Notes

Preface

1 Rae Langton, conversation, May 30, 2010.

2 On the treatment of newspapers, see W. A. Veenhoven, who states that even quotations from speeches in Parliament were prohibited; at first newspapers would leave large white spaces to indicate that material had been censored, but soon white spaces were prohibited (Case Studies on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms: A World Survey, vol. 5 [The Hague: Nijhoff, l975–76], 497). On the jailing of the opposition, including “700 national leaders of her political opposition,” see Murray J. Leaf, Pragmatism and Development: The Prospect for Pluralistic Transformation in the Third World (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998), 31. On “coerced sterilization,” see James G. Chadney, “Family Planning: India’s Achilles’ Heel?” in India: The Years of Indira Gandhi, ed. Y. K. Malik and D. K. Vajpeyi (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1988), 92.

Chapter One: The Seduction to Stop Thinking

1 Clinton L. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948).

2 Hans Born, “National Governance of Nuclear Weapons: Opportunities and Constraints,” Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), Policy Paper No. 15, 2007. North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, but according to the Federation of American Scientists, its status as a nuclear state is still unclear in 2010.

3 These 2010 weapons figures, as well as those in the next sentence, are reported by SIPRI Yearbook, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and the Federation of American Scientists.

4 Born, “National Governance of Nuclear Weapons,” 7, 12.

5 Ibid., 12.

6 The most detailed documentary account of the path along which US presidents assumed formal control of nuclear weapons is Frank G. Klotz’s unpublished Oxford D.Phil dissertation, “The US President and the Control of Strategic Nuclear Weapons” (1980). Lt. Gen. Klotz is currently the commander of Air Force Global Strike Command and hence oversees all the country’s intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable B-2 and B-52 bombers. For the case at the International Court of Justice, see “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Advisory Opinion, 1996, ICJ, 226 (July 8).

7 Born, “National Governance of Nuclear Weapons,” 5, 13.

8 Jules Lobel, “Emergency Power and the Decline of Liberalism,” Yale Law Journal 98 (May 1980), 1401, 1404, 1408, 1418, 1420, 1416.

9 Following the shooting of President Reagan, Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s public announcement, “I am in control here,” was treated as a spectacular personal blunder. In fact, it exposed before the eyes of the nation—had we only understood what we were seeing—the extraordinary shift in the line of presidential succession that has come about through nonconstitutional means. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution requires that presidential authority move from the president, to the vice president, to the speaker of the House, to the president pro tem of the Senate, and then to the secretary of state. But the Reagan administration had also arranged for a military line of succession—or what Haig and others repeatedly referred to on the day of the shooting as a “crisis management” line of succession, renamed the “national command authority” a day later—that went from the president to the vice president to (skipping the House and Senate, and even the civil Cabinet member, the secretary of state) the secretary of defense. In fact, some accounts of this new line of national command succession indicate that the line goes directly from the president to the secretary of defense. Hence, there was a consciously designed split between constitutional or civilian lines of authority and military lines of authority. Evidence suggests a third line of succession for controlling the nuclear codes and, therefore, firing atomic weapons. As secretary of state, Alexander Haig was not “in control here” according to any of the three lines of succession, but the existence of three contradictory lines makes explicable Haig’s own confusion about the matter. Press attention to Haig’s “blunder” (and to his personal conflict with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger) deflected attention from the far more astonishing and damaging revelation that secret, nonconstitutional lines of succession had been created that preempted the constitutional, popularly endorsed, and publicly recognized sequence.

For accounts of the shooting, Haig’s announcement, and the constitutional and “crisis management” lines of succession, see the New York Times, March 31, 1981, and April 1, 1981. For nonconstitutional lines of succession authorizing the firing of nuclear weapons, see House of Representatives, Subcommittee on International Security and Scientific Affairs of the Committee on International Relations, First Use of Nuclear Weapons: Preserving Responsible Control, 94th Cong., 2d sess., March 1976, 39, 42, 76, 79, 128, 213, 215.

10 Born, “National Governance of Nuclear Weapons,” 15.

11 Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 105, quoting Public Records Office, DEFE 25/49, “Nuclear Retaliation Procedures,” Report from GEN 743/10 (Revise), 23 January 1962. The record does not indicate who appoints the deputies. The use of the word “retaliation” here and elsewhere in Hennessy’s book should not mislead one into thinking that Britain has a second-use policy; what is being “retaliated” against in some of these papers is not an incoming nuclear weapon but a land army marching across Europe. (See the description of Operation visitation, 186.)

12 On the breaking of national and international law during the administration of George W. Bush, see Elaine Scarry, Rule of Law, Misrule of Men (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). On the extensive use of a private presidential army during the Bush administration, see Jeremy Scahill’s analysis of private contractors in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books, 2007).

13 As I show in The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 139–57), nuclear war conforms to the model of torture, not the model of war.

14 Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans. and introd. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin, 1986), section 434a, 216. Tancred sees the distinction between perception and deliberation as the central contribution of Chapter 11 to the doctrines presented earlier in De Anima. Bruce Aune states the Aristotelian opposition clearly in “Thinking,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1967), 100.

15 Aesop, “An Unseasonable Reproof,” in Fables of Aesop, trans. S. A. Handford (New York: Penguin, 1954), 197.

16 Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” in Baudelaire, Selected Verse with an Introduction and Prose Translations by Francis Scarfe (New York: Penguin, 1961), 210.

17 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin, 1954), 152.

18 Ibid., 154.

19 Ibid., 155.

20 The laws of most countries accord a special status to dying words. In Anglo-American law, for example, hearsay is ordinarily inadmissible in court, but it becomes admissible if the hearsay is spoken by someone murdered who, before dying, names the murderer; see Karl S. Guthke, Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 28. While dying words permit a loosening of legal constraints, a tightening of constraints may instead arise as illustrated in two other genres of language—whistleblowing (laws protecting whistleblowers suffered a setback in the 2006 Supreme Court decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos) and political dissent in wartime (the 1919 case Schenck v. United States was the first to address, and then deny, the applicability of First Amendment speech to wartime dissent; writing for a unanimous court, Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that obstructing war conscription, as Schenck had done in a pamphlet urging that “A conscript is little better than a convict,” presented a clear danger analogous to “crying fire in a theatre”).

21 Sylvain Ayotte, “Emergency Preparedness in Quebec: Co-ordinated Response among Partners,” Emergency Preparedness Digest, October–December 1991, 2.

22 Artaud does not, however, explicitly name Thucydides. Marseilles, the region of France from which Artaud comes, itself has a tradition of plague writing dating back to the 1720 plague in Provence, a set of writings investigated by historian Daniel Gordon in “The City and the Plague in the Age of Enlightenment,” Yale French Studies 92 (1997), 77–78.

