Rescuing the individual from individualism
This is a solicitation to a collective philosophical reflection… one I’m sure many have made before us. My own ignorance of what has or has not been said on this subject is a vast ignorance. I have spent precious little time — compared to the time I invested in all sorts of other things — doing what scholars of philosophy, ethics, etc, do… reading and studying what others have said; so when I think I’ve stumbled on some new insight, invariably someone will point out that there’s nothing new about it… and that those who have suggested it before have not merely suggested it, but they have elaborated many implications and explications.
I was re-reading Stanley Hauerwas‘ extended reflection on the temptations and perversions of Constantinianism – on how church went from community to institution, from love to power, entitled After Christendom.
Hauerwas is preoccupied with ethics as a peculiar outgrowth of liberalism/modernism – and as an aside, he is a fan of the work of Catharine MacKinnon, another (feminist) critic of liberalism (particularly liberal law).
Obviously, Dr. Hauerwas is a Christian theologian, and as such, he addresses his critique to other Christians. To posit what he does as the Christian response to liberalism, he is talking to other Christians with whom he shares a confession of faith… which makes no sense to do with non-Christians, precisely because it is an issue of faith. There is a mixed audience here, however; and whether our response to the crisis of modernity is the same or not, his claim of a crisis in the first place is — argumentatively speaking — prior to the confession of faith. For that reason, I want to share this argument as a way of sharing and engaging with a common experience.
Here is an excerpt from After Christendom:
The awkwardness of our times is perhaps nowhere better exemplified by the current enthusiasm for the development of something called ethics. As Charles Taylor observes that in the Enlightenment the belief was fostered that if we could “achieve the fullness of disengaged reason and detach ourselves from superstitions and parochial attachments, we should as a matter of course be moved to benefit mankind.” Thus the project of modernity is to base ethics, and correlatively our social and political institutions, on rationality qua rationality.
Of course the Enlightenment project ot underwrite an independent realm called “morality” was a response to a very specific set of circumstances.
“Rights, respect, and utility gained virtually exclusive priority in moral thought precisely when appeals to a wide range of assumptions and categories in the traditional ethos of our predecessor culture became more likely to generate conflict than agreement. Recoiling from Reformation polemics and the religious wars, modern ideologies and ethical theorists increasingly had good reason to favor a vocabulary whose sense did not depend on prior agreement about the nature of God and the structures of the cosmos and society ordained by him. That the favored notions were abstracted from that same ethos should not surprise us. Neither should the fact that the resulting abstractuions are ill-suited to interpret or explain much of the moral revulsion sustained by remnants of that ethos which still survive. Early modern ethical theorists disagreed little about cannibalism, bestiality, and the like. But as religious discord grew they found it necessary to devise a language in which highly contentious social and cosmological categories and assumptions would no longer be presupposed. Ethical theory, by sticking to this more austere language, drew a relatively tight circle around morality.” (Taylor)
Of course, it is just this sense of ethics that Christians are called upon to embody in the interest of developing medical ethics, business ethics, professional ethics, and so on. We are asked to leave our theological convictions as much as possible behind and become casuists for liberal social orders. We become technicians for the working out of basic principles of autonomy, justice, and beneficience for the quandries of the profession. The development of these highly formal accounts of “ethics” … was thought necessary to stop Christians from killing one another. Religion had to be socially and politically relegated to the newly created space called the private. [Interestingly, this public-private dichotomy is exactly what radical feminists of the 60s-70s critiqued in the course of their own interrogations of liberalism. -SG] Ethics now becomes an autonomous area of human behavior that can be distinguished from religion and etiquette. Just as we can only know X or Y is true insofar as we are able to divorce our knowing from any concrete tradition, so morality can now only be a correlative of an account of rationality qua rationality. It is now assumed that morality, as such, must be autonomous. The object of such a morality is to create respect for the autonomy of that new creature we have learned to call “the individual.” “Medical ethics,” “business ethics,” and other “ethics” become ways to explore the quandries such a morality necessarily creates.
We can pull further quotes to elaborate this point if my own summaries prove inadequate. Hauerwas says that two fundamental epistemic crises have emerged based on the the discreditation by historical experience of two principle liberal assumptions: (1) the public-private dichotomy, and (2) and “the harm principle,” ie, the libertarian’s rule that we can think what we want but never do anything that infringes in any way on the free action of others. The article of faith underwriting the harm principle is that when these deracinated “individuals” are left to their own devices, they will tend to do all the decent and charitable things we claim to value and everything will turn out okay; in fact, this self-involved participation by individuals will create the most harmonious society possible (this is market fundamentalism’s most cherished lie).
