another, and another.”

Jim: And we knew the persona was a construct.

Bob: Right, right. We knew none of it was true. But we know that when Louis C.K. is talking about race, he’s actually making a point. He has a routine where he starts off saying, “Oh man, I don’t know, I’m bummed. I don’t know why. I’m white. I mean I’m not saying white is better, I don’t think I’m better, I’m just saying it’s better to be white.” Part of that is exaggeration or fanciful, but he’s making a point. And then he goes on to say, “…and I’m a man.” He’s touching on a truth, and he’s also talking about his conflicts.

Jim: We’ve become increasingly reliant on comedians to deliver very serious truths, like what’s happening in the news. What are your thoughts on that?

Bob: We now have people getting serious content through comedy; of course John Stewart, and now John Oliver, Steven Colbert, Trevor Noah. And you know that is definitely a real shift, but it goes back a little ways. There was Mark Twain and Will Rogers, for example. What we have now is humor as a kind of rhetoric. And of course, to some extent the politicians are doing the work for you because you have them on video contradicting themselves. But what this means is that humor has become part of the armamentarium of argument. And this is where we come to persuasion. And the question of how much does it persuade? In the end, I think you can only really persuade through real argument although humor can be a way in to let you do that.

The default condition in life is seriousness. Serious argument, logical argument, that’s how we have to live our lives. Humor is the icing on the cake. And the truth is, cakes without icing are lousy.

The forum will be held:
Monday, July 31
6-7:30 p.m.
12th Floor Lounge, Lowenstein Center
Lincoln Center campus

It will feature District 6 incumbent Helen Rosenthal (D) and fellow candidates Cary Goodman, David Owens, William Raudenbush, and Mel Wymore, to discuss important preservation, land use, and development issues.

The forum, “The Balance Between Land Use and Quality of Life,” is being co-hosted by LANDMARK WEST!, Historic Districts Council, The League of Preservation Voters, and Fordham. The forum will be moderated by Lesley A. Massiah-Arthur, associate vice president for Government Relations at Fordham.

Massiah-Arthur said she hoped the forum would be an outlet for debate about how a neighborhood can grow in a constructive fashion. In the 6th District, issues such as school integration and a proposed expansion of the Museum of Natural History are high on the agenda.

“Fordham is very much a part of the community and has a vested interest in how the political dynamics are shaped in this area, but by the same token, as a not-for-profit institution, we’re not in a position to support one candidate over another,” she said.

“The University is the best setting for these kinds of conversations. It allows us to reflect in a very communal way, and hopefully keeps conversations above board. The fact that people think that Fordham has a level of gravitas in this community is a good thing.”

Christina Greer, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, said the race, which will effectively be decided when primary elections are held on Sept. 12, is expected to be a replay of the 2013 election, when Rosenthal won with 27 percent of the vote and Wymore got 21 percent. On July 27, Greer is moderating a separate debate between several candidates in the district on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

“[Rosenthal] has somewhat of an incumbency advantage, but because [Wymore] was able to garner a pretty good amount of support back then, I think he’s been working pretty tirelessly with various groups over the past four years,” she said.

Greer called Wymore a “bit of a thorn in [Rosenthal’s] side.”

“He was always pretty clear, when he lost, that he’d be running again.”

Monday’s event is free to the public, but reservations are required.

]]> 75235 https://now.fordham.edu/politics-and-society/ethics-expert-calls-reversal-on-goldwater-rule-a-mistake/ Tue, 25 Jul 2017 19:52:08 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=74943

Editors note: On July 25, the American Psychoanalytic Association announced it no longer expected its members to abide by the so-called “Goldwater Rule, a code of ethics prohibiting most psychiatrists from giving opinions about the mental state of anyone they have not evaluated.” Celia Fisher, Ph.D., the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics, professor of psychology, and director of Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, discussed the rationale for the rule in February. 

Below, she explains why the July 25 decision is an unfortunate one that elevated political and economic considerations above ethical principles.