23 Antonin Artaud, Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove, 1958), 92.

24 Ibid., 82.

25 An everyday habit may in some cases even accelerate an emergency. A study in the 1970s attempted to explain why so many of those raped or robbed were teachers or nurses. The study concluded that the victims were disproportionately people who had habits of serving or helping others. The criminal attack often began with a request for help: the attacker would ask for the time, for a street direction, for a match, or some other form of assistance. People in the habit of helping strangers were therefore at risk. Such a revelation does not mean a librarian should stop helping strangers, but that she should abstain from helping strangers if she is walking alone on a street that is otherwise unpopulated.

26 Donald L. Metz, Running Hot: Structure and Stress in Ambulance Work (Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1981), 145.

Chapter Two: Four Models of Emergency Thinking

1 A. Ocklitz, “Cardiopulmonary resuscitation already in Egypt 5,000 years ago?” Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 109, no. 11 (June 1997), 406–12.

2 2 Kings 4: 34–35, cited in Mickey S. Eisenberg, Life in the Balance: Emergency Medicine and the Quest to Reverse Sudden Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 35.

3 Eisenberg, Life in the Balance, 55–136.

4 A. Olotu et al., “Characteristics and outcome of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in hospitalized African children,” Resuscitation 80, no. 1 (2009), 69–72.

5 52% of the children were younger than one year; 44% were between one and five years old; 18% were six to fourteen years old. (Ibid., 70.)

6 A 22% survival rate (eighteen of eighty-two children) rather than the earlier 15% figure. (Ibid., 71.)

7 The age would be younger if all patients had been included. Cardiac arrest patients younger than fifteen were eliminated from the study at the outset.

8 I. Desalu and O. T. Kushimo, “An audit of perioperative cardiac arrest at Lagos University Teaching Hospital,” Nigerian Journal of Clinical Practice 10, no. 3 (September 2007), 188–93; and I. Desalu, O. T. Kushimo, and O. Akinlaja, “Adherence to CPR guidelines during perioperative cardiac arrest in a developing country,” Resuscitation 69, no. 3 (2006), 517–20. The second of these two articles focuses exclusively on the need for conformity to guidelines, not introducing the problem of blood loss.

9 Kilifi District Hospital has no equipment for ventilation or defibrillation, so both breathing and compression were done by the physicians and nurses directly. In Lagos Hospital, the breathing part of CPR was given by manual ventilation.

10 Peter Safar and Martin McMahon, Resuscitation of the Unconscious Victim: A Manual for Rescue Breathing, 18, 19.

11 A test in which viewers were asked to reproduce the curl of a hand depicted in a photograph, a tracing of a photograph, and a cartoon sketch is described in E. H. Gombrich, Julian Hochberg, and Max Black, Art, Perception, and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 35, 74, 78. Gombrich, Hochberg, and Black argue that cartoon is the opposite of camouflage because it provides an exaggeration of the body that matches the way the body exaggerates inner states, magnifying a small bump into the felt experience of a large one.

12 Safar and McMahon, Resuscitation, 71. The instruction to “watch the chest” is at least as crucial in giving chest compressions as in assisting the victim’s breathing. In its 2010 guidelines, the American Heart Association stresses the importance of compressing the chest of an adult 100 times per minute to a depth of two inches and watching to make sure the chest fully recoils between each compression (co-chairs John M. Field, Mary Fran Hazinski, et al., “2010 American Heart Association Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care Science,” Circulation 122 [November 18, 2010], 640–56).

13 W. A. Carlo et al., “Educational impact of the neonatal resuscitation program in low-risk delivery centers in a developing country,” Journal of Pediatrics 154, no. 4 (April 2009), 504–8.

14 Olotu et al., “Characteristics . . . in hospitalized African children,” 72, italics added. The protocol followed in Kilifi is the Pediatric Advanced Life Support of the Resuscitation Council, UK. The American Heart Association’s November 2010 guidelines acknowledge that the interval for retraining it had earlier recommended—twelve to twenty-four months—is too long, given that “knowledge and skills . . . decline within weeks after initial . . . training.” It has not yet arrived at a new recommendation, but it may well approximate the three-to-six-month interval urged by the Zambia study described above (co-chairs Mary Fran Hazinski, Jerry P. Nolan, et al., “2010 International Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care Science with Treatment Recommendations,” Circulation 122 [October 2010], 250–75).

15 Stephanie Rosborough, MD, conversation, March 11, 2010.

16 American Heart Association, “2002 Heart and Stroke Statistical Update,” Dallas, 2002.

17 Safar and McMahon, Resuscitation, 5. The figures on oxygen loss given here were based on the extensive experiments Safar had conducted. Eisenberg’s 1997 book specifies that permanent brain dramage begins four minutes after oxygen is cut off (Life in the Balance, 14).

18 R. Vukmir, “Witnessed arrest, but not delayed bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation improves prehospital cardiac survival,” Emergency Medicine Journal 21, no. 3 (May 2004), 370–73.

19 Safar and McMahon, Resuscitation, 12. Safar notes that expired breath actually contains 18% oxygen if the rescuer is taking deep breaths, as is urged in the protocol.

20 Eisenberg, Life in the Balance, 92, 93, 101.

21 See the copyright page of the handbook.

22 When Safar moved to the University of Pittsburgh Hospital in 1968 to establish a Department of Anesthesiology, he set up a paramedic service (called Freedom House) in the city’s Hill district, where the greatest number of the city’s African-American population lived (Eisenberg, Life in the Balance, 103). It is widely credited as the first advanced medical emergency program in the country, and spread to many other cities.

23 Eisenberg, Life in the Balance, 127. In fact, there are other points in the story when distribution precedes and assists medical discovery. For example, Elam’s initial work on artificial respiration began when he was walking through the polio ward of the University of Minnesota Hospital in 1946, saw a young girl who had turned blue being rushed through the corridor, and interrupted their rush to deliver mouth-to-nose resuscitation which immediately transformed her from blue to pink. He knew how to do this because he had the night before read a book cataloguing eighty-four historical techniques of resuscitation, and recalled the description of midwives delivering mouth-to-nose breaths to newborns, a procedure scorned as “vulgar” by the medical profession (85–90).

24 Kouwenhoven cited ibid., 126.

25 David Segal, “A Reader’s Digest that Grandma Never Dreamed Of,” New York Times, December 19, 2009.

26 Eisenberg, Life in the Balance, 128.

27 Gary Lombardi, E. John Gallagher, and Paul Gennis, “Outcome of Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest in New York City,” JAMA 271, no. 9 (March 1994), 678–83.

28 Marc Eckstein, Samuel J. Stratton, and Linda S. Chan, “Cardiac Arrest Resuscitation Evaluation in Los Angeles: CARE–LA,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 45, no. 5 (2005), 504–9.

