'The Body of the Condemned' and the Changing Nature of Torture

Foucault's Discipline and Punish begins with two description's of criminal treatment. One of these describes the brutal torture and execution of the regicide Damien, while the other describes a strict daily schedule for prisoners. While both are remarkable for their own reasons, it is the historical relationship between the two that Foucault draws attention to. Looking at these two penal methods, it is obvious that one is more familiar to us today. The well regimented and organized schedule shown to contrast the treatment of Damien seems both more "humane" and more "ethical". While the method used to punish the regicide looks as if it must be from some by-gone era. The reality is that these two examples of penal method are separated by a mere 80 years.

Foucault then describes the changes that occurred starting with the public torture and execution of Damien. Emphasis would slowly move away from gruesome slow tortures like the breaking of the body or the quartering by a team of horses to more 'clean' and efficient ways of killing like the infamous guillotine. Not only would the method of execution change, but the status of the criminal would change as well. Where Damien was paraded openly into the town square and dispensed as a spectacle, later criminals would be veiled and guillotined behind high walls and out of the public eye.
From our more contemporary perspectives it might seem, at first, that Foucault is highlighting the civilizing of our penal systems; however, this is not his intent. He is showing that in this movement away from punishing the body the punishment is directed inwards, towards the 'soul'. The disciplined criminal is moved out of the sight of the public eye, veiled, watched, and controlled down to the smallest detail; the criminal is dehumanized. As opposed to deterring the criminal by setting an example for the public through the sheer violence of execution, it is the inevitability of discipline that is relied on instead.

As Foucault describes the change in criminal treatment, he shows how the opinion of the day is directing that change. That is to show that the change in the penal system is not an isolated affair, it is a direct reflection of the content of thought in those times. By dissecting the transition from punishment to discipline, Foucault wishes to show that institutions and people are made up of the thought that pervades their time. In a way, he wants to show that the person is truly historical.

In my senior seminar project, I aim to discover how well this type of investigation works in deciphering the changes in the institution of education and those that participate in it.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1997. 3-31. 

Existential Human Nature? Is It Possible?

          Carl Rogers, famous psychologist and one of the founders of psychotherapy, interviews Paul Tillich, one of the most influential modern existential theologian, about human nature. Trend setters in their own areas, Rogers approaches the question of human nature from a scientific, psychological, and observational standpoint, while Tillich approaches the question from a philosophical, existential, and theological standpoint. Both believe that there is such a thing as human nature. The interview mostly is about Tillich’s thoughts on human nature with Rogers providing comments from his own expertise.

          Rogers thinks that humans are organisms and therefore directional, such as in a self-actualizing direction. We are also “incurably social” and have a need for relationships. He thinks humans have a “describable nature” and are not just objects. As Rogers put it, he and Tillich are searching for alternatives to the “logical passivistic, ultra-scientific approach, which results in a mechanistic, and highly deterministic” point of view on human nature of that time.

          Tillich thinks the best to prove human nature is “negatively” and uses famous existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as an example. Sartre says that, “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself… man is free, man is freedom.” To say that man has the freedom to make himself, according to Tillich, is to give man the nature of freedom because no other species has the ability to do so.

For those who are intrigued by the dialogue between Carl Rogers and Paul Tillich, the full interview:

Carl Rogers and Paul Tillich p.1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gHSKdX66tY

Carl Rogers and Paul Tillich p.2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilRzf6SRfZI

Who was Cleopatra VII?

