Downton Abbey and life's interference with art

Caution: spoiler alerts here for Downton Abbey fans who haven't yet watched all of Season 3!

So those of you who have seen the end of Season 3 know that at the very end of the episode, one of the main characters makes a sudden, permanent exit. (I'll leave the spoiling at this level.) I was appalled by this fresh assault of tragedy for the household. How could they do this to us loyal viewers?

My wife, who had been keeping silent about the shape of things to come at Downton after getting an unfortunate spoiler hint on Facebook, turned to the internet after the show to find out why this had happened. The answer, it turned out, was that the actor who played the character in question had decided to leave the show. Since he wouldn't be back, they had to find a way to take him out of the action permanently, and the alternatives (a distant voyage, for instance) might have been even more awkward.

Now that doesn't explain why this character went off the scene at the end of the last episode of the season, leaving everyone to put themselves back together emotionally without any support from the show. The reason for that, it turns out, is that British soap operas traditionally remove characters in the Christmas episode, which was what this one had been when it was first broadcast in the U.K. (Really, what can you say?)

But back to the show. The reason for the character leaving was that the actor -- an actual living human being -- wanted to take his career in a different direction. But I don't have any particular connection to that actor. I do feel very much engaged with the show. Yeats once asked how we can tell the dancer from the dance. Here it's clear what the difference between the actor and the play is, but as a viewer I'm annoyed that the actor got in the way of the art!

This is either a sign of the power of art and narrative, or an indication that I should get out and jog more.

Discretion and the Baga

Elsewhere in his book Art of the Baga (did I mention that this book is very interesting?), Frederick Lamp discusses the question of how he can keep the confidences of his sources, who evidently shared with him some ritual secrets of the Baga, while still conveying enough of the essence of the matters under discussion so that readers can get a meaningful understanding of Baga culture.

Lamp faced a serious dilemma. Apparently some crucial information "has always been considered secret, the property of only the most highly ranked, initiated males" -- but "[s]ince initiations are no longer practiced on any level, the mechanisms for transmitting that knowledge are gone. The information is simply guarded by those who have it, and much of it will probably disappear with them at their death." (14) Is there a moral obligation for a scholar to preserve elements of human culture, even if the people whose culture it was would prefer for it to die with them?

Fortunately, Lamp "was able to enlist the aid of others in the community, including some elders (one aged around 107) who were not ritual officials. Through them I gained a satisfactory amount of information." (14) He also became part of discussions with the Baga themselves about these issues, and perhaps indeed they are the best people to answer the question of what part of their past culture should be preserved for history -- yet against tradition.

But meanwhile the next question was what Lamp should write. Ultimately, Lamp says, on certain ritual secrets he "decided to present only material that has already been disseminated outside the Baga community, in theses, sketches, and collection photographs, together with a minimum of what little elaboration has been offered to me by the elders themselves." He goes on to "beg the indulgence of any elders who may feel I have crossed the line." (58) This stance reflects a deep respect for the Baga elders' right to decide how much of their heritage will survive.

But there is one further note. Lamp writes that "I have withheld information that may jeopardize secrecy, and particularly details that outsiders may find abhorrent." (58) One can't read that sentence without wondering what details an outsider might find abhorrent. Here of course we, the outsider readers, do not know. But there are some intriguing hints. Lamp reprints a photograph he himself took in 1976 of a ritual event among the Temne (a group with some links to the Baga); he writes that "[t]he ritual was saturated with secrecy and I was very unwelcome, even though the part of it I saw was ostensibly public ... and I had official permission to attend.... The atmosphere was extremely tense, and dangerous to the uninitiated." (83) Later he quotes a Baga source saying that during an initiation, "the female sorcerers who would attempt, out of curiosity, to follow the operation of circumcision in the forest are physically liquidated from society by the Tshol" (94)  -- a "shrine figure" (87) with formidable powers. Perhaps there are more hints later in the book (which I've only read the first part of so far), but it does seem that part of what Lamp is not describing is the serious threat or reality of violence.

And, in a classic irony, if violence is indeed an underlying feature of Baga ritual, we have to recognize that this violence is bound up with the processes of creativity that also produced Baga art.