This ideology is given a name: individualism.
Feminism undermined the public-private dichotomy with particular force; and war, genocide, ecocide, et al, have given the lie to the unstated premise of social harmony inhering in the individualistic harm principle. Let’s bear in mind that the other institution in the background of Mill, Locke, and the rest is property. The harm principle does not apply to land, air, water, ecosystems, etc., unless these are legally-encoded as property, whereupon the only “harm” that can be legally done is for one person to “harm” the property of another. I can legally kill my own dog or bulldoze my own field, but you cannot. The harm is not against the land or the animal, but against the person situated in the category of “owner.”
Ironically, this empirically baseless attribution of individual “rights” has nothing to say about actual humans who live on actual land, except for the enshrinement of property. Importantly, one can assert a right to property in this paradigm, but not a right to land. We have no legal right to exist… in a place, as the harried homeless can attest.
This uprooting absraction of the landless, locationless, ahistorical, non-ethnic, classless, and (recently) ungendered, disembedded individual is integral to the public-private/harm principle assumptions, and constitutes what Hauerwas calls the “false universalism” of modernity. Dr. MacKinnon would say that abstract equality is used as a philosphical and legal cloak over concrete inequality. [NOTE: inequality of power — McK acknowledges difference, ie, sexual dimorphism, but challenges that this difference can be the moral basis for heirarchy)
How does this individual secure those abstract rights? By what power? In short, the answer is the nation-state, which takes upon itself not only the prerogative to exercise whatever force is necessary to secure the social harmony that supposedly inheres in all this “freedom,” it exercises a legal monopoly on that force. Dr. Hauerwas challenges Christians with the fact that “freedom of religion,” a “right,” does not strengthen the church as a political community, but instead allows this freedom only so long as the faith-community obeys the law (so peyote, polygamy, and tax-refusal, for example, are all still punished by the state within the structure that supposedly frees religion). This is a lightning bolt that Stanely Hauerwas throws at the liberal church — with its defense of rights (and nationalism) that affirm its subjugation to the state by way of this freedom… but that’s not the topic here.
The topic here is, what has happened to the supposedly liberated individual in this epoch, episteme, system of individual-ISM?
The premises of liberalism/modernism have so permeated every fiber of our consciousness that most of us will have difficulty thinking about anything at all without resort to universalizing notions like justice, freedom, rights, and so forth; and I recognize that this argument will make us appear to many to be appealing to some antique despotism. We feel that these concepts are as essential and omnipresent as air, that without them we have entered an intolerable vacuum.
We could begin to think about this by acknowledging actual individuals as the locations of consiousness and moral agency, without falling into the liberal (libertarian) non sequitur of disappearing an individual’s history, status, location, culture, and interdependence with other individuals.
I might suggest that the alienation many of us feel (and write about) is generated, elaborated like an infected wound elaborates a toxin, out of this abstracting ideological norm, even as that ideology is reciprocal of our material technological existence. We are moral agents who have been cut off from the possibility of moral agency.
Enough for now.
What are some thoughts on how to rescue individuals from individualism? Or on these claims?
FOOTNOTE: Many definitions of “ideology are out there. In this case, I refer to those unexamined ideas that simultaneously conceal and reproduce social power.
Sean:
Stan – prefatory disclosure… I am not a Christian, although I tried in earnest to adopt Christianity during a serious engagement with a local Presbyterian church during 1999-2001. I befriended the associate pastor, a very bright guy with a well-read background, who introduced me to Reinhold Niebuhr and CS Lewis. I read a lot of Lewis and from there went to Peter Kreeft. I’m familiar with many essential aspects of Christian theology. So while I’m not a Christian I do have a good background in the theological fundaments. I was simply unable to make the spiritual leap of faith.
I’m also a lawyer and in that context am familiar with Catherine MacKinnon’s work, she was fairly prominent while I was in law school 1986-1989. I never found her persuasive because she argued to excess, blowing things out of proportion and in the process losing all chance at gaining my intellectual empathy. Between MacKinnon and Camille Paglia (who also was popular/prominent at the same time), I found myself wondering what had become of feminism. I found myself trying to argue against the position that “theoretically,” all heterosexual sex was rape. When things become so absurdly distorted into a grotesque, I can’t take them seriously.