Through my search for books, I stumbled upon a sourcebook written by a professor of Rutgers University after establishing a course centered around Cleopatra and her image. Although I have other books and have skimmed through them, the sourcebook has captured a bit more of my interest then the others. While all of it is interesting, like Cleopatra's father being exiled by his eldest daughter and had her executed on his return , I'm in the process of seeing what is relevant to my topic and gaining some background information. When I find what I really need, my plan is to double check my primary sources. If they are correct, I'm sure to find more sources similar to the one Strabo apparently stated: "Augustus Caesar, after pursuing (Cleopatra and Antony), brought about both their deaths and ended the drunken abuse of Egypt."
Jones, Prudence J. "Ptolemy XII and the End of the Dynasty" Cleopatra: A Sourcebook. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 200

The Rising Sung

Nearly two years ago, while sifting through the daily news, an article caught my attention. It read, "the language a wise man can learn to read in one day and a fool in a week." "Challenge accepted," I thought. However, it came to be that I was closer to the "fools" end of the spectrum, by completing the challenge in five days. Nevertheless, what had started as a time absorbing task, slowly began to absorb me. I was immersed in a beautifully minimal language, that came with a wealth of culture. A wealth of culture however, that came at a price. A once great nation split into two.

The year is 1945, Japan has lost the second world war. As per post-war negotiations, Japanese annexation of Korea has halted. The U.S. has begun occupation of the southern Korean peninsula, and as a countermeasure, the Soviet Union in the North. Amidst tensions, a negotiation is reached to divide the country along the 38th parallel. Borders are established, families become separated and resources are divided among the two. The North, having just been under Japanese rule, is desperate for a natural born leader; a tried and true "hero" of the battlefield, someone capable of leading a nation. Russia, with eyes set on control of the region, is more than happy to oblige. From zero to hero, the USSR worked tirelessly to create an image for Kim Il Sung that was befitting of a leader. A leader, that would one day leave a legacy that would cripple a Nation. 

The focus of my paper will be directed at the creation of the puppet North Korean dictator fashioned by the USSR. My goal is to reveal a more authentic picture of Kim Il Sung, one devoid of Russian or North Korean propaganda. By using interviews from Russian ministry officials and statements from Red Army veterans, I hope to separate fact from fiction and achieve a better understanding of the military/civilian life of Kim Il Sung (prior to his pre-election image). I believe this paper will offer insight, not only into the life of Il-Sung, but also into the methods employed in establishing a puppet leader, as well as the effects of creating a cult of personality.

For those of you who may be interested in learning more about the current state of North Korea, I'd recommend reading: Escape from Camp 14. This book highlights the hardships endured in the daily lives of people living in the North Korean labor camps. For the time-constrained, here is a short twelve minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdxPCeWw75k. 

Will the Real Joan of Arc Please Stand Up?

Much has been said and surmised regarding Joan on Arc over the decades. Popular opinions on the trial and death of Joan range from a revenge seeking French peasant desiring justice for the death of her sister (see: the film The Messenger) to a witch charged with numerous “typical” charges of the Middle Ages: witchcraft, spell binding, black magic, etc. (see: any other popular culture adaptation). The goal of this paper and semester long research project is seemingly simple: I want to prove that Joan of Arc was tried and found guilty of very different charges than popular culture (and perhaps even some scholars) have previously argued. I will look back upon the Inquisition trial records of Joan, quantify the questions Joan was asked, and then juxtapose the primary source results of Joan of Arc’s true charges with that of previous scholarship and perhaps even some popular culture illustrations.

Joan of Arc has become a fascinating center of popular culture references over the decades. Her portrayals range from a Harry Potter-esque world of witchcraft to horribly cliché illustrations of life in the Middle Ages, particularly as a member of the peasantry. I wish to present a scholarly analysis of Joan that is both interesting and factual, and can hopefully begin to rival the flashy, yet inaccurate portrayals of Joan. In essence, I want her historical headstone to read both appropriately and truthfully. Thus, let the research begin.

For your viewing pleasure, please enjoy these pop culture references to Joan (and try not to laugh too hard!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQx1sqPHTrk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQydMhY9OpI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxta-nM8qtU

Lost Olympic History: Examining a Relatively Unexamined Major International Event

I’ve always been fascinated by the Cold War period. My interest is not just in the ideological conflict, but also the social chaos that seeped into society, from the “Red Scare” to the protests and liberalism of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. So naturally, when choosing a topic I began looking at anything and everything in the Cold War. While most of my early ideas where shot down since they lacked a lot of breadth in their types of primary sources, I have finally settled on the 1980 U.S. Olympic boycott in Moscow.