Sexuality and tradition among the Baga

Another note from Frederick Lamp’s fascinating Art of the Baga (1996):

Lamp describes “a spectacular and sensuous dance” performed by Baga men (73), that celebrates an important spirit named “a-Bol, the patron of the feminine moiety,” one division of Baga society. (70). This dance, which another scholar observed in the 1950s, was performed several times in 1987, perhaps as part of the renaissance of Baga traditional practices. All the dancers, Lamp reports, are dressed as women:

Each dancer is dressed in a particular female style: a printed-cloth wrapper around the waist, a scarf around the head, necklaces, bracelets, and conspicuous earrings tied to the ears. (73)  

What’s the dance like? Lamp writes that:

In the dances we saw in 1987, the men’s movements were homoerotic. First parading at a normal gait, the dancers would then take a position with legs splayed and knees bent, shuffling their feet with each beat, swiveling the hips …. (73)

He goes on:

Demonstrations of this dance in several [Baga] Sitemu villages were relatively sedate, but at the three-day ritual sacrifice the dancing was boisterous, continued for several hours, and included some spirit possession and also some sexually suggestive gestures and contact between the men.  (73)

Lamp suggests there may be multiple reasons for this ritual, but he proposes that one source may be that “the a-Bol ritual may be seen in the context of a ‘younger’ clan identified with the feminine principle, and sexual as sexuality is defined for the ‘younger’” – and, he writes, “No studies have investigated the extent of this phenomenon, but it seems clear that some homosexual behavior was expected among the youth.” (74)

This elaborate display of cross-dressing, with its complex roots, is interesting in and of itself. But it is also striking evidence – not that any was actually needed – that the claims sometimes made in Africa today that homosexuality is un-African are, of course, false. 

On the fall and possible rise of the art of the African Baga

From a book I'm reading called "Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention" by Frederick Lamp (1996): "during the colonial occupation by the French, the demand for African art objects in France nearly denuded the Baga cultural landscape of old masks and ritual sculpture." (Page 19) One can see why: Baga masks in particular are remarkable, as this African Art dealer's website illustrates. But to "denude" a cultural landscape -- what an accomplishment.

Yet there is a saving feature of this situation: in real life, there's always a day after, and in the Baga's day after there has evidently been something of a renaissance of traditional practices, in which, the author writes, "[s]ince 1985, my photo albums have exposed [Baga] carvers to works of art now in private and museum collections in other parts of the world."(Page 22.) So it's possible to hope that the Baga themselves will replenish their cultural landscape, and that they may at the same time find a way to deliver new art to admiring outsiders that will escape the demand for authenticity that seems to require stripping people of their own culture.

Remembering Arthur Chaskalson - Washington College of Law, American University, March 4, 2013

Last Monday, March 4, 2013 I had the privilege of speaking at American University's Washington College of Law at a memorial tribute to Arthur Chaskalson, "Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson: Celebrating the Life of a Transformational Lawyer and Judge." The event was recorded on video, and can be seen at http://media.wcl.american.edu/Mediasite/Play/379a119cebd440ffb3e8f4a84122cfec1d.  I personally learned a lot from the moving talks that others gave that day. Here's an approximate version of what I said: 

Thanks to Dean Claudio Grossman and Professor Sean Flynn. It’s an honor to be here with others who remember Arthur.

Let me begin by mentioning that there will be a second memorial for Arthur this Friday afternoon in New York. There are so many people here in the US whom Arthur deeply affected, that even two memorials won’t be enough.

In 1986, when I was teaching at Columbia, Jack Greenberg, formerly the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, began inviting anti-apartheid lawyers from South Africa to come over to Columbia, and I had the great good fortune to become the person who put together and co-taught a course with them on South African law, called “Legal Responses to Apartheid.”

The first time I taught, my co-teachers were Sydney and Felicia Kentridge, and Dikgang Moseneke. All three were remarkable. Sydney had done the Biko inquest, representing Steve Biko’s family, and would go on to lead the bar in London, Felicia had co-founded the Legal Resources Centre with Arthur, and Dikgang had emerged from imprisonment on Robben Island as a teenager to become an attorney, later an advocate, later among many other roles the Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa. So I had a wonderful introduction to South Africa law.