29 Mikael Holmberg et al., “Survival after cardiac arrest outside hospital in Sweden,” Resuscitation 36 (1998), 29–36.

30 Lombardi et al., “Outcome . . . in New York City,” 679.

31 L. B. Becker, “Outcome of CPR in a large metropolitan area— where are the survivors?” Annals of Emergency Medicine 20, no. 4 (1991), 355–61.

32 C. Stein, “Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest cases in Johannesburg, South Africa: a first glimpse of short-term outcomes from a paramedic clinical learning base,” Emergency Medicine Journal 26 (2009), 670–74, esp. 673 comparing Los Angeles and Johannesburg figures for return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC).

33 Ibid., 673.

34 Bystanders assisted in 28% of the cases in Los Angeles and Sweden, and 32% of the cases in New York City.

35 The study of Sweden, for example, cites studies documenting survival rates of between 14% and 18% in Seattle, Washington, and King County, Washington, and 17% in Helsinki. The elapsed time between cardiac arrest and defibrillation in Seattle was three to four minutes. (Holmberg et al., “Survival . . . in Sweden,” 33, 34.

36 Taku Iwami et al., “Continuous Improvements in ‘Chain of Survival’ Increased Survival after Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrests: A Large-Scale Population-Based Study,” Circulation 119 (2009), 728–34. Prior to the surge of citizen training, Osaka’s survival rate had been 5%.

37 Tetsuhisa Kitamura et al., “Conventional and chest-compression-only cardiopulmonary resuscitation by bystanders for children who have out-of-hospital cardiac arrests: a prospective, nationwide, population-based cohort study,” Lancet, March 2010, 1–8.

38 Ibid., 2, 4.

39 Ibid., 4.

40 Ibid., 5, 6.

41 Jonathan R. Cole, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence; Its Indispensable National Role; Why It Must Be Protected (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 237.

42 American Heart Association, report of the “2005 International Consensus Conference on Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care Science with Treatment Recommendations,” Circulation 112 (2005). The 2010 guidelines make it clear why an untrained bystander can use compression-only when resuscitating adults but should use classic CPR when resuscitating children. While heart attacks in most adults are initiated by ventricular fibrillation, “the majority of pediatric cardiac arrests are asphyxial, with only 5% to 15% attributable to VF [ventricular fibrillation]” (Field, Hazinski, et al., “2010 American Heart Association Guidelines”). Supplying breath is therefore as crucial as compressing the heart, as is also true in cases where an adult’s cardiac arrest has been caused by asphyxia (for example, near drowning).

43 M. R. Sayre et al., “Hands-only (compression-only) cardiopulmonary resuscitation: a call to action for bystander response to adults who experience out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrest. A science advisory for the public from the American Heart Association Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee,” Circulation 117 (2008), 2162–67.

44 Amsterdam reported 150 resuscitations in four years (Eisenberg, Life in the Balance, 14, 59, 61). Eisenberg is himself a physician and medical researcher. His articles on bystander CPR are cited in the bibliographies of many of the journal articles on bystanders cited above.

45 Eisenberg (ibid., 3) provides this number, based on sixty beats per minute.

46 Article 2, “Quill Plains (Naicam) Mutual Aid Area” (signed December 1, 1986); and Article 9a, “Battlefords Mutual Aid Area” (Signed August 29, 1988).

47 Each contract lists the population size of the participating regions.

48 Bill 54, “An Act Respecting Emergency” (Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1989–90, ch. E–8.1, also called the Emergency Planning Act).

49 Former mayor Dorothy Saunderson, conversation, April 24, 2010. The mayor, who served in that office for twenty-five years, was eighty-five years old at the time of the flood. Some reports place the total rainfall in the area closer to fifteen than to thirteen inches.

50 Fraser Hunter et al., “Interagency Report on the Torrential Rainstorm of July 3, 2000 at Vanguard, Saskatchewan,” Canada–Saskatchewan Memorandum of Understanding on Water Committee (July 2003), 3, 11.

51 Saunderson, conversation. As Mayor Saunderson’s husband was gravely ill, the declaratory act was carried out by the deputy mayor.

52 Fraser G. Hunter, et al., “The Vanguard Torrential Storm (Meteorology and Hydrology),” Canadian Water Resources Journal 27, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 213, 223.

53 Ibid., 222–23, 219–20.

54 Carl Friske, emergency management advisor, Saskatchewan Emergency Planning Office, conversations, May 10, 11, 2010. Carl Friske, who arrived by boat on the first day and coordinated public works, social services, and public information for the first twelve days, was the only official present from the Emergency Planning Office. All other labor was carried out by residents and volunteers whose work he describes with quiet amazement.

55 Ibid.

56 D. B. Donald et al., “Mobilization of Pesticides on an Agricultural Landscape Flooded by a Torrential Storm,” Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry 24, no. 1 (January, 2005), 10.

57 Friske, conversations, May 2010.

58 Saunderson, conversation.

59 Ibid.

60 The “Interagency Report on the Torrential Rainstorm” stresses the importance of this form of distributing information on 11, 16, and 18 (recommendations 3, quoted above, and 5 on the use of, but non-reliance on, ordinary forms of media).

61 I am grateful to John A. Woltman and Carl Friske of Saskatchewan Community Services for sending me copies of the Battlefords and Quill Plains social contracts and regional maps of “Municipal Mutual Aid Areas” and “Provincial Emergency Planning Districts,” as well as for their verbal descriptions by telephone in February 1993 and September 1995.

62 Gary Storey, “Grain Elevators,” The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, www.esask.uregina.ca/.

63 Michael Cottrell, “History of Saskatchewan,” The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan.

64 Gary Storey, “Grain Elevators.” See also Nora Russell’s article on “Co-operatives” in this same online volume.

65 “Naicam EMO [Emergency Measures Organization] Co-ordinator Report on Sask Wheat Pool Elevator Fire in Naicam on April 18/19.” My thanks to John A. Woltman for sending me the formal report on the 1990 Naicam fire and for speaking with me by phone.

66 Mike Steers, “The Elevator’s on Fire,” Emergency Preparedness Digest, July–September 1990, 10, 11.

67 Ibid., 11. The name of the lake and the number of trucks is given in the “Naicam EMO Co-ordinator Report,” 1.

68 “Naicam EMO Co-ordinator Report,” 1.

69 Steers, “The Elevator’s on Fire,” 11. The after-action report says “the town crew” reported 87,000 gallons (395,500 liters)available at 11:20, 91,000 at 12:10, and 63,000 “on hand” at 3 p.m.

70 John Woltman, conversation, September 25, 1995.

71 Friske, conversations, May 2010.

72 Though the test was three years in the making, it cost the province only $8,000 (Canadian), in part because so much of the labor was volunteer. Mike Theilmann, “The Little Exercise that Grew,” Emergency Preparedness Digest, July–September 1990, 16–19.