“Revising ethical standards to address a particularly problematic political figure or to condone the publication of a book does not reflect well on the association.  The public should be aware that the American Psychoanalytic Association organization does not represent the field of psychiatry per se, but a group of professionals who practice a particular therapeutic orientation within the mental health profession known as psychoanalysis,” she said.

“Responsible diagnosis in psychoanalysis, as in other mental health fields, relies on assessment techniques that are characterized by interactions with and analysis of patient responses to specific established questions. A professionally and ethically responsible diagnosis cannot be determined in the absence of such interactions or assessments. For example, although the American Psychological Association has not adopted a “Goldwater Rule”, the importance of appropriate assessments are intrinsic in its ethics code, which forbids psychologists from providing opinions of the psychological characteristics of individuals if they have not “conducted an examination of the individuals adequate to support their statements or conclusions”. To be sure, the mental health profession can and should share their knowledge with the public, but irresponsible “diagnosis” diminishes the profession and does not serve the public it seeks to inform.”

Stream the February interview with Fisher on this topic below.

“This was the book that made me excited to study political science,” said Dayal, Ph.D., an assistant professor of political science who began teaching at Fordham in 2015. “It examines one of multiple ways to think about power, which is really what animates the study of political science.”

Dayal hopes her own research, which focuses on international organizations, peace processes, and peacekeeping, will also contribute to new ways of thinking about power.

“We live in a world that has been shaped by big international institutions like the United Nations, European Union, and NATO, which emerged out of the end of World War II,” said Dayal. “These are institutions that were designed to help countries cooperate and work together to secure mutual benefits.”

As the United States’ role in global affairs begins to change—for example, with the country’s recent withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement—political scientists are weighing the short- and long-term effects of the country’s political moves, she said.

“When the United States backs away from international organizations and agreements, we worry it could delegitimize a lot of these institutions,” said Dayal. “If the U.S. says, for example, that it doesn’t need to be a part of an institution like the United Nations, other countries may say, ‘Well, the United States doesn’t think it’s important so why is it important for us?’”

The bargaining models of war

This summer, Dayal is set to complete a manuscript examining the U. N.’s peacekeeping operations. She hopes her analysis of how U.N. peace operations play a role in peace processes might help scholars and policymakers as they reconsider how the United Nations contributes to the way wars around the world end.

“There’s a popular perception that all peace operations don’t work very well, and that’s an understandable reaction because of the way that news is reported,” said Dayal.

Failing U.N. peacekeeping missions in countries and regions such as Rwanda and the Balkans, she said, are more “vivid” in the public eye than more successful peacekeeping missions like those in El Salvador, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, and Liberia—which were not quick fixes.

“What we know from existing academic research is that if combatants have decided to stop fighting, negotiate an agreement, and lay down their arms, then peacekeepers are good at keeping them from picking up their arms again,” said Dayal. “But when we send peacekeepers into active war situations, research tells us statistically it can be the same as not sending them at all.”

Globally, the United Nations is the largest deployer of troops in high conflict regions. Because of this, Dayal said it is important to consider how combatants, who are involved in ongoing peace processes, view the United Nations.

“The United Nations thinks of itself as bringing peace, but the combatants’ view of the United Nations can be very different,” said Dayal. “Combatants think of U.N. involvement as bringing a range of things. It’s possible that it will help bring peace, but even if it doesn’t bring peace, it can bring material and financial benefits, or help create the conditions for humanitarian actors to work on things like refugee resettlement, as well. It can also bring tactical and symbolic benefits, like helping rebels forces recraft themselves as political parties.”

Investigating force in peacekeeping

Dayal said U.N. peacekeeping operations have undergone several changes after some prominent peacekeeping failures in the 1990s. Most recently, she and her co-author Lise Morjé Howard have been researching the U.N. Security Council’s decision to give U.N. peacekeepers authorization to use force in defense of civilians.