            Although I’ve settled on a topic, the sheer width of it will make it hard to narrow down into a specific argument. Like most Cold War pieces, there are a lot of differing factions and forces behind the Olympic boycott. It was not just policymakers on either side of the Iron Curtain who had a voice, but also domestic support groups and athletes themselves who noted interesting stances. This leaves me with a variety of options: to examine the efficacy of the boycott on forcing the Soviet withdrawal of Afghanistan, the domestic support amongst the general public and athletes, or to examine the reasons Jimmy Carter himself took this uncharacteristically strong stance, among other options. In short my job now consists of sifting through primary sources to find a conflict within the broader scope of the Olympic boycott that holds my attention. That is, in my opinion, a blessing since I’m going into my research with an open mind.

Another benefit to my research is the lack of secondary sources devoted completely to the Olympic Boycott. Many scholars have written about social and political culture during the conservative revolution of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, but very few have focused specifically on the Olympic boycott itself. This gives me much more freedom in frame working my argument within the context of already existing cultural viewpoints.

Just Materials for Just War-Starting out on Augustine

These last two weeks, I've started looking around and reading materials related to my senior seminar project. Before I go over what I've found, allow me to give a brief overview of what I'm attempting for this semester.

In short, I want to look at the concept of a just war (aka, a war with positive moral content, rather than negative) in the writings of philosopher/theologian St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430). I chose "just war" as a concept to study because, simply put, I plan on going into Officer Candidate School (OCS) after graduation, and I wanted to study the morality of what it is that I'm going to be getting myself into. As for why I picked St. Augustine, there were a myriad of reasons, the primary ones being that (a) I read the Confessions in my Sophomore year, where I was drawn to his personal, dramatic style, and (b) when I went to Ecuador over the summer, I saw a gigantic statue of St. Augustine in a cathedral, where due to the rain and the way the statue was designed, St. Augustine was bleeding from his eyes; I figured anybody who got a statue that metal had to be someone worth studying further.

And so, I scoured the library and the web, where I came upon what many consider Augustine's magnum opus, his City of God (De Civitate Dei). In this gigantic book (over 1000 pages published serially over a decade!), Augustine lays out the idea of there being two cities: the City of God, reserved for the faithful, and the City of Man, reserved for everyone else. Of interest here is Book 19, which devotes itself to commenting on and debunking the writings of Marcus Varro, a Roman philosopher who takes the Supreme Good (SG) of Man to be "primary goods of nature" (which are more or less the virtues) (Augustine, 2003, 845). His task here is to show that the Christian view of the SG of Man "to be everlasting life"(Ibid., 852).

On his way there, though, Augustine has to establish that mortal goods are imperfect when compared to everlasting life and peace in the glory of God. Early on in Book 19, Augustine is able (through a series of logical syllogisms,) to discard most mortal goods, except for the one: peace. For it is true that part of the SG of Christianity to be peace, it is not of the same kind as is normally pictured. What is to be glorified here is "everlasting peace," not an unjust peace which allows vice to flourish and thus denies people their true peace (Ibid., 859). It is for this reason-breaking an unjust peace so that people may have everlasting peace-that Augustine says that "the wise man, they say, will wage just wars" (Ibid., 861). Essentially, for Augustine "Peace is the instinctive aim of all creatures, and is the ultimate purpose in war"; war is fought so that peace may be found" and that "...a man who has learnt to prefer right to wrong and the rightly ordered to the perverted, sees that the peace of the unjust, compared to the peace of the just, is not worthy even of the name of peace" (Ibid., 865-866).

Augustine's thought here is much more nuanced than what I'm (unfortunately) able to present here, but I believe that just this small snippet of what I've found thus far can help show you why I believe this to be such a fascinating topic, and why it's such an important one. For in an age when hostilities (fought as every name but war,) are brought about for purported altruism, we may wish to examine whether such altruism is indeed even enough to justify such a destructive force in our lives.