73 1989 Saskatchewan Emergency Planning Act (amended and updated 1992, 1993, 1998, 2002, and 2003). See Sections 15.1.a,b, and c; 18.1.f, j, k; 21.1.a.iv, vii, viii, and x, for the potentially problematic provisions, as well as the accompanying provisions that place restrictions on these emergency powers.

74 Following Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the governors of southern states formed a mutual aid plan called EMAC, the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, which the US Congress made a public law in 1996. As EMAC’s website notes, it is “the first national disaster compact since the Civil Defense Compact of 1950 to be ratified by Congress.” While this is surely an important step, the number of citizens who have heard of EMAC appears to be small. Further, even those who know the term will find a website most of whose categories are unenterable because they are password-protected: “EMAC Operation Manual,” “Forms and Checklists,” “Notice and Reporting Systems,” and many others are off-limits to the public. Some helpful-sounding categories such as “EMAC Mission Ready Package for up to 25 Personnel,” “EMAC Mission Ready Package for 50 Personnel” and other mission ready packages for up to 1,500 personnel can be opened by anyone, but the mission ready package is only a five-page form with fill-in-the-blanks for items such as “Resource Provider/Agency” and space for projected costs of items such as air travel, per diem food costs, and vehicle costs for state officials traveling to another state. Approximately three-quarters of an inch of space is provided in which to describe the mission purpose and constraints.

75 Robert Pekkanen, Japan’s Dual Civil Society: Member without Advocates (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 133, 135.

76 Ibid., 88.

77 Ibid., 94.

78 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, Francis Bowen, Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage, 1960), vol. 1, 310.

79 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, 114, 115.

80 Pekkanen, Japan’s Dual Civil Society, 96, 102.

81 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, 117.

82 Pekkanen, Japan’s Dual Civil Society, 133–36.

83 Goran Hyden, No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 6–32.

84 Michael Bratton, “Beyond the State: Civil Society and Associational Life in Africa,” World Politics 41, no. 3 (1989), 411.

85 Kenneth Little, West African Urbanization: A Study of Voluntary Associations in Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 26, 27, 34, 48.

86 Ibid., 26, 27. Those associations that appeared to be based on the former village were often so open to people from other places that Little judges the place name to be quasi-fictional; on the other hand, he shows that migrants often sent money back to the home village.

87 Ibid., 48.

88 Clifford Geertz, “The Rotating Credit Association: A ‘Middle Ring’ in Development,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 10, no. 3, cited in Little, West African Urbanization, 51.

89 Shirley Ardener, The Comparative Study of Rotating Credit Associations, unpublished ms., cited in Little, West African Urbanization, 51, n. 1. After the publication of Little’s book, Ardener’s study was published (and is therefore available) in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 94, no. 2 (July–December 1964), 201–29.

90 Shawn J. McGuire, “Vulnerability in Farmer Seed Systems: Farmer Practices for coping with Seed Insecurity for Sorghum in Eastern Ethiopia,” Economic Botany 61, no. 3 (Autumn 2007), 21, 215–16, 219. McGuire explains that the NGOs themselves have limited seed and have to give it to those who have enough wealth to promise that the sowing will be done by a specific date, a promise a farmer who has no oxen cannot make since he must wait to sow until the unscheduled day when a neighboring farmer can provide him with oxen.

91 Michael Bratton, “Drought, Food and the Social Organization of Small Farmers in Zimbabwe,” in Drought and Hunger in Africa: Denying Famine a Future, ed. Michael H. Glantz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 224, 225, 239.

92 Ibid., 231, 232. One year into the drought, 82% of the farmers reported their belief that the associations had grown stronger; even three years into the drought, 63% still felt they were continuing to strengthen.

93 Ibid., 224.

94 McGuire, “Vulnerability,” 218.

95 Here I am speaking about the way voluntary associations address the nation-state (and through the nation-state, the large population), rather than about reverse: the way the nation-state may choose to address the voluntary associations. As became apparent in the description of the Kobai earthquake, a state can encourage or instead discourage civil society by granting or denying legal recognition, tax-exempt status, and low postage rates. More drastically, the state can actively work to suppress civil society, as it did in Ethiopia during the 1974–87 Mengistu regime.

96 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, 202.

97 Bratton, “Beyond the State,” 417.

98 Robert D. Putnam with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 101.

99 Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 393. Peter Kropotkin describes how in Iceland and Scandinavian lands the entire body of law would be recited aloud before an assembly, in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: McClure Phillips, 1903), 158.

100 Berman, Law and Revolution, 375.

101 Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, trans. Frank D. Halsey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925), 218. For the full contract, see Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 177. Despite their aura of revolution and volatility, the first French communes were brought into being by the desire for self-help: “to protect the town and keep the peace in circumstances where self-help seemed the only hope” (Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977], 104). Reynolds’s French sources are A. Vermeesch, “Essai sur les origins et la signification de la commune dans le nord de la France” (Heule, 1966); Petit-Dutaillis, Les Communes françaises (Paris, 1947); and P. Michaud-Quantin, Universitas: Expressions du mouvement communautaire dans le moyen age latin (Paris, 1970).

102 Berman, Law and Revolution, 366.

103 Statute of the Spade Compagnia, cited in Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 126. Putnam’s book shows the startling contemporary relevance of the medieval contracts. Judging the “widening gulf between North and South [to be] the central issue of modern Italian history” (158), he argues that the differences in civic virtue in the two areas correspond precisely with the differences in city contracts in 1300 (Chapter 5) and with mutual aid societies in the 1800s. Not only, then, do mutual aid societies instill habits to address emergencies, but the very predisposition to form associational groups appears itself to be “a habit” that a given region practices across many centuries. In his study of civil society in Japan, Pekkanen cites scholarship showing medieval precedents for the neighborhood associations, though Pekkanen himself rejects these precedents ( Japan’s Dual Civil Society, 102–4).

104 According to Pirenne, the word “peace” referred both to freedom from war and to freedom from crime: “The peace of the city (pax villae) was at the same time the law of the city (lex villae)”; “peace” in the twelfth century “designate[d] the criminal law of the city” (Medieval Cities, 207, 208).

105 Berman, Law and Revolution, 396.

106 Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 125 (citing Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 174). Though themselves in need of help, strangers are also helpful: “information may be obtained [from them] about matters which one may like to learn.”

107 The link between social contract and the wish to eliminate war is visible in the fact that the social contracts of many different nations explicitly designate international peace a central aspiration, either in the preamble (e.g., the constitutions of Andorra, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Croatia, Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Oman, Pakistan, Senegal, and Turkey) or in an early article (e.g., the constitutions of Albania, Angola, Cape Verde, Ecuador, Finland, Italy, and Laos). It is also the case that many countries identify domestic peace as a central aspiration in either their preamble (e.g., the constitutions of Cambodia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Laos, Macedonia, Turkey, and Uganda) or an early article (e.g., the constitutions of Cambodia, Cameroon, Croatia, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, and Ireland). My thanks to research assistant Matthew Spellberg for patiently compiling these lists.