In their article, “The Use of Force in U.N. Peacekeeping,” to be published in International Organization journal this fall, they note that the authorization of force doesn’t always fit the peacekeeping mission. She cites the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti as an example.

“The problem in that case is that Haiti is not at war,” she said. “Who are we protecting civilians from? What’s the peacekeeper’s job there? It’s not clear because the language is identical to the language of giving peacekeepers the authorization to protect civilians in war-stricken places like Darfur or in South Sudan. We think the answer to why the mission mandates all look so similar lies in Security Council politics, not in the conditions on the ground.”

Dayal said her goal in investigating international organizations is to spark conversations among scholars, policymakers and citizens of the world about effective governance and conflict management, so that they can work together to build a better world.

The risks of inaction

One thing that Dayal emphasizes to her students and other young people is that there are risks to inaction on both a national and global level.

Earlier this summer, she was asked to deliver a speech to young women graduating from her old high school in Troy, New York. She encouraged the graduates to be active participants in politics even in moments of despair.  An adaptation of that speech was published on Ms. Magazine’s blog.

“It’s important for people to understand that democracy isn’t the kind of thing that you set up once, and it just runs on its own,” she said. “It requires investments from citizens to make sure that their values are expressed in their systems of government.”

“I was told that my great-grandfather cobbled the shoes of the Jesuits there,” says Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in Irish history at Fordham in 1975.

Four years later, he left academia to become a speechwriter for New York governors—first for Hugh Carey until 1982, and then for Mario Cuomo. Quinn was a key contributor to several of Cuomo’s most memorable speeches, including his July 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—widely regarded as one of the most powerful of the past four decades.

Quinn left the governor’s office in 1985 to become the chief speechwriter for Time Warner—a transition he made while working on Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which won a 1995 American Book Award.

He followed that with a collection of essays, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007), and a series of historical novels—Hour of the Cat (2005), The Man Who Never Returned (2010), and Dry Bones (2013)—all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

Quinn and his wife, Kathleen, have two adult children, both of whom are Fordham graduates. He recently met with FORDHAM magazine to discuss his family history, his writing, and more.

How much did you know about your ancestors when you were growing up? Did your parents talk much about them?
No. I mean, I heard anecdotes and I always knew I was Irish—our Catholicism was our Irishness. But I think my parents’ generation felt, “We’re moving into America. That is the past. There’s no need to have it beyond St. Patrick’s Day.” You’re very proud of being Irish, but the particulars of it were not of interest. I think in my parents’ case, and their parents’, they pushed their children ahead, you know, and made sure that they went to college. I only knew one grandparent, and they never talked about Ireland. Never. And I think they loved cities—you know, the whole Irish farming experience hadn’t been too great.

Your great-grandfather Michael Manning, how much do you know about what brought him to America?
It was the famine that would have brought him. He would have been one of the 2 million Irish who left in 10 years.

When did you really delve into that history and learn more about what the immigrant experience must’ve been like for him?
Well, that’s how I wound up writing a novel. I was studying for a Ph.D. in Irish history with Maurice O’Connell at Fordham. Then I left the academic world to go into politics, and I used to go to the state library to research speeches. I found this housing report for 1855 that was like a description of Dickensian London. I recognized that this is where my great-grandparents lived, and I had never heard anything about it. So then I began to look into that, the conditions in New York in the 1840s and ’50s. It had an infant mortality rate like the third world. It didn’t have a sewer system. So I realized, in a sense, why they didn’t tell us all this growing up. What was the use in knowing that?

Do you think there is a tendency to romanticize the immigrant experience generations later, and do you see a danger in that?
Oh, yeah, it’s a human tendency. It becomes part of a sentimental path rather than a reliving of the brutal reality that so many people go through.

And I think the danger is that you can lose sympathy with people in poverty and difficult circumstances now, thinking, “We were more noble the way we did it.” You forget the people who didn’t survive, who were victims of a lack of opportunity, poverty. We tidy it up. I always say America loves immigrants, but they have to be here two or three generations before anybody loves them.