St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London, Penguin Classics, 2003), 843-894.

A Mode of Communication Distribution

Taverns and coffee houses, because of their trustworthiness, were the establishments in which news was passed, subscriptions to newspapers were delivered to a tavern. They also provided a space for the illiterate to hear the news. Also, news was passed orally through taverns and this made taverns a place to gather information. These establishments were a mode of communication distribution.

Christopher Marshall kept a detailed diary of his stay in Philadelphia. In that diary were a few excerpts that showed the correlation between taverns and coffee houses, and news. These establishments were, in a way, the Twitter of the day. People went to these establishments for the latest gossip, events and on-goings in local and country-wide news.

Christopher Marshall states, "To [the] Coffee House, where was the reading Rivington's newspaper, containing the capitulation of Charleston, but, as this came through the Tory line and was by forced extorted from John Mercer, who, when taxed about his paper, absolutely denied it until confronting him with Daniel Wister and Owen Jones Jr., and by threats [they] recovered it from him, as was related to me by Paul Fooks, who was one of them who attended him until he delivered, numbers did not believe the authenticity of it." This diary entry details the occurrence of a man delivering news to a coffee house. What is interesting, besides the fact that news was orally read to customers at the coffee house, was that many were skeptical about the story because of its bias. It is amazing to see the realization of bias during this time and that they take into account the source of their information. It shows that these readers, or listeners in some cases, are not blindly following something simply because it written on parchment. These people understood that the British, or Tories in this quote, could have produced falsified information to undermine the morality of the citizens of Philadelphia. Marshall says, "numbers did not believe the authenticity of it." The term authenticity is important because it connotes that the citizens did not believe the news because of its Tory beginnings. 

Later on the citizens learn that this article was in fact true. Marshall expresses the dismay and disappointment of all around him.  

Blog Post #9 - Emmeline's Speech on the Argument of the Stone

This week I analyzed another speech that shows the early actions of the WSPU, this time from Emmeline’s perspective. Her speech, “The Argument of a Broken Pane” happened at a dinner party, celebrating the release of some of the Suffragettes who had been prisoners in 1911. This speech not only offered itself as a celebratory one for the freed women but also once again served as a central focus and call to arms for these women to remind them exactly what they fought to receive, the vote. Mrs. Pankhurst also directly refers to their motto, “Deeds not words” in her speech. She says, “’Deeds not words,’ is the motto of this movement, and we are going to prove our love and gratitude to our comrades by continuing the use of the stone as an argument in the further protests that we have to make,” (Jorgensen-Earp 144). Emmeline says it bluntly that the WSPU will continue to use the stone to make sure their argument is known and heard by those necessary, specifically the government and the public.

Emmeline continues in her speech to mention the importance of one thing, the numbers of women fighting for the cause. To her there can never be too large of a force of women, because of this she emphasizes the importance of ever recruiting new women to join in the battle for the vote. In her closing statements, Emmeline once again mentions the importance of truly equal rights between the sexes in concern with the political needs of both. Emmeline states, “If it is a good thing for a man to sacrifice for the public good, then it is a good thing for a woman to sacrifice for the public good,” (Jorgensen-Earp 146). To Mrs. Pankhurst there is no difference between a man or a woman fighting for what is right. She ends her speech, reiterating the importance of the argument of the stone, “Why should women go into Parliament Square and be battered about and be insulted, and, most important of all, produce less effect than when they use stones,” (Jorgensen-Earp 147). This statement means that because the Suffragettes are harmed when peacefully protesting the WSPU will instead move to more militant tactics because they are more effective.

