The Deliverance of Others

Front matter

David Patun os Liu yee» Reading F a , ae ina Global Age

The Deliverance of Others

David Palumbo-Liu

Preface

Although I am sure she has no recollection of this, the initial idea for this book occurred during a conversation I had with Regenia Gagnier many years ago. At that time, I had the pleasure of having her as a colleague at Stanford. Maybe it was partially because we both had been trained at Berkeley and shared some sense of displacement in Silicon Valley, but for some reason Regenia started talking about rational choice theory. Not only was she speaking about it with regard to her research interests, but she was also commenting on how, after having been what she felt a long time at Stanford, she sensed that this way of accounting for human behavior had become pervasive on campus. Eventually I came to feel that along with rational choice theory came an implicit set of values, which I later dubbed “rational choice thinking.” By that I meant the belief that not only could human decision-making be formalized in rational choice’s parsimonious and elegant formula, but also that its various manifestations could be widely articulated as “common sense” —“people” act on the basis of common ways of reasoning, and, what is more, they should be treated according to that logic. This kind of thinking undergirds our sense of how we behave toward each other and think about the world. Two incidents, which occurred a decade apart, illustrated this in a particularly dramatic fashion.

The first was Larry Summers’s infamous World Bank memo of 1991.1 During his tenure as chief economist for the World Bank, Summers issued a memo suggesting that there was indeed a problem with pollution —the First World had too much of it, and the Third World too little. He proffered a number of rational-choice type arguments, among them the rationale that since the life expectancy of those living in the Third World was so far below that of those living in the First World, the human cost of breathing toxic fumes and consuming toxic food and water would be much greater in the First World than in the Third. After all, those living viii Preface in the Third World couldn't expect to live as long as “we” do, so what would be wrong with reducing their lifetimes by a minuscule amount, when, on the other hand, if we ourselves were to breathe in the byproducts of our First World lifestyle, it would decrease our lifetimes by a much greater proportion? As Summers puts it,

“Dirty” Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? ... The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.”

The response of Jose Lutzenberger, the Brazilian minister of the environment, on reading this leaked memo seems to sum it up well:

Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane. . . . Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional “economists” concerning the nature of the world we live in... . If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said . . . the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.’

While one might applaud such a sentiment, Lutzenberger appears to offer a contradiction: arent logic and sanity deeply affiliated? What could be their possible point of separation? Glossing the terms helps untease the “rational” from the sociopathic, the “impeccable” ethics of business based on some utilitarian notion of “the greater good” (particularly construed, of course) from the notion of an ethical system based on some sense of global community and the goal of a more democratic, just, and equal modality of interdependence. What were the respective fates of Summers and Lutzenberger? Lutzenberger was fired after sending his riposte, while Summers became President Bill

Preface ix

Clinton’s secretary of the Treasury, then president of Harvard University, and then a chief economic advisor to President Barack Obama.

The second example took place shortly after 9/11: the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proposed a “terrorism futures market.” As one news article put it,

It sounds jaw-droppingly callous, not to mention absurd: An Internet gambling parlor, sponsored by the U.S. government, on politics in the Middle East. Anyone, from Osama bin Laden to your grandmother, can bet over the Web on such questions as whether Yasser Arafat will be assassinated or Turkey’s government will be overthrown.

If the bettors are right, they'll win money; if they're wrong, they'll lose their wagers. The site itself will keep numerical tallies of the current “odds” for various events.

Why not just ask the guys at the corner bar whether or not we should invade Jordan, or play SimCity to make foreign policy decisions? But experts say the DARPA-backed Policy Analysis Market . . . is based on a legitimate theory, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that has a proven track record in predicting outcomes. Basically, the idea is that the collective consciousness is smarter than any single person. By forcing people to put their money where their mouth is, the wagers help weed out know-nothings and give more weight to the opinions of those in the know.