People lose sight of the kind of labels and stereotypes that have been attached to new immigrant groups. The Irish, their disease was cholera. People thought they carried it with them. It came from tainted water, but people didn’t want to live around the Irish because they thought it was their disease, and they were judged to be mentally inferior to Anglo-Saxons. It’s like IQ tests, when they were first used at Ellis Island: They felt that Italians and Jews would bring down the national IQ. So you just see these things, and I don’t know how you cure it.

I think if you’re Irish and if you understand your history, if it doesn’t leave you with sympathy for the underdog, I don’t know what would.

You’ve written—both in Banished Children of Eve and in Looking for Jimmy—about the pivotal role Archbishop John Hughes, Fordham’s founder, played in galvanizing “the Irish-American process of reorganization” in the mid-19th century. How would you sum up his contributions?
I always say he was as much an Irish chieftain as a Catholic churchman. He’s the stem of the whole flower, the central figure, or however you want to describe it. He was here when a million Irish came out of Ireland from the famine, essentially skill-less, impoverished, and he was the mainspring of their reorganization. I always say that the Irish experience in America was about reorganizing. They were a mob when they came here. They had no financial resources. They had no education. They had no skills.

The engines of reorganization were the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party (which called itself the “Organization”), and the labor movement. The thing was to know the community was there, and it held together. Things cohered.

How did you go from grad school at Fordham to political speechwriting?
I wrote an article for America magazine in 1979 called “An American Irish St. Patrick’s Day.” I submitted it because, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was fascinated by this Irish-American experience that seemed to me to be going away without having been examined. We never looked at ourselves. Now we were moving to the suburbs. We were losing that thing I was talking about; the coherent thing was falling apart. But where was the record of it? Supposedly the Irish are great writers, but I couldn’t find any novels about the Irish-American experience. One, Elizabeth Cullinan, she wrote a beautiful novel, House of Gold, about the Bronx parish that I grew up in. But I remember everybody was horrified that she wrote it. She was putting out the family laundry. My mother was like, “How could she do that?”

So I wrote the article about this, and a Fordham alumnus read it and gave it to [New York Governor] Hugh Carey, who knew my father and was looking for a speechwriter. Out of the blue, they asked me to write the Fordham Law School commencement speech for him. I’d never written a speech. But I was looking for a job, and I didn’t want to be underemployed, so I wrote the speech. They really liked it and eventually offered me a job. I said I’ll do it for a year and then go back to academics. That was almost 40 years ago.

What did you learn from your experience in Albany?
To work in politics behind the scenes, you learn so much about the dynamics of human interrelationships, how much is based on personal relationships. Merit and hard work are no match for it. You know what was the great motto of the Albany machine? Honesty is no substitute for experience.

At what point did an academic career recede in your rearview mirror?
It receded when I got my second raise. I was making about twice what I’d been making. And then I got married. My wife is from the Bronx. We knew each other 14 years before we got married. That’s what’s known in the west of Ireland as a “whirlwind courtship.” She had moved to Albany for graduate school. She was a rehabilitation counselor. We reunited and got married. Finishing the doctorate would have been taking a big step backward. And some part of me always wanted to be a writer. It was an ambition.

Tell me about the genesis of Banished Children of Eve. I understand you initially thought you were going to write a history of the Irish in New York. Is that right?
I was an ex-academic. I still have a big interest in history. I used to send away for remaindered books. As I began to think about the experience of the famine Irish coming into New York, I realized there was really no central history written of it, this big event. I got one book on the Draft Riots, The Armies of the Streets [by Adrian Cook]. This historian did what no historian had done before. He went down and got the records from the morgue. They used to say a thousand people died in the riots. He could identify a hundred and something people. One of the names was Peter Quinn. My Quinn ancestors weren’t here yet. They didn’t come until 1870, but I was like, “Whoa, who is he?”