The second time I taught was with Arthur, who spent the academic year 1987-88 at Columbia. I had thought I understood South African law, but from Arthur I realized that to really understand it I would have to immerse myself in it. It was easy, and accurate, to say that South African law in the late 80s was horrifically unjust. But if that was all you could say, it was impossible to understand how Arthur and others were actually succeeding in working against apartheid within that very legal system. So I realized that I had a course of study ahead of me.

Arthur did one other thing for me that year, which was to invite me out to South Africa. I went in the summer of 1988 for three weeks, stayed at the Chaskalsons’ home in Johannesburg – though that time Lorraine Chaskalson was still back in New York in an academic program there – and met a group of lawyers who were engaged in the same work as Arthur: trying to find ways to achieve some measure of justice, or progress towards justice, in the courts of apartheid South Africa. It turned out that I’d found one of the main concerns of my adult life: the challenge to apartheid and the efforts to build a just nation in its wake.

So I’m personally very, very grateful to Arthur and to Lorraine, my friends, for having done so much to set me on this course and for the quarter-century of support and friendship they’ve given to my family and me. I can’t resist saying that if you look at the program for today’s gathering, you’ll see on the right side a picture of Arthur, sitting next to a handsome young man. That young man is my younger son David and he’s sitting, obviously completely thrilled, next to Arthur behind the bench of the Constitutional Court, during a tour of the Court that Arthur gave to Dave, Teresa, and me in 2009. Arthur looks like he’s having a good time too!

But I haven’t come primarily to talk about Arthur and me and mine. Instead, let me try to add to our memories and understanding of Arthur, and to help paint a picture of a man who combined aspects of John Adams, James Madison and John Marshall in a single life.

John Adams: So let me start with this: Arthur Chaskalson believed in the law. But how could one believe in the law in South Africa, when it was shot through with injustice? This is a question that all of us this morning have been asking. Ambassador Rasool’s image of anti-apartheid lawyers in South Africa as “dislocated from the law” was very illuminating; so was Stephen Clingman’s suggestion that Arthur respected the office of the judge, however dreadful the occupant of that office. Here’s my answer: I think that Arthur believed in what the law should be, and committed himself to doing everything he could so that the law could be that as well. So to pursue the path of the law, he understood that he needed to be faithful to that ideal law; but that in turn meant that he had to honor the potential for that law within the harsh and callous framework of South African law as it stood.

So to Arthur, a leader of the Bar, when he represented a group of anti-apartheid activists on trial for treason in Delmas in the 1980s, it was a profound step when he moved to recuse the judge in the case (as Stephen Clingman recounted). But it was also a serious matter when he and his co-counsel, including the extraordinary George Bizos, decided they would no longer take tea with the judge during breaks in the action – as a mark of their protest against that judge’s handling of the case.

So, similarly, it was Arthur, representing Dullah Omar – later Minister of Justice – in a challenge to Omar’s detention under the state of emergency in the mid-80s, who raised an argument about a possible interpretive limit on emergency power and apparently indicated in the trial court that he didn’t have too much confidence in the argument. Who ever heard of an American lawyer saying he lacked confidence in his own argument? But in the Appellate Division Arthur went on to say that he now had more confidence in this same argument – and who ever heard of that either? Arthur didn’t win that case (I wrote a book about the State of Emergency, part of whose point was to show that every important state of emergency case in the Appellate Division upheld the state’s powers).

But Arthur did win other cases, including a remarkable pass law case from the mid-1980s that his longtime colleague and friend Geoff Budlender described in his eulogy for Arthur at his funeral in South Africa. What’s most striking about Geoff’s account of that case, in which Arthur persuaded a by-no-means eager Appellate Division to read a portion of South Africa’s pass law in favor of black South Africans – when clearly that law was never meant to have benign effects for black people – is that the court could not resist the sheer intellectual force of Arthur’s argument, even though its import was completely counterintuitive. But logic alone is rarely enough. The judges of that court were persuaded, I am sure, in good part because they knew that what Arthur argued was what he believed.