“Markets are a great way of aggregating information that a lot of different people have,’ said Eric Zitzewitz, an assistant professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of the big issues with intelligence that was gathered before 9/11 was that information wasn’t aggregated within the intelligence community. This is directly aimed at addressing that.”*

Although the idea sounds offensive to some, “to the extent this has even a small probability of using valuable information to help prevent tragedies, that’s got to be the overriding ethical concern,” he said.

Nevertheless, what led to the scheme’s downfall was not its sheer weirdness, but the fact that it was broadly publicized. Even Fox News commented,

When the plan was disclosed Monday by Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, the Pentagon defended it as a way to gain intelligence about potential terrorists’ plans. Wyden x Preface called it “a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism.’ Dorgan described it as “unbelievably stupid.”

Criticism mounted Tuesday. On the Senate floor, Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle of South Dakota denounced the program as “an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism.” “This is just wrong,” declared Daschle, D-S.D. At an Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton called it “a futures market in death.” At the Foreign Relations hearing, [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz defended DARPA, saying “it is brilliantly imaginative in places where we want them to be imaginative. It sounds like maybe they got too imaginative,” he said, smiling.®

While there is much here to comment on, I focus on two aspects that relate to the main concerns of this book. First, there were the rival metrics of the various cost-benefit analyses—moral, ethical, practical, and “aesthetic” (it just sounded wrong). The Deliverance of Others is intimately concerned with how literary aesthetics in particular help us meditate on the ways we are connected to, and act in relation to, others. Second, there was Wolfowitz’s chilling suggestion that the notion of a terrorism futures market was perhaps just a case of too much imagination. Really? Where did DARPA cross the line? And do we really want to harness the imagination of the world in this way?” In this volume I tackle the problematic of what drives our imaginations, especially of others, and what limits our imagination, for both good and bad reasons. Indeed, I am interested in how literature helps us think through these judgments.

In these pages I look at the various modes of representing and analyzing how humans behave, make choices, express preferences, achieve goals, and assess their place in the world vis-a-vis their goals. However, The Deliverance of Others addresses not only rational choice theory, but also other modes of defining human commonality and interaction—the discourse of the human body and how bodies can interpenetrate in (even) nonsexual ways; the discourse of the emotions and sentiments, and how both are common properties of humans, yet flow between us as well. These questions form the building blocks of my reassessment of the role of contemporary narrative literature in imagining this “togetherness” in and with the other in a critical fashion that I believe should be central to any reading of and any teaching of what we now call “world literature.” Let me provide another anecdote—a more generic one.

Preface xi

One of the first rites of being welcomed into a new community is often the cocktail party. I am sure what I am about to relate has happened, for example, to every teacher of literature. You are nibbling on your curried shrimp, swilling your chardonnay, and a nice person comes and asks what you do. You say, “I teach at X” You feel secure—you have a job, it’s a good school, people like schools. But you don’t feel that way for long. “Oh? What do you teach?” Here I would say, “Comparative literature.” My new friend’s eyes start scanning for an escape route— where is there a venture capitalist or engineer or, even better, both in the same body? I can see reeling through my soon-to-disappear friend’s mind a flashback to the English A.P. exam: “Lord, he’s going to ask me what I have been reading, and even worse, to discuss my thoughts on it!” OK, I feel the same way when I meet engineers. That’s why we have cocktails, and lovely weather to point to here in the Valley.

For twenty-odd years now, I have been trying to see how certain powerful ways of describing how we are bound together have taken hold: we are the same because we all define, rationalize, and reach for our economic preferences and utilities in the same way; we all have a human body; we all have human emotions. These are baseline assumptions, and they help keep us talking to each other. But what has happened now, in this age of increased globalization, when more and more people—closer to us in real and virtual ways than before—need to be vetted on whether or not they are actually the same as us in these ways, precisely? Furthermore, what happens when we try to imagine the genesis and consequences of seeing others through the systems that deliver them to us? And how can the humanities, and literature in particular, aid us in understanding these new sets of problems of “deliverance” in this newly interconnected world?