The personalization of history struck me. There were no diaries, no records. Nobody wrote. There’s not a scrap of paper in my family of anybody’s experience. So I wanted to write a history, but I began to realize the voices I wanted were not recorded. Then I found out that this songwriter, Stephen Foster, was in New York at the time of the Draft Riots. I went down—I think he committed suicide in the New England Hotel on the Bowery, and I stood in front of it. Every novelist is part psychotic; we hear voices. And standing there, I kind of felt I knew who he was. I had never written fiction, not a lick of it. But I said the only way I reach those voices is in novels.

How conscious were you of the fact that as a novelist you were drawing from your work experiences—for example, from the time you worked as a court officer in the Bronx?
At some points I was, absolutely. Dealing with a city, I felt like it was in extremis [as it was during the Civil War]. Being in the South Bronx in the ’70s in a uniform and sitting in a courtroom with 150 people and saying, “Well, you know, these people look poor and strange to me. And this is what my ancestors looked like to the people who were wearing the uniforms at that time.”

I figured it wasn’t just an Irish story I was telling at that point because once you stepped off those boats, you’re no longer Irish. You’re still Irish, but you’re becoming something else. And part of that experience is you have to interact with people you never had to interact with before. You might hate them. But you have to live with them, and some part of you is going to rub off on each other. That dynamic hasn’t changed.

Since 2005, you’ve published a trilogy of historical-mystery novels featuring the Irish-American detective Fintan Dunne. Do you see those books as part of a continuum that began with Banished Children of Eve?
Yes, Fintan Dunne is a descendant of Jimmy Dunne [in Banished Children of Eve], but I don’t know how. He’s a cousin somehow. The idea was that they would be three books that would stand alone, but in a way tell the history of New York from the First World War to the Cold War. And the thread would be this Irish-Catholic guy, Fintan Dunne.

I love Raymond Chandler. I always felt his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne. I knew people that lived in that New York, and the thing about New York is, you never have to look for a story to tell. It’s right there in front of you.

How do you go about conducting research for your novels? When do you know enough’s enough?
I love doing research. Every writer wants excuses not to write, and research is the best excuse to have because you’re still working on the book. What I would try to do is immerse myself to the point where I would feel that I have some sense of that world. Then I would start to write, and if I had to look for other pieces, I would.

When I was researching Banished Children, my wife and daughter were away for the summer at Shelter Island. I would go out on weekends, but every night after work, I’d go to the newspaper division of the New York Public Library. I read all of the newspapers from the Civil War. I remember sitting there, and the air conditioner wasn’t working. It was August. I said, well, now I’ll read all of Harper’s Weekly. Then I realized I can either write this or research it for the rest of my life because the research is quicksand; it’s so interesting.

Did it get harder to stop researching for the Fintan Dunne books because it’s just so much easier to find things these days?
Oh, yeah, it’s unbelievable. I used to keep a list at my desk. I’d write down things to look up. Then at lunch hour—I was working at the Time-Life building—I’d run to the library. Now you just go online. It’s so much easier but not as much fun. It was so much more like detective work before. You were like Fintan Dunne. You were a gumshoe tracking stuff down.

What does it mean to you to be an American of Irish ancestry born in New York? What kind of cultural inheritance do those three things imply?
My father once said to me that the legacy of being Irish is having a sense of humor and rooting for the underdog. And if you’re going to live in New York City, those are two necessary things!

And I think the great thing about being Irish and Catholic in New York is you don’t have to be. Everybody can choose what they want to be. It’s not an identity imposed on you. Tomorrow, I could be an American Buddhist. To me, that makes it so much more valuable, you know, that freedom to be what you want to be that New York confers, I think, as much or more than any place in the world. I can be this. Then I can admit other people’s rights to their choices.