But Arthur’s work was not a rarefied process of intellectual argument punctuated by tea. (Actually I believe that Arthur and his colleagues often did their late night case preparation with some whiskey.) The fact is that anyone opposed to apartheid in old South Africa was a target of the state’s unwelcome attentions. That first summer that I stayed at the Chaskalsons’ house, lawyers at the LRC office in Pretoria were on the trail of what they thought might be a burial ground where security forces had disposed of the bodies of people they had killed. They were consulting Arthur about what to do. Or rather, they were doing so except when, for perhaps 6 hours one weekend day, the phone service at the Chaskalson home went completely out. I assume that Arthur and Lorraine took for granted that their lives were constantly subject to surveillance, interference and the possibility of worse.

Nor was Arthur merely trying to reform apartheid. In the 80s it was sometimes possible, from across an ocean, to confuse legal struggle against apartheid with a failure to really get the point that apartheid had to end. Arthur had no such confusion. I am sure he had been completely clear on this point since his days on the Student Representative Council at Wits in the 50s, and since his work with Bram Fischer – the leader of the South African bar, and a Communist who spent his final years in prison, whose desk and law books (and, as Stephen Clingman said here, whose gown) Arthur received after his death. But I remember standing in the Chaskalsons’ garden with him one evening, looking out at Johannesburg and perhaps saying something about how strange a combination of achievement and injustice South Africa was, and Arthur replying that it all had to be destroyed – every bit of apartheid, I understood, root and branch.

Not that he sought violence – not at all. Every bit of his legal work was a witness, and an exemplar, of the possibility of peace. He was under no illusions about the quality of South African justice, but he helped preserve and to make believable the ideal of what it could be – and that in turn became a major resource for the new country whose Chief Justice he would become.

James Madison: As the world has often shown, it is sometimes in a sense easier to oppose injustice than to rule justly. South Africans who hated apartheid for its corrupt and racist evil did not necessarily know much about how to engage in the often-depressing process of democracy. Arthur threw himself into the work of creating that new democracy, and he did not shrink from hard choices in the process. He joined the ANC’s negotiating team – a step that meant he was now in the midst of South Africa’s political fray. The negotiations were miraculous, but they also featured hard and sometimes controversial bargaining. The first post-apartheid constitution, the Interim Constitution, which Arthur played a central role in negotiating, contained some notable concessions to white anxieties, including, if I recall correctly, provisions for a right to vote in local elections not only for residents but also for property owners. But that was part of the price of a negotiated transition; I am sure Arthur did not relish paying this price or others like it (most notably, the agreement on amnesty) but he understood that the path to be followed, the path of law and of truth, had to also be a path that led forward.

John Marshall: Then, of course, he became the first President of the Constitutional Court, and ultimately the Chief Justice of South Africa. The Constitutional Court, an assembly of demigods as Thomas Jefferson called our Constitutional Convention, set out to build a body of jurisprudence that was at the same time intellectually rigorous, grounded in fundamental legal aspirations, and committed to the humane transformation of South Africa. Arthur led that process, and shaped the internal community of a court that was notable for its care and for its frequent unanimity. And he stepped aside early as Chief Justice, characteristically, to make it possible for an African judge, Pius Langa, to assume the leadership of South Africa’s judiciary.

Then Arthur retired – as inaccurate a term as one could imagine. He continued to play a powerful part in South African life, with what may have been his last public speech a sharp critique of proposed legislation that threatened the independence of the legal profession and the courts.  Along the way, as President of the International Commission of Jurists, he led a critical examination of US anti-terrorism policies. It isn’t surprising that this man of the law confronted a senior Department of Defense official about Guantanamo, and challenged his arguments on the ground – the undeniable ground – that there cannot in today’s world be anyone who is somehow entirely outside of the law. Can I just say that in this respect Arthur also resembled Thomas Jefferson, in being part of a worldwide community aspiring to freedom?