I admit that the phrase “the deliverance of others” has a strong biblical air and tradition, as it refers to how others can be lead into “the light.” While this volume does not emphasize that connotation of the phrase, because of the import of its clear ethical connotations, neither does it disavow it. What happens when we take on the call to embrace others and take responsibility for them? Put more precisely, this book seeks to delve into the shape, nature, and structure of systems that deliver otherness to us—taking people from “different” worlds and importing them into ours—and analyze those systems when even the most benign and seemingly neutral ones of them actually work to filter out “excessive” otherness for the sake of the functioning of the system. The questions xii Preface then come to be about what “difference” gets siphoned off and where it goes, and, more important, what stays in to change the system, showing its limitations when it comes to actually presenting others to us and creating an ethical global community. I look to literature—specifically, modern and contemporary prose narratives—as a unique mode of understanding a world comprised of new peoples, new choices, new data, all seeking to interact in the best way possible. It would be my hope that, at the cocktail party, I would pull out a literary example and show how its treatment of some issue about which my interlocutor surely knows (economics, choice theory, healthcare, biomedicine, advertising, information, media) not only describes how those systems work (or don’t), but also how the literary imagination and literary art sees, from a point outside the system, another way of conceiving of those relations between people in those delivery systems. In my most hopeful moments, and if my friend is still there, I would close with some discussion of what this experience has tried to teach us about living together ethically. This is a short book, meant to be almost a kind of primer. I hope you find it useful.

Acknowledgments

I want to express my gratitude to a number of people. I have had the great benefit of talking about the subjects treated in this study, in direct and indirect ways, with many wonderful colleagues and friends. Renato Rosaldo and Mary Pratt welcomed me to Stanford and their cultural studies reading group two decades ago, and I will never forget the intellectual buzz, the comradely good humor, and the sense of doing something important in the curriculum and in our writing that kept their house aglow. It was in that context that I first met Regenia Gagnier, to whom I owe the kernel of inspiration for this book. I also want to thank two people who, along with their intellectual brilliance, exemplify for me the warmth, humor, and humaneness one would want to aspire to: Linda Hutcheon and Roland Greene. I also want to thank Heather Houser, whose work in a graduate seminar and in the fine dissertation that followed opened my eyes to so much, and whose work is now doing the same for all its readers. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been a core inspiration for many years, and nothing has delighted me more than now working with her in various venues. Her notion of literature’s “unverifiability” has always stayed with me, along with the need to actually read, and read, and read, and to think first, before anything else, ethically.

Lastly, there are some people without whom in all honesty this book really would not have been written. I thank Karen Kuo for patiently working out so many issues and sharing so much with me. Ruth Ozeki was kind enough not only to share her films and fiction with me, but also, over the course of a term here at Stanford, to discuss at length and with humor and insight her creative process. I owe a huge debt to Shu-mei Shih, Rob Wilson, Wai Chee Dimock, Bruce Robbins, Nirvana Tanoukhi, and Francoise Lionnet for their wonderful and inspiring xiv Acknowledgments enthusiasm, support, and friendship in many venues and encounters— much of what you find in these pages is in fact as much their thinking as mine. Each of these people has immensely broadened my sense of literature, helped me make my ideas as clear and compelling as possible, and lifted my spirits when I really wondered what in the world I thought I was doing. Finally, I owe a debt to Ken Wissoker, of Duke University Press, whose enthusiasm for and appreciation of the idea for this book did much to make it more than just an idea. I was also fortunate in the two press readers that Ken enlisted—their engaged, serious, and rigorous comments helped immeasurably in guiding revision of the manuscript.

As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Sylvie, and to our son, Fabrice. Sylvie, with her deep love of the intellect and especially of literature, showed me, in conversation and action over these decades, how life and art are not separate, and that strolling down any avenue or oceanside can animate conversation about what, for instance, we had debated at a recent graduate seminar, or lectured about in class, or tried to prove to our son, and how what we experience in life can enhance our understanding of the lessons we try to teach our students (and ourselves) as we pick up a work of literature and open a page. My one wish is that the world becomes more aware of this truth about life and art, and ethics and pleasure, for our son’s tremendous talent, creativity, and love of the arts deserves a home, too.