Source:

Pankhurst, Emmeline. “The Argument of the Broken Pane.” In Speeches and Trials of the Militant Suffragettes: The Women's Social and Political Union, 1903-1918, edited by Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, 144-47. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

Final Thoughts on Titanic History

           Fellow researchers, I think that this is the ninth and final blog post for senior seminar which is both relieving and alarming at the same time. Relieving because we can now focus solely on writing our papers, yet alarming because it means we are getting closer and closer to that December 5^th presentation date. I wish you all luck in our final weeks of writing.

             During this past week, I have decided to focus only on the second class in my research paper, and have been concentrating on what sources to use to prove my thesis and replace the primary accounts from the crew. My revised thesis is “The testimonies of second class Titanic survivors are crucial to understanding Titanic history because they provide insight into why passengers aboard the Titanic believed it was unsinkable and why second class male passengers had the lowest percentage of survival.”

            This week I want to discuss two journal articles which I have found that relate to social class and the Titanic but are written by non-historians. I will not devote much of my paper to their results; however I do feel they are interesting, relevant to my research, and I like that other disciplines are concerned with Titanic history. Historians prove their arguments with historical facts and primary accounts, but it is easy to see why social scientists would also want to examine social class on the Titanic and the psychology behind survival.

            The first article is Intervention of Natural Survival Instincts and Internalized Social Norms Exploring the Titanic and Lusitania Disasters, written by Bruno Frey, David Savage, and Benno Torgler and published in the National Academy of Sciences in March, 2010. The purpose of the essay is to compare the sinking of both the Lusitania and the Titanic because they had a similar amount of lives lost, they occurred within three years of each other, and they had similar class structures. The authors wrote, “Many of the passengers on the Titanic may have (wrongly) believed that they would ultimately be rescued, those on the Lusitania may have learned from the experience of the Titanic. This may have led those passengers to change their behavior.” The authors determined that the reason why passengers of the Lusitania acted differently than those on the Titanic was because the ship sank much faster (under 20 min.) and people panicked and were only interested in self-preservation rather than complying with social norms such as the case on the Titanic. As revealed in the quote, they also contributed the change in behavior to passengers being aware of what happened on the Titanic and there not being enough lifeboats. The authors of this article made a mistake however when they wrote, “Social norms were much more influential in the case of the Titanic. Having more time on the Titanic also may have eased the restrictions on bargaining for lifeboats and facilitated information generating advantages, which may have benefited first class and second class passengers compared with third class passengers, with the crew favoring the rich and powerful.” This statement is fallacious, the second class men suffered more loss of life than any other group aboard the Titanic including the crew. The second class passengers were not rich and powerful, they were middle working class people. This study found that time was the only factor which contributed to adherence to social norms in comparison of the two maritime disasters. Gender and age prevailed over social class, but it also is considered to be a social norm.

            The second article is titled Social Class and Survival on the S.S. Titanic by Wayne Hall, a behavioral scientist. It was published in 1986 by Social Science and Medicine. In his abstract, Hall purported that social class and gender were the two determining factors of survival on the Titanic, similar to the findings of the previously mentioned article. The purpose of Hall’s article, he stated, is to analyze the differences between members of the social classes as well as to provide an explanation for the differences in their survival rates.  The study determined that “there was no overall difference between the survival of passengers and crew… the relationship between class travelled and survival depended upon the passenger’s sex; the difference between the rates of survival in first and third classes was more pronounced among women and children than men and fewer men survived in second than in first or third class.” The reasons that Hall attributed to low survival rates were the fact that the few lifeboats there were, were not full and did not go back to pick up people who were in the water. Also, he used Beesley’s account, one of my primary sources and pointed to the fact that there was a ship nearby that people thought would rescue them, many women would not leave their husbands, and many “passengers disbelief that they were in danger on the “unsinkable” Titanic. This source is the first that I have found that addresses the question of why second class men had the lowest percentage of survival and the smallest number of survivors total. Hall briefly addressed the question by stating that the second class and third classes were loading lifeboats in the same area, and so the men would have been allowing the women and children to go first. He does not explain how this theory should have meant that third class men had a similar percentage to the second class, but they had twice as many survivors than the second class.