As to your primary question —
Christianity would assert that extreme individualism is a product of a loss of communion with God, a loss of the connection, an absence of the Holy Spirit, and evidence of the God-shaped hole within our souls.
I would assert that this doctrinal perspective may be true for the realm of Christianity, but I would say also that Christianity is but one realm through which community may be achieved despite a general human drive for individualism. What is really the goal of all spiritual study, in my view, is the end-product of respecting the preciousness of each individual’s life, and the need for all humans to do so as a whole community that agrees upon such preciousness and works to respect that preciousness, not just in theory or in discussion/debate, but in real practice.
Christianity is but a vehicle for achieving that end-product, and I would suggest it’s not the only vehicle. Historically speaking, Christianity is a culture-product, not an ultimate truth.
STAN: Neither MacKinnon nor Dworkin ever said — as is often repeated — that heterosex is always rape. And that has nothing to do with her argument on liberal law as presented here. De and I have been down this road, so don’t go there. This blog will never, ever, ever be a forum to bait Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin. I am completely serious.
18 September 2009, 10:25 amMichael Anderson:
I think we need to try to simplify the language a bit…it gets awful “academic” out there in those articles by people with 4-12 years of degrees, even if it is the truth, and even with scholarship being important. Maybe some “modern” parables, or stories to awaken the scholarship in folks? Maybe with religious overtones, maybe not? Perhaps your minister over at All Saints might have some ideas?
We am feral, ain’t we?
Thanks…
18 September 2009, 2:12 pmSean:
Stan, I’m not “baiting” anything. At the very worst, my memory is flawed. So I hope you’ll forgive me if 20 years later I recall only the things that made me frustrated. And please respect me enough to know that I assume generally, you’re a serious fellow. In fact I wonder if you think I’m being unserious, since you refer to “baiting.” Perhaps you’re having a bad day?
18 September 2009, 6:34 pmStan:
I ain’t mad atcha, Sean. This is just a subject that De and I have been around the block with, especially De, because she was in the ideological trnches when the two aforementioned were lighting fires under the left for its reflexive subordination of feminism to (pick one) class struggle, national liberation, et al. To this day, McK and AD are subjected to misrepresentations and abuse, to the point where it has become ritual denunciation, a kind of periodic burning of them in effigy. They have, in other words, been effectively demonized; and in the process their work is constantly dismissed without people ever having seen it. Their names have become epithets. And the damage this has done to feminism – as thought and social practice – has been substantial. Some lines are drawn on this blog, and we drew that one. We are not parrots of either of these feminist thinkers, though I’ll say that I have benefited greatly by my study of them (and not secondary accounts of their ideas), as has Robert Jensen, for those of you who may enjoy his work. There seems no place they can be mentioned these days without the repetition of these misrepresentations… so we have made this a safe place for them on that account at least. We can discuss the ideas, as they were stated, and in the context they were meant to be understood. I believe you are a person of good will; and I also believe this demonization has percolated through intellectual discourse so thoroughly that it leaks in without people being aware of how these two women have been systematically vilified… with professional apologists for the exploitative porn industry loaning the process their every amplifier.
I do not agree with Catharaine MacKinnon on her conclusions any longer, though her premises which include her deconstruction of liberal law’s central contradictions all still work. My disagreements with her are the same I have developed with my former colleagues in marxism (McK’ intellectual forebearers, too, Lukacs esp) — relating to the process of enemizing. That’s a long way down the path together, before we finally part on the last leg of the journey.
These two women were provocative (as you suggested); but they were so by saying things directly and aloud that no one wanted to hear. McK says, in the opening lines of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, “sex is to feminism what work is to marxism, what is most one’s own, yet most taken away.”
The unwelcome thing they said to leftist males – their contemporaries during the most turbulent period of feminism – is that women’s liberation cannot be fitted with the desire of leftist males to see greater sexual access to more women’s bodies… the oft-stated (liberal) premise being that generic, abstracted “sex” could somehow be disentangled – in the real world – from the problem of power. In a world where sex is always inflected with power, the myth of free-sex (zipless fucks, as one writer called it) is every bit as dishonest and reproductive of power as the myth of the free market. What set them apart from the newer, more consumerist brands of post-modernism (so-called “sex radicalism”), is that they didn’t attempt to show that women are “just like men,” except for the problem of socialization; and they didn’t buy into the vague and convenient notion that by being “transgressive,” they could conjure away the hierarchy that still endures between men and women.