108 Federal Office of Civil Defence, Civil Defence Medical Service, Bern, n.d., 4.

109 Federal Office of Civil Defence, Civil Defence: Figures, Facts, Data, 1989, Bern, Spring 1989, 505.1. For the repeated assertion that a fallout shelter makes survivability possible even a short distance from the impact, see additional pamphlets published by the Bern office such as The 1971 Conception of Swiss Civil Defence, 26.

110 Lecture by David Giri, International Conference on Advanced Electromagnetics, Torino, Italy, September 11, 2001.

111 Civil Protection Concept: Report of the Federal Council to the Federal Assembly Concerning the New Civil Protection Concept, Bern, 17 October 2001, v, 23, 24.

112 Ibid., 5, 28.

113 The 1971 Conception of Swiss Civil Defence, Bern, 24, 29, italics added.

114 Federal Law on Civil Protection System and Protection & Support Service, 2003, Article 47, 7, 8; and see Civil Protection Concept, 24.

115 Civil Protection Concept, iii, v, 3, 10, 23.

116 Federal Law on Civil Protection, Articles 11, 13.

117 Federal Law on Civil Protection, Article 15. See also Constitution of Switzerland, Article 61, Clause 3.

118 For the general requirement for “protection of cultural property” (including cultural property that is privately owned) and for “compulsory service,” see Civil Protection Concept, ii, 10, 13, 17, 24.

119 The 1998 figure is given in Civil Protection Concept, 28.

120 See the Federal Office of Civil Protection booklet, Protection of Cultural Property: A Global Mission, Bern, 2005, 20.

121 Protection of Cultural Property, 5, 13, 14, 18, 21.

122 Iso Camartine, personal conversation at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, April 1990. Iso Camartine is also the friend who described Zürich’s Committee on Special Objects.

123 See, for example, Civil Defence: Figures, Facts, Data, 1989, 103; The 1971 Conception of Swiss Civil Defence, 17; Federal Office of Civil Defence, Swiss Civil Defence, Bern, n.d., 3, 6. Article 2 of the Swiss constitution specifies “safeguard[ing] the independence and security of the country” as a main purpose of the constitution.

124 The 1971 Conception of Swiss Civil Defence, 47.

125 Paul Hodge, Washington Post, January 20, 1977, DC1.

126 “FEMA’s Focus Found to be on Armageddon,” St. Petersburg Times, February 22, 1993, 1A.

127 These narratives all come from the articles of Ted Gup, listed in note 128 below.

128 Gup has almost single-handedly taken on the task of alerting the public to the existence of these shelters. See, for example, Ted Gup, “Doomsday Hideaway,” Time, December 9, 1991, 26–29; “Underground Government: A Guide to America’s Doomsday Bunkers,” Washington Post [Sunday] Magazine, May 31, 1992, W14; “The Doomsday Blueprints,” Time, August 10, 1992, 32–39; “How FEMA learned to Stop Worrying about Civilians and Love the Bomb,” Mother Jones, January–February 1994, 28–31, 74, 76.

129 Ted Gup, “The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway,” Washington Post [Sunday] Magazine, May 31, 1992, W11. Although Congress was unaware of Greenbrier, it did authorize extravagant funds for the Federal Emergency Management Agency without requiring explanations for how, and on whom, it was being spent.

130 Civil Defence: Figures, Facts, Data, 1989, 506, 507.

131 These figures are specified in a July 3, 2009, online report: http://www.swissinfo.ch.

132 Swiss Civil Defence, 8, and see notes 111–113 above for both recent and early iterations of the principle.

133 Between 1981 and 1991, when the $2.9 billion mobile presidential shelter was being built, FEMA spent $243 million on preparation “for natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods” (“FEMA’s Focus Found to be on Armageddon”). Ted Gup estimates that each year the government spends less than 50 cents per person on civil defense (Time, December 9, 1991). The absence of civil defense preparation during Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2007 was just one particularly vivid illustration of the ongoing exclusion of the population from the country’s conception of “national defense.”

Though I have focused here on the extraordinary discrepancy between executive protection and civilian protection, irrespective of the particular president in office, some presidents have been more concerned about civilian protection than others. For example, Eisenhower used the need to protect the population as a reason for funding a national highway system; Kennedy wanted civilian fallout shelters but Congress refused to fund them (“Civil Defence: Evacuous,” Economist, November 18, 1978, 20); Carter tried to reactivate civil defense (Richard Burt, “Democrats Back Carter on Nomination Rule,” New York Times, August 12, 1980, A-1); Clinton appointed a FEMA head, James Lee Witt from Arkansas, who sought to steer money toward the population and away from the presidency (Penny Bender, “FEMA Faulted for Not Preparing for Disasters,” Gannett News Service, May 18, 1993).

134 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization, vol. 6, pt. 2, 392, 403–4, 407. My thanks to Joe Scarry for directing me to China’s granaries.

135 Ibid., 407.

136 Ibid., 411.

137 Derk Bodde, “Henry A. Wallace and the Ever-Normal Granary, Far Eastern Quarterly 5, no. 4 (August 1946), 413.

138 Needham, Science and Civilization, 417.

139 Pierre-Etienne Will and R. Bin Wong, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 5, 25.

140 Ibid., 12, 528–32.

141 Ibid., 101.

142 Ibid., 14, 26, 33, 36, 57, 72–73.

143 Ibid., 104, 125.

144 Ibid., 47, 53, 104, 105, 125.

145 Clement Attlee, Public Records Office, CAB 130/41, GEN 253, 1st Meeting, 10 October 1948, cited in Hennessy, The Secret State, 124, 127.

146 This Box Hill is distinct from the Box Hill in Surrey where John Keats wrote Endymion and Jane Austen situated a key scene in Emma.

147 Hennessy, The Secret State, 171–77, 184–85. The list of those selected for shelter at Box Hill is contained in the 1963 Ministry of Defence War Book, declassified in 2000.

148 Ibid., xvii.

149 Hennessy interview with Sir Frank Cooper, BBC Radio 4, Top Job, August 8, 2000, cited in The Secret State, 180, 181.

150 Dr. Edgar Anstey of JIGSAW (Joint Inter-Services Group for the Study of All-Out Warfare), “Note on the Concept and Definition of Breakdown,” June 1960, cited in Hennessy, The Secret State, 121. Anstey was a “Principal Scientific Officer from the Home Office” (143).

151 Epictetus, Discourses, in Epictetus: The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, the Manual, and Fragments, vol. 2, trans. W. A. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Edition, 1985), 4.1.34.

152 Maurice Cranston, “The Political and Philosophical Aspects of the Right to Leave and to Return,” in The Right to Leave and to Return: Papers and Recommendations of the International Colloquium Held in Uppsala, Sweden, 19–20 June 1972, ed. Karel Vasak and Sidney Liskofsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 21, 29.