You’ve talked about storytelling as a noble occupation, something that unites us all. Would you elaborate on that?
You grow up, and you think there are serious jobs—accountant, lawyer, business CEO—and then you realize, the most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories. The first thing we did after we sat around campfires was to tell each other stories. It is essentially what it is to be human.

In every human society, one of the most important persons has been the storyteller, the seanachie in Irish. Before the Bible was written, it was spoken. Every religion is organized around a story. Every nation is organized around a story. Every family has its own myth.

Now I think there are bad stories. There are stories that are written or told badly, and then there are stories that are bad, like eugenics. That was a bad story. It was essentially a story that was used against other people to commit mass murder. Stories are very powerful.

One of the things I learned in writing speeches was that a good speech is a good story. And [Ronald] Reagan, one of his powers as president was, he had a story. He had the story of the frontiersman and the lone pioneer. One of the reasons why Cuomo is remembered is he had a story too—family, mom and pop. That’s what people listen to.

Do you ever itch to be back where you were—
To be young with hair? Sure, everybody does.

I mean, as a political speechwriter, having the opportunity to help tell a story in that way?
No. I’m really glad I did it. It was a defining experience. It helped me be a writer in ways I can’t describe. But I would never, ever want to do it again. For five minutes, I wouldn’t want to do it again. And I do think you have to be young to do it. It’s physically taxing. And it’s an exercise in anonymity.

Next month, you’ll be participating in a Fordham conference on “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination.” How would you define that term, and do you think of yourself as a Catholic writer?
When I’m writing, I never think about being Catholic. It’s just who I am. I’m not advancing any dogmas.

I have an essay in Looking for Jimmy where I said there are three elements to the Catholic imagination: sin, grace, and mercy. I wrote that years ago, and Pope Francis, the word he uses all the time now is mercy. We don’t want justice. We want justice for other people. We want mercy for ourselves. In politics, there’s not much mercy. It’s always been an in-demand commodity in the world, and it always will be, because it’s such a leap. Mercy is not deserved. It’s freely given, and there’s no rationale for it.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

Watch Peter Quinn’s New York, a five-minute video in which Quinn talks about his noir-tinged Fintan Dunne series and the city as muse. “For me,” he begins, “New York City isn’t so much a setting as it is a character. It destroys some people, elevates others. But one thing New York won’t do is leave you alone. It’s always changing.”

The center’s staff wrote about the ethics of diagnosing from afar on March 7 and Aug. 16 of last year, and again on Jan. 30 of this year. To find out why it’s such a big deal, we sat down with Fisher. Listen below:

Full transcript below

Patrick Verel: This is Patrick Verel, and today I’m speaking with Celia Fisher, the Marie Ward Doty University Chair and Ethics, Professor of Psychology, Director of the Center for Ethics Education, and author of the book, Decoding the Ethics Code: A Practical Guide for Psychologists.

The issue of diagnosing someone from afar is something that the ethics blog addressed. Why does this keep coming up?

Celia Fisher: I think it keeps coming up for a number of reasons. Obviously this year we’ve had a presidential candidate and now a president who has a style that is clearly very different from what we’ve ever seen before. There’s a lot of attention to the why’s and reasons for his proclamations and for his behavior, so I think there’s media attention that’s being drawn to this. I think there’s a social interest that’s being drawn to this, and the extent to which some of the unusual comments and behaviors reflect some kind of psychological probably or whether it’s just a very interesting idiosyncratic type of character that we now have in the public sphere.

Patrick Verel: Now you argue that people who are attempting to attribute mental problems like narcissism to political figures that they disagree with are actually, they’re doing a disservice to themselves, right? Can you explain that a little bit more?

Celia Fisher: Well I think they’re doing a disservice to both the professions of psychology and psychiatry, as well as to the public and the political spheres. People go to mental health professionals for a formal evaluation based upon not only the professional’s training, but also measures that have been validated, that are known to be able to predict and understand somebody’s mental health.