This stuff is still the currency on the left, and one of several reasons I dropped my affiliations with left-ISM.
19 September 2009, 5:20 amlatte lenya:
the relationship between individualism and community is a continuum. The individual self is a gift from God, and the only way to grow as a self is to first of all be a self, a mind, a soul, a body; and just about everything in the community, whether well-intentioned or otherwise, around you conspires to take that away from you from minute one, from the first thing that is declared about you: “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” From there, the dance, the struggle, the war plays out. Wrap a squalling infant in a blue blanket and ‘Oh, he’s angry! What a fighter!’ Wrap that same squalling infant in a pink blanket, and ‘Oh, she’s sad…pick her up.’ …and you have the rest of your life, if you’re lucky, to recover that half of your own God-given humanity forbidden to you by your community because of the color of your blanket.
19 September 2009, 10:23 amCommunity is how the self grows, the community is how the self does not grow.
Isolation is not the same thing as individualism. Isolation is the problem, not individualism. To be ‘trapped inside oneself’, that philosophical problem, is a problem of isolation. When I hear expressions like ‘trapped inside oneself’ or ‘the problem of the self’ expressed as a universal difficulty, I often roll my eyes and think, “here they go again,” meaning men inventing ways to stay isolated. Male philosophers will stay inside their garrets or ivory towers pondering the problem of the self and then write books about it as though it’s everybody’s problem.
I grew up a born-again Christian, in a rural community surrounding a small Baptist church. We were fundamentalist before that term had a political connotation. I suspect most of the adults, small-time farmers and workers at the factory in the valley below us, voted Democrat (until McGovern, anyway). All who worked in the trades—carpenters and house painters—were union, as were the factory workers. The dairy farmers, some with as few as 50 cows, were part of a milk cooperative. It was also viciously judgmental and willing to demonize and ostracize anybody who crossed a line, which was always invisible. A boy was gay; a woman divorced a husband who beat her; a girl of ten expressed a political opinion, or asked the wrong question about the Bible—the savagery of the community response was breathtaking, and as Christian as it was un-Christian.
And yet it was a real community, which nurtured and supported the members who knew the rules and were willing to follow them. We took care of each other, broke bread together, prayed for each other, and read the Bible (King James Version, of course) together. We worked together to can tomatoes and bring in the hay, after which adults and kids of both genders played baseball and touch-football in the mown fields. And the individuals were far from repressed carbon-copies of each other—farmers and factory workers with great stories and love for children and knowledge to share—real knowledge, of machines and weather and animals—and who could quote the Bible with wonderful irony and tell jokes and play pranks. If you were a writer who grew up with these people, you would have material for the rest of your life.
How to be an individual without being isolated?
How to be connected without being crushed?
xavexgoem:
Ooh, hand-wringing time!
imo, I think intellectual “preparedness” comes after having a context in which to describe it. Immediate and tangible proof that something in this world cannot be right can maybe be linked to individualism.
For me — just here — it seems to be through pictures: The Entitlement, Five Blog Stories (re: Ramsey), and oh my god I just searched through the entire archives and I can’t find the one I really wanted. It was a disturbing picture, and hard to explain (actually, it was that lack of being able to explain it that made it so much more disturbing). Had something to do with rape in Iraq, I think. (Apropos of nothing, I’ve been here waaaay too long and haven’t been outside neearly enough)
Anyway, all these things proof that everyone is linked to certain communities and sub-cultures, for good or bad; and that the insistence by some that this is all the work of “bad apples” (as has been talked about previously) is more proof of individualism, and that the larger dynamic can be protected by the actions of a person that the larger dynamic bred.
Rape is caused by rapists — bad apples — but nothing on what causes rapists. Murder in Iraq caused by contractors and lower-rung soldiers — bad apples — but nothing on the culture that permits it. I had a full-blown panic attack just reading the description of WP use in Fallujah from information clearinghouse… I think that goes a long way (I was also out of benzodiazapines and was staying in a big city, something I’m completely unfamiliar with, which moved all that right along).