153 It should also be noted that local communities within nuclear states, such as Oakland, CA, have sometimes attempted to establish right of exit by creating “nuclear free zones” that prohibit research, production, or transportation of nuclear weapons within the boundaries of their municipalities. In the case of Oakland, a federal court ruled that the ordinance violated the US Constitution’s War Powers clause and, in effect, jeopardized national defense (United States v. City of Oakland, No. C–89–3305 JPV 13–14, Northern District of California, August 20, 1990, invalidating Oakland, California Ordinance 11,062 [December 16, 1988]). See Luis Li, “State Sovereignty and Nuclear Free Zones,” California Law Review 79, no. 4 (July 1991), 1169–1204.

154 Andrew Mack, Working Paper 1993/10: Nuclear Free Zones in the 1990s (Canberra: Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1993), 17, 19.

155 Ibid., 8.

156 Ibid., 17.

157 Erik A. Cornellier, “In the Zone: Why the United States Should Sign the Protocol to the Southeast Asia Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone,” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 12 (2003), 233, 234.

158 Jozef Goldblat, “Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones: A History and Assessment,” Nonproliferation Review (Spring/Summer 1997), 21.

159 See “Treaty on the Prohibition of the Emplacement of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction on the Sea-Bed and the Ocean Floor and in the Subsoil Thereof (1971 Seabed Treaty),” Treaty Series 955 (New York: United Nations, 1974), 117, note 9, available online at “Oceans in the Nuclear Age: Nuclear Free Zones,” Law School, Berkeley, CA: http://www.law.berkeley

.edu/centers/ilr/ona/pages/zones2.htm.

160 See “Overview” to “Oceans in the Nuclear Age,” ibid., 9.

161 Cornellier, “In the Zone,” 235–36.

162 Goldblat, “Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones,” 31. Goldblat enumerates eleven other ways in which the treaties are “deficient.” For example, only Africa’s Treaty of Pelindaba prohibits research on nuclear explosives (27, 31).

163 Gerrit Oakes cited in Navy Release, “Submarine Crew Accomplishes Mission, Earns Quals Doing Extended Patrol,” November 16, 2008.

164 Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter cited in States News Service release, “1,000 Trident Patrols: SSBNs the Cornerstone of Strategic Deterrence,” February 24, 2009.

165 Robert S. Norris, Hans M. Kristensen, Christopher E. Paine, Nuclear Insecurity: A Critique of the Bush Administration’s Nuclear Weapons Policies, Natural Resources Defense Council, September 2004, 9, italics added.

166 Ibid., 6.

167 For a full account of the incompatible relation between the Second Amendment and nuclear weapons, see Elaine Scarry, “War and the Social Contract: Nuclear Policy, Distribution, and the Right to Bear Arms,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 139, no. 5 (May 1991), 1257–1316.

168 Congressional “authorizations of force” (e.g., Korea) and “conditional” declarations (e.g., Gulf War) have neither the formal nor substantive properties of a declaration of war.

169 Bruno Tertrais, “The Last to Disarm? The Future of France’s Nuclear Weapons,” The Nonproliferation Review 14, no. 2 ( July 2007), 258.

170 Such as Decree No. 64–46 ( January 14, 1964) and Decree No. 96–520 ( June 12, 1996) confining authority to engage nuclear forces to the president alone. See Born, “National Governance of Nuclear Weapons,” 9; Tertrais, “The Last to Disarm?,” 257; and Georg Nolte, European Military Law Systems (Berlin: De Gruyter Rechtwissenschaften Verlags, 2003), 292. Although as in other atomic-age democracies the requirement for a legislative authorization of war has been allowed to deteriorate, Nolte calls attention to a 1993 proposal by the Vedel Committee to strengthen Article 35 by amending it to require a parliamentary declaration of war for any military intervention outside French borders (294).

171 The “Subject Matter” of Article 246 is enumerated in a document that accompanies the Constitution, the Seventh Schedule, List I, numbers 1, 2, and 2A. India’s constitution also includes environmental clauses on the obligation to protect wild animals, birds, and forests (Article 48A; Schedule 7, Clauses 17, 17A, 17B; Schedule 12, Clause 8) that may also one day contribute to an elimination of the country’s nuclear weapons. Like the Swiss concern for the protection of the country’s cultural heritage, the Indian constitution lists a positive duty “to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture” (Part IVA, Article 51A).

Like many constitutions written after the invention of atomic weapons, the Indian constitution includes “emergency” provisions (Part XVIII) that potentially subvert other clauses in times of national crisis. In his study Constitutional Dictatorship, Clinton Rossiter reminds us that although these emergency clauses have become frequent in the nuclear age, they also antedate the era; he analyzes at length the emergency clause of Germany’s Weimer Constitution that made possible Hitler’s rise to unfettered executive power. For a rich comparative analysis of emergency provisions in a range of constitutions, see Bruce Ackerman’s article in which he singles out the Canadian and South African constitutions as having the best safeguards (“The Emergency Constitution,” Yale Law Journal 113, no. 5 [March 2004], 1029–91). More convincing, however, is Laurence Tribe and Patrick O. Gudridge’s response to Bruce Ackerman arguing that any such emergency article—no matter how loaded with safeguards—carries a high risk of destroying the constitution (“The Anti-Emergency Constitution,” Yale Law Journal 113, no. 8 [June 2004], 1801–70).

172 See, for example, in the UK parliament’s online archive (www.parliament.uk), the House of Commons Public Administration Report, HC 422, of 2004 saying that Parliament’s authorization of war should be required; and Clare Short, “Bill Requiring Parliament’s Approval for Declaration of War and Dispatch of Troops,” October 21, 2005.

173 State Department Press Release, “Background Notes: Pakistan,” June 11, 2010.

174 See “ E. Germans Deserting,” Newsday, March 1, 1990, 12; International Herald Tribune, March 1, 1990, 1; Mark Trumbull, News Currents, Christian Science Monitor, March 1, 1990, 2.

175 Anatol Lieven and Mary Dejevsky, “Vilnius Anger Over Seizure of Deserters,” The Times [London], March 28, 1990, 1.

176 Another area where we sometimes debate whether to aid rather than how to aid is the region of Good Samaritan laws. Many European countries have strict legal requirements for giving aid to strangers, whereas the Anglo-American tradition has (with the exception of a few weak state laws that have never been enforced) virtually none. But the debate centers on the question of legal enforcement, not the question of moral validity. No one questions the moral obligation to help someone in cases where doing so brings no increased risk to oneself. For example, the standard air travel announcement about emergency oxygen begins, “If you are traveling with a child, or seated next to one . . .” In other words, if you are seated next to a child, you are traveling with one.