One can only assess somebody’s mental health in a one on one interview using these type of valid and reliable measures. When somebody is attempting to diagnose from afar, they are actually performing nonpsychology, nonpsychiatry. They can be diminishing the trust that individuals who do need some kind of mental health assessment can have in such professionals who are providing these offhanded kinds of diagnoses.

Patrick Verel: I feel like there’s a term I’ve heard, is this arm chair psychology?

Celia Fisher: Arm chair psychology has a history of when psychology broke away from philosophy, and in fact psychologists wanted to be legitimate in their own right because they used the scientific method to develop ways of assessing people. So right now, that term I think is very appropriate for people who are sitting and saying, “My views of the world, my reading of what President Trump says or anybody else says, I can now without applying any type of diagnostic instrument, figure out what category they’re in.”

Patrick Verel: Americans are obviously more polarized now than we have been in probably a good generation or two. Is it fair to say that they’re also more likely to attribute the differences of other people that they disagree with to mental deficiencies?

Celia Fisher: I don’t know if there’s a newer trend to do that just because of the politicization and the polarization of our society right now, but I think that what has happened is, is that rather than look at intent and looking at whether or not somebody is strategic in what they’re doing, there’s a tendency to say, “If somebody is voicing something that I find so inconsistent with my own values, they must be crazy.”

I think that that’s very harmful, but what it does is is it takes us away from looking at somebody as a full person who may actually be very rational in their impulsive, or seemingly irrational statements. A mental disorder is something that people do not have control of. In fact, it takes away from their autonomy to make decisions. Whereas sometimes, very dramatic, unconventional statements can be very strategic in terms of turning public attention to certain issues, and turning public attention away from certain issues.

In that way I think it’s very dangerous for mental help professionals to come out with these kind of, as you call them, arm chair psychology diagnoses, which really turn the public’s attention away from what the intent and the ramifications are of some types of extreme political statements that may really be incredibly strategic, and then simply say, “Well, it’s the result of a disorder.”

Patrick Verel: I guess it’s just sort of like a crutch to just say, “Well they’re crazy.”

Celia Fisher: Exactly. I think if you look at the way that both the people that voted for Trump, and some of the people who didn’t vote for Trump, well many of them said, “Well he doesn’t mean that.” Now we’re seeing that he did mean what he was saying, and so to off handedly just dismiss somebody’s language, what they say are their intentions either because you don’t want to believe that that’s what’s true, or you’re trying to say, “Well, it’s just some impulsive behavior that can be controlled,” I think is very damaging to both sides of the political spectrum.

Patrick Verel: How can the field of ethics help bridge these kinds of divides?

Celia Fisher: What I think is that ethics is incredibly important in terms of integrity right now, because what we’re hearing about this term fake news, and the fact that lies and fake incidences are being promulgated across the social media is very dangerous. I think also the term fake news is dangerous because many of the untrue information that’s coming across is actually propaganda, and there’s an intention behind it.

Fake news makes it sound like it’s comedic, or it’s not important, or it’s a cartoon, but actually propaganda has a very specific intention, and that is to undermine the truth, and I think that ethics is now more important than ever to really come out and say, “When is something untrue. When is something intentionally untrue,” which we must call a lie and a falsehood when that exists.

]]> 64200 https://now.fordham.edu/politics-and-society/are-you-listening-workshop-offers-strategies-for-tackling-polarizing-conversations/ Wed, 02 Nov 2016 19:52:54 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=58457 It’s getting harder and harder to talk with others about divisive topics like abortion, gun rights, and the 2016 presidential election.

As part of Ignatian Week, on Nov. 1 Fordham Law students learned techniques designed to promote civility and reduce instances of talking past each other.

“Dialogue and the Difficult Questions,” a workshop held at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, was conducted by Amy Uelmen, lecturer at Georgetown University Law Center and founder of Fordham Law’s Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer’s Work, and Charles Camosy, Ph.D., associate professor of theology at Fordham.