I’m not sure what my point is, exactly. Shock shakes my foundation, and especially here (at FS), there’s at least something to explain why the foundation is so unsolid (so, hey, it’s not just me freaking out here). I think being part of a community, any community, with a clear articulator of the goings-on of such-and-such goes a long way. (oh yeah) and also that anything an individual does is hugely a result of the circumstances they’ve learned and been under. Doesn’t an understanding of that remove to some extent the idea that everything is the result of individualism?
An ugly part of all this is I have no clue whether what I’m saying stems from me as an individual or me under a system of individualism, or if what I just said there belies what I’m worried about. Ugh, I’m exhausted now.
19 September 2009, 12:58 pmxavexgoem:
append to the above: I had a hand-wringingly good idea, but I completely forgot what it was. It probably stopped making sense as I was articulating whatever it was I was saying. Oh well!
19 September 2009, 1:01 pmSean:
Gotcha. I appreciate you explaining more about your views. Back when I read the few things I encountered about Andrea Dworkin, Catherin MacKinnon and Camille Paglia, my main sources on what I then considered “radical” public thought were The Nation, The Progressive, and Mother Jones — what I’d call “mainstream left” these days, but what I and many Americans then might have considered “radical” publications. In the 20 years since then, I’ve grown cobwebs in my noggin and probably have developed false connections/attributions, I’m not a youngster any more and my memory isn’t quite as crisp as it used to be. In any case, my first comment in this thread was really meant to be a personal view, and not any sort of authoritative view on any of the people I mentioned. So I appreciate being corrected, and I definitely don’t want to retread old paths or reopen old wounds, and apologize if I’ve dredged up something best left dormant.
19 September 2009, 4:24 pmStan:
This from my friend and a church-man in Lumberton, NC (one of the poorest and most chronically underemployed places in the state, significantly Native American). I re-post it ot the blog with his permission, as an example of the people who are abstrcted from place… in this case, foreclosed upon. The right to life, liberty and all that stuff doesn;t include the right to a place to live.
20 September 2009, 8:59 amKim Sky:
Perhaps we need to follow the advice/tools offered to third world countries. Where everyone puts some money into a pot, and then takes turns receiving it. Or something like that? The banks are charging too much for small services, and many people need help!
Chao.
20 September 2009, 6:28 pmStan:
Here is another excerpt from Hauerwas, this one for those who are interested in the theological aspect of this critique of liberalism, but also a Christian-insider’s account of how and why church is an inescapably political community. Hauerwas was affected a great deal by Yoder and Ellul in his political pacifism. Echoes here of Hornborg and his description of how universalism/abstraction dissolves the specificity of the sacred:
I am breaking the paragraph, so this can sink in a bit.
Another break, so the “how we are made” sinks in without the reflexes kicking in when the sentence is completed (for the professed) with:
Some will claim this makes Hauerwas, and Jesus, anarchists. I have a technical disagreement with that, ie, anarchism is also a child of the Enlightenment. But however one gets one’s head around it, the “tension” between church (beloved community) and state is irreconcilable. Nationalism is idolatry, and — like swearing oaths — it’s prohibition in the Gospels and Epistles is very clear.
[Here is a political account of the time from another essay, for those who may be interested.]
21 September 2009, 6:47 amCurt Kastens:
I might agree with you.
21 September 2009, 8:35 amLet us put out a couple of concrete examples here. First let us say that some high ranking official (the Attorney General for example) has been reading feralscholar and the works of Stan Goff and he has this idea that people who are spreading rumors about an Iranian nuclear program and its intentions are creating a very unnecessary danger for the world community. Now some of the people who have been are perhaps sincere in their beliefs that such a program exists and that it is more dangerous for example than the US nuclear program, but most are simply trying to create conditions for a war of aggression for personal reasons. Now if this fictional Attorney General wanted to be faithful to God would he USE FORCE to arrest those who he believes are trying to start a war of aggression, for conspiring to commit a crime or should he not INTERFERE WITH THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH of those misusing this freedom for personal gain.
Second let us say there is a fictional Air Force Pilot who has been reading Stan Goff and he or she is beginning to have doubts about his or her place in the scheme of things when he(she) gets the order to carry out an attack against Iran.
Should he(she) simply refuse his(her) orders and allow others to carry them out in his place or is he obligated to use every means at his disposal including killing Americans, his former drinking buddies if necessary, to prevent such an attack, even if he is unlikely to succeed in his goal?
I myself am not really sure of the second answer. If he is unlikely to succeed is he not just adding to the toll of human death if he fails? How can he know in advance the outcome of their efforts?