177 For example, the opening chapter of Locke’s Second Treatise concludes, “Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death . . . and in the defence of the common-wealth from foreign injury” (8). Later, in Section 88, Locke returns to the commonwealth’s power to punish transgressions of the law, as well as “to punish any injury done unto any of is members, by any one that is not of it, (which is the power of war and peace;)” (47). The abiding background throughout both Hobbes and Locke is the state of non-injury.

178 The large gap between acting to diminish injury, on the one hand, and acting to inflict it, on the other, explains the distinct constitutional provisions for defense (where one is seeking to stop foreign invaders from injuring one’s population) and offense (where one is actively inflicting harms on another country’s population). If the home country is under attack, the president can, without consulting the population or Congress, begin to act to defend the nation because there is no ambiguity about whether human beings want the diminution of injury. Offensive wars, however, require full deliberation, hence a congressional declaration. There are, then, two release mechanisms on the act of injuring: the first is invasion; the second is a congressional declaration. The president becomes commander in chief if the country is invaded and (in the absence of an invasion) if Congress has declared war. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Roosevelt began defense preparations even before going to Congress and asking for a formal declaration (Monday, December 8, 12:30 p.m.; Congress declared war at approximately 1:10 p.m.). In contrast, the United States was not under attack by Korea in 1950 (when Truman committed troops to the region), by Vietnam in 1962 (when the US began using Agent Orange) or in 1965 (when the US began carrying out continuous bombing raids), or by Iraq in August 1990 (when Bush Sr. sent troops) or January 1991 (when Bush Sr. initiated a major air strike) or 2003 (when Bush Jr. invaded Iraq). For a president to invade a country that has not attacked the US homeland without congressional authority was in each case illegal.

179 What happens if a law-abiding population finds that the state (in the name of emergency) has begun to inflict injury on those who are neither criminals nor enemies? Resistance to such a government will again draw on deep habits. During World War II, one remarkable village in southern France—Le Chabon—rescued thousands of Jewish children and adults. The actions of these Huguenot villagers were in part motivated by their long-practiced ethical commitment to what Philip Hallie calls “the preciousness of life” or what I have been calling the no-injury rule. But presumably many towns in Catholic France had just such an ethic of non-injury, yet they did not actively practice that ethic once the state legalized (and began to require cooperation in) the deportation of Jews. A second habit, Hallie shows, was at work in Le Chabon. As a result of being a minority religion in Catholic France, the inhabitants of the Huguenot village had at intervals across four centuries been subjected to persecution and had developed the practice of “refusing to abjure their faith.” When Hallie conversed with the villagers about the aid they gave to Jews during the war, they declined to recognize their own acts as heroic or exceptional, instead regarding them as simply their way, their habit. See Philip P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chabon and How Goodness Happened There (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980), 167, 168, 172, 179.

Chapter Three: The Place of Habit in Acts of Thinking

1 For example, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Christian fathers addressing spiritual exercises.

2 For example, John Locke, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell in Britain; William James and John Dewey in the United States.

3 For example, Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

4 Montaigne, “Of Custom,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 77, 78.

5 The indictment of habit is made by Beckett’s Vladimir (late in Waiting for Godot), not by Beckett speaking in his own voice.

6 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1737.

7 Thus T. L. Phipson reports that the French violinist and composer Charles Dancla was once offered a Stradivari violin for a performance, but after ten days of practice rejected it, finding the sound of the violin less beautiful than that produced by the nominally less valuable violin he had for many years used (Famous Violinists and Fine Violins: Historical Notes, Anecdotes, and Reminiscences [ London: Chatto and Windus, 1896], 119).

8 William James, Habit (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1914), 6. Italics in original.

9 Ibid., 11.

10 Ibid., 8.

11 Ibid., 66. James calculates that only before age twenty can we learn a language without a foreign accent (contemporary research has now pushed that age back to puberty), and between twenty and thirty we learn most professional and intellectual habits. Those, like Montaigne, who believe habit powerfully modifies perception in a negative direction will also be attentive to education, especially its negative outcomes: “I find that our greatest vices take shape from our tenderest childhood, and that our most important training is in the hands of nurses” (78).

12 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1743.

13 John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: an Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1922), 31. In How We Think, Dewey suggests that what makes color particularly hard for a child is that unlike many other sensory events, it does not elicit from him a specific response or adjustment: “By rolling an object, the child makes its roundness appreciable; by bouncing it, he singles out its elasticity; by throwing it, he makes weight its conspicuous distinctive factor. . . . The redness or greenness or blueness of the object [in contrast] does not tend to call out a reaction that is sufficiently peculiar to give prominence or distinction to the color trait” (The Middle Works of John Dewey 1899–1924. vol. 6, ed. Jo Ann Boydston [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985], 275–76).

14 João Manuel Maciel Linhares et al., “The Number of Discernible Colors in Natural Scenes,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 25, no. 12 (December 2008), 2918–24. My thanks to Bevil Conway for keeping me informed about evolving research on this question.

15 Dewey, How We Think, 215, 216.

16 Ibid., 223, 225, 263.

17 Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 100. So key a matter is sensory perception that James Ostrow, writing about the habitual in Merleau-Ponty and Dewey, titles the book Sensitivity. Ostrow sees the overwhelmingly negative connotations of habit for the modern period, and has the utopian hope that by renaming it he can bring about an appropriately positive view. The idea that we might actually begin to use the word “sensitivity” where we yesterday used the word “habit” seems extraordinary (Dewey himself only uses the word once or twice in How We Think and Human Nature and Conduct). But Ostrow’s act of renaming at least reminds us how centrally interested in concrete sensation and sensitivity Dewey and Merleau-Ponty are.

18 Dewey, How We Think, 192, 212, 229, 230.

19 See Ronald Melzack, “Gate Control Theory: On the Evolution of Pain Concepts,” Pain Forum 5, no. 1 (1996), 128–38, esp. 131; and Patrick D. Wall, “Comments After 30 Years of the Gate Control Theory,” ibid., 12–22, esp. 19. For preliminary findings suggesting that the neural architecture of pain may eventually have equivalents in other sensory events, see the analogue between phantom-limb pain in those missing a limb and phantom visual objects in those with eye damage (and with no cognitive impairment or psychopathology) in Geoffrey Schultz and Ronald Melzack, “Visual Hallucinations and Mental State: A Study of 14 Charles Bonnet Syndrome Hallucinators,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 181, no. 10 (1993), 639–43.

20 Edward Jablonski, Gershwin (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 8; jacket insert to Gershwin Plays Gershwin: the Piano Rolls (CD: Electra Nonesuch, 1993). Malcolm Gladwell describes the “10,000 hour rule” according to which great creative achievement in any field, whether music (e.g., the Beatles) or computer design (e.g., Bill Joy, Bill Gates), requires 10,000 hours of practice (Outliers: The Story of Success [New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008], 35–68).