He was a great man. He was also a very humble man. I once was joking at dinner about the phrase “a crashing bore,” and some unfortunate person who I felt had embodied this, and it became quite clear that Arthur worried that he might be such a person too. He was not, not at all. He was warm and kind and hospitable and engaged with the world of ideas and culture and a devoted parent and grandparent – all with his wife Lorraine, who was and is all those things as well. I loved talking law with him, but I remember at least as clearly discussions about how much to wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher and about the wellbeing of the cats who lived in the Chaskalsons’ backyard.  

You can catch a glimpse of Arthur in one more story. In 1995, I believe, Arthur and Lorraine were carjacked at the entrance to their home. This was an era of extremely frightening and violent crime, in which, as Jon Klaaren, a professor there, once explained to me, the micro-politics of every encounter shaped how the event would play out. Arthur and Lorraine of course did not resist the robbery, but Arthur did explain to the robbers that the papers in the back of his car were from the Constitutional Court’s case on the certification of the draft South African constitution, and asked them to leave those papers behind – which I believe they did. Can there ever have been a micro-political moment quite like that, with the President of the Constitutional Court politely persuading armed robbers not to interfere with the development of the country’s constitutional law?

I don’t know just why it is that some oppressive countries give birth to exceptionally talented and humane people. Why did Tsarist Russia produce Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Whatever the reason, South Africa has been such a country, the land of many people I’ve already mentioned, of Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer and Nelson Mandela – and Arthur Chaskalson, who will be dearly missed.

The end of the world, and what to do about it

Yesterday, February 15, 2013, a meteorite flashed over a city in Siberia and exploded. No one was killed, but over a thousand people were injured. That was bad. The scary videos (collected in this New York Times piece) attest to the power of the explosion, which according to another Times piece may have been 20 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima (or even more). But it could have been worse. That meteorite may have weighed around 7000 tons. Meanwhile a far larger piece of space rock, known to its friends as 2012 DA14 and weighing an estimated 195,000 metric tons, according to Wikipedia, whizzed by Earth on the same day, about 17,000 miles from the surface -- closer than some of our own satellites. 

We know that a serious satellite hit would be a disaster. The dinosaurs may have died from one, and so could we. So the question is, do we try to do something to forestall the end of (our) world?

One answer might be that there simply is nothing we can do. But that isn't true. We're already tracking a lot of stuff flying by us in space. (The Times reports that we have "cataloged 95 percent of near-Earth asteroids 0.6 miles wide or wider, but fewer of the smaller ones." We didn't see the Siberian one coming -- it was much smaller and, as the Times story also notes, it couldn't be seen because it was approaching "from the dayside," so that the light of the sun overwhelmed it.) We could, potentially, figure out ways to block objects that are on their way towards us. Doing so wouldn't be easy, and today might not even be possible, but the basic idea -- push the stuff away before it gets too near us -- seems straightforward enough. Or we could hedge our species-wide bets, by creating colonies off the earth -- in earth orbit, on the Moon, or even further out. Even more expensive, of course, but again by no means beyond imagining.

But should we spend even one penny on these efforts? That's an interesting issue. The chances that human civilization, or the human race, will be extinguished by an asteroid strike are extremely small. Not zero, but extremely small. The chance that human beings will die of treatable diseases, or of starvation, or of criminal or military action, are all far greater, in fact all of these are certainties. Apparently yesterday's Siberian explosion was unprecedented because it actually caused many injuries; meteors enter our atmosphere all the time, some of them as big as a car, and normally do no harm at all. So it would certainly make sense to say that any resources we have for improving the lot of humanity should go to dealing with the ills of our own world rather than the perils outside it.

And yet I do think we should make an effort to prevent the end of the world. The likelihood is very, very low; but the stakes are very, very high. As a matter of sheer mathematics, any possibility of a harm of infinite magnitude (I think from our point of view our own extinction would qualify as of infinite magnitude) would amount to a significant matter, the kind of thing one shouldn't ignore.

I don't mean to say that we should treat the end of the world as nigh. A tiny risk of disaster is nothing like as big a problem as an imminent likelihood of merely very bad conditions. So we should absolutely not make this danger a top priority, and instead should continue the modest, pragmatic task of attending to life in the here and now. But not without an eye -- and some concrete work -- directed to outer space.

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