Camosy said he feels strongly about pro-life issues and animal rights, but said it is his goal to be in solidarity with those with whom he disagrees. He cited social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who says that the positions we hold on the most controversial, polarizing issues are not often based on evidence and argument.

Instead, most of us hold a particular position because that’s the position of our “team,” or social group.

“Because it’s based on teams, it naturally results in a binary,” said Camosy. “There are the righteous, who are on our team, and there are the heathens, who are on the other team. That dynamic, and not actually engaging with other people’s arguments, is what is foundational, and drives polarization.”

He said many people derive their identity more from being in opposition to the other “team” than from identifying with their own group.

“This cuts us off from our ability to listen,” he said. “Our identity is so invested in being against the other, that [it]produces the tendency to come up with caricatures and straw men.”

Uelmen said she was motivated to address the subject by the tears of her friends in her own religious community. During the 2004 presidential election, they tried to engage each other but were torn by the fact that some members felt the others were literally going to hell because of their political choices.

The presenters offered a five-step practice for starting and maintaining conversations that are difficult, in order to reach a point of peace and acceptance of the fact that understanding is not the same thing as agreement. Participants were instructed to engage one another about a controversial topic, and to:

—Approach the conversation from the perspective of basic respect, in the spirit of Pope Francis’ suggestion that “We remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other.”
—Unplug from social media and stay focused on person-to-person interaction.
—Give the person on the other side an “out,” by using phrases like “maybe I don’t understand” or “maybe I need more information.” That way you don’t box anyone into a corner.
—If you learn something new during your conversation, express your gratitude.

One student participant wondered what one should do when a person is not interested in meeting you halfway in any fashion. Camosy suggested that you decide ahead of time that you’re not going to try to “win” the debate. You can even inform the other person that you just want to understand what they think and why they think it.

“It does take a bit of discipline to say ‘I’m not in this to win the conversation,’” he said, “’[but rather]to listen to somebody, take my shoes off, and understand their experience.’”

Hear what students had to say about healing the nation’s political divide:

Hamid Al-Bayati, PhD, who served as the Iraq ambassador to the United Nations from 2006-2013, has been teaching United Nations and Political Leadership at the Lincoln Center campus as a distinguished adjunct professor.

The seven years that Al-Bayati spent working the hallways of the United Nations have enabled him to augment class readings with personal accounts and anecdotes about the dealings of international relations.

Even before that, Al-Bayati was well-acquainted with the challenges of diplomacy, which he detailed in his book From Dictatorship to Democracy: An Insider’s Account of the Iraqi Opposition to Saddam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

That history helped set the table for discussions about some contentious times in the UN’s recent history—from the resolutions adopted in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 the response to 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan to the 2011 resolution authorizing the use of force in Libya.

The class reading list includes memoirs by George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Leon Panetta. Last week, Al-Bayati took the class to the UN’s Secretariat Building for a personal tour.

“We’ve compared the positions of the different political leaders and we’ve tried to diagnose the mistakes that President Bush Sr. committed in Iraq, and then President George W Bush, as well as President Obama. We [look at]what they could learn from them to do better,” he said.

He said the biggest challenge in creating the course was narrowing the material down to just one course, as he said one could teach an entire class just on the Security Council alone.

Al-Bayati’s course is a continuation of the strong UN-Fordham relationship. According to Fordham psychology professor, Harold Takooshian, PhD, Leila Doss, a UN staffer, supervised an internship program for 18 Fordham undergraduate students in the 1990’s.

Al-Bayati finishes the course this week, but it will be repeated in the fall by journalist-psychologist Dinesh Sharma, PhD, the author of The Global Obama: Crossroads of Leadership in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2013) and Barack Obama in Hawai’i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President (Praeger, 2011).

Al-Bayati said the class has been both highly theoretical and practical, with students showing interest in UN careers.

“My advice is they should know something about everything and everything about one thing,” he said. “The UN includes every issue you can imagine.”