21 Tolstoy writes an instruction to himself in his diary on March 8, 1851: “Keep a journal of my weaknesses (a Franklin journal)”; and his entry for the days following are punctuated with italicized names of weaknesses (“cowardly,” “desire to show off, ” “lack of firmness”) followed by a specification of the discredited action. He also enumerates aspirations: “Rule. Try to form a style: (1) in conversation, (2) in writing.” Tolstoy’s Diaries, Volume I: 1847–94, ed. and trans. R. Christian (London: Athlone Press, 1885), 24, 25. For a rich account of Franklin’s huge impact on Tolstoy as well many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian writers and scientists, see Eufrosina Dvoichenko-Markov, “Benjamin Franklin and Leo Tolstoy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 96, no. 2 (April 21, 1952), 119–28; as well as Boris Eichenbaum’s 1922 account of the direct link between Tolstoy’s use of virtue charts in his diaries and his eventual achievement as a creative genius in The Young Tolstoi, trans. Gary Kern et al. (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1972), 19–22.

22 D. H. Lawrence, “Benjamin Franklin,” Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1923, 1964), 9, 14, 21.

23 Ibid., 13, 14, 16, 19, 21.

24 Ibid., 13, 19, 21.

25 Ibid., 11, 14, 19.

26 Franklin’s glass harmonica, merely a curiosity today, was deeply admired in Franklin’s own day, as evidenced by Mozart’s last work of chamber music, the 1791 Adagio and Rondo for Glass Armonica, Flute, Oboe, Viola, and Cello (K. 617). Twenty years earlier, Mozart and his father (as we know from a September 21, 1771 letter from Leopold Mozart to his wife) stood on a balcony in Milan and waved to Marianne Davies, the first musician to play the glass harmonica in public and a young woman whose contact with Franklin was extensive enough that she has sometimes been (without sufficient evidence) identified as his niece; the Mozarts continued to meet with her both in Milan and in Venice (Emily Anderson, Letters of Mozart and His Family Chronologically Arranged, Translated, and Edited with Introduction, Notes, and Indexes [New York: Norton, 1985], 198). Leopold Mozart’s letters to his wife also describe with admiration the glass harmonica owned by Dr. Franz Mesmer (“Wolfgang too has played upon it. How I should like to have one!”), whom he and his son often visited in Vienna during this period (letter of 12 August 1773, in Letters of Mozart, 236). Mesmer later used the instrument in his medical practice. Though Franklin would eventually be part of a scientific committee that wrote a formal report discrediting Mesmer’s claims about the curative powers of magnetism, in 1779 he went to visit Mesmer in Paris because of the famous physician’s interest in the glass harmonica (M. E. Grenander, “Reflections on the String Quartet[s] Attributed to Franklin,” American Quarterly 27, no. 1, 82). Leopold was also acutely aware of Franklin’s nonmusical achievements, as we know from his letter to his wife and son when they were in Paris in April 1778: “Write and tell me whether France has really declared war on England. You will now see the American Minister, Dr. Franklin. France recognizes the independence of the thirteen American provinces and has concluded treaties with them” (Letters of Mozart, 525).

27 John R. Hale, Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Viking, 2009), 9.

28 Barack Obama, Forum with John Shattuck and Bob Herbert, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA, October 20, 2006.

29 Robert C. Byrd, Congressional Record–Senate, 149, February 12, 2003, 3580, 3583.

30 Bill Clinton, interview with David Frost, Talking with David Frost, PBS, October 30, 1992: “Let me say something else. The other lesson of this war [in Vietnam] is if you’re going to draft people and put them into combat, you should sell the conflict to the American people. You should get Congress to declare war. So there can be no doubt about what the objective is. And there ought to be clear and achievable objectives that you then put everything you’ve got behind achieving. None of those things happened in Vietnam. One of the things that it prepared me to do, and I think people who served in our generation—people like Senator John Kerry and Senator Bob Kerrey—I think all of us are determined to see that something like that does not happen again.”

31 Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States Before the Adoption of the Constitution, 4th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1873), vol. 2, 87.

32 Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, 32.

33 Ibid., 124, 125.

34 Ibid., 93.

35 Montaigne, “Of Custom,” 77.

36 Ibid., 83.

37 Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 58.

38 Ibid., 25.

39 Montaigne, “Of Custom,” 83.

40 “The lawmaker of the Thurians ordained that whoever should want either to abolish one of the old laws or to establish a new one should present himself to the people with a rope around his neck; so that if the innovation were not approved by each and every man, he should be promptly strangled” (ibid., 86).

41 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1743.

42 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. and introd. C. B. MacPherson (New York: Penguin, 1985), Pt. I, Ch. 6, 127. The alternative (and more widely credited) etymology of deliberation—which locates its root not in the word for “liberty” but the word for “weight”—also illuminates the materiality of the act. Two etymologists—Robert K. Barnhart and Ernest Klein—note that though “deliberation” originates in the root for “weigh,” the formation of the word was influenced by the “liberty” root, an important point since scholars sometimes criticize Hobbes for his etymology. (See The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology [New York: H. W. Wilson, l988] and A Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language [Amsterdam: Elsevier, l971].)

43 Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Francis W. Garforth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 100, 104, 105. Although Locke himself is a brilliant practitioner of similes, he complains that a simile acts as an accelerator used to trip thinking forward so that it can keep pace with speaking, leaping over ground that instead needs scrutiny.

44 Ibid., 87.

45 Ibid., 69, 89.

46 Ibid., 95, 124. Locke did not mean, however, that one should confine oneself to a single field of study. He urges what we today call cross-disciplinary work: “If men are for a long time accustomed only to one sort or method of thoughts, their minds grow stiff in it and do not readily turn to another. It is therefore to give them this freedom that I think they should be made to look into all sorts of knowledge and exercise their understanding in so wide a variety and stock of knowledge. But I do not propose it as a variety and stock of knowledge, but a variety and freedom of thinking, as an increase of the powers and activity of the mind, not as an enlargement of its possessions”(73).

47 Ibid., 86, 87, 106. Italics added.

48 Ibid., 74, 75. “Clog” is here a wholly positive word, though it is at one later point used pejoratively (125).

49 Ibid., 123.

50 Dewey, How We Think, 188, 190.

51 Ibid., 189, 191.

52 Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 190.

53 Charles S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly ( January 1878), 286–302, esp. 292. Though Peirce uses the word “thinking” throughout this essay, he clearly means that part of thinking that Aristotle calls “deliberating” since he repeatedly specifies that its goal is the taking of an action; and he excludes from “thinking” acts like listening to music that have no such action, acts which Aristotle identifies as “contemplation” or “perception” (see Chapter 1, page 8).

54 Dewey, How We Think, 189; Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 289.

55 Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 293.

56 The term is Peirce’s, 292.

57 Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. 36–111.

58 Dewey, How We Think, 193, 194.

59 Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens, 43, 111.

60 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1756.