Is he allowed to consider the impact of his decisions on his family? Is a the fact that he is in the military make any difference in what his obligations are?
Stan:
This is pretty funny. The “works of Stan Goff”? It’s a blog, okay. If I hadn’t been in the army once, no one would ever pay any attention to what I say. How’s that for irony.
What gets emphasized here again and again, in this thread, is peacemaking. Where do all these weird tempo-task hypothetical emergencies come from? Hauerwas, who is being featured (not Stan Goff), is talking to Christians about why they cannot take the state as the point of practical moral reference … it’s not about waging an attack.
World community is an oxymoron. That’s why we keep talking about place, relocalization, all that stuff. No one can be responsible to or for the whole world. That’s a delusion of power.
21 September 2009, 11:02 amSteve:
As an ex-pentecostal I wonder what radical christians make of the history of christian dualism. If the mainstream church has been taken over by darkness, (at minimum the history of the inquisition as an early form of state genocide would seem to me to be near absolute proof of that fact, if I believed in supernatural causes) how is this allowed to happen in a universe governed by a benevolent God? It is one thing to blame humans and original sin for all the darkness, but if salvation itself can be stolen and falsified by the adversary, if the body of christ can be turned into mechanism of evil rivaled only by the modern state, this is a place ruled either by the Abomination or nothing at all.
STAN: You bring up the issue of theodicy.
21 September 2009, 2:19 pmCurt Kastens:
“Weird tempo tasks hyper emergencies” I guess for ordinary people that description would apply.
21 September 2009, 5:04 pmI will add a little about peace. It has been said by many other before me that peace is more than just an absence of violence it is a state of harmony. But is harmony possible without trust. Considering your own history, my own history, the history of everyone that you know, the history of the US, the English, the Russians the Gambians, the Ghanans, the Berbers, the Kurds, the Eskimos, and on and on and on can we really trust anyone including ourselves completely? Maybe this is the revolutionary (evolutionary) step that mankind has failed to take that is holding back our development. Maybe if one group of people decide to trust others so completely that they make themselves so totally vulnerable to others that they walk around with guns pointed at their heads allowing anyone to end their life at a moments notice it will cause an evolutionary chain reaction? Well I do not have that much courage or trust. Call me irrationally paranoid if you will but I think I will save that term for people who harp about the Russians re invading Poland or Slovakia, or those who think that an Iranian Hydro bomb is a threat to Israel like the Iranians would bomb that country killing thousands of fellow Muslims BEFORE they had been attacked by Israel or the US. Some day people like me may be cursed. In the mean time not only would I favor a small military force for any country as an insurance policy but I have come to realize that secrecy is another catch 22 that the Human Race must live with. It is true that secrecy is anti democratic but if evil people know to much they can create havoc. One never knows where evil people could pop up next or when. I would hope that some one has had the foresight to plan a few surprises for them if it should be necessary.
Ok we can not take the state as a point of practical more reference, I am not sure that I know exactly what that means but I like the sound of it. Yet millions in our society are agents of that state and everyone has to deal with it. So if one never wages a counter attack against “the state” does a person bear any responsibility for the actions of the state? If a person or people were to counter attack the state are they really attacking the state or the people who are in charge of the institutions of the state? Also would the answers to these questions change if we used the words Das Volk, the people, in place of, the state?
This may be a blog that gets only 25 hits a day according to Satbrain but if 100 people read the blog at least once a week it could change the price of tea in china is the year 2525 if man is still alive.
I really do not like the sound of your last paragraph. Look if I had been President when the Ruwanda massacre happened I would have ordered the US military to go there even if Congress had specifically forbidden it. Hopefully many in the military would have refused my orders and even more would have said give us a few days to think this over the consequences of this decision are pretty serious. Those that would have been on my side would have started immediately doing what they could and then as more came on board they would have done more. Global village is not an oxymoron. Am I going to back that up with a vast array of articles by influential or unheard of scholars to support that statement. Heck no it is so obvious to so many people that it needs no defense. I never really have bought in to the whole anti modernization diatribe. Not that I have found all of the links that you have provided as being bad. The world’s environment is so screwed up we need to reconsider everything about where we are as a species and how we got here to know where to go next. I guess the main reason that I have not gone for anti modernism is that I see that some of the decisions that are predecessors have made we have to live with and can not undo. Am i going to back that up with links and articles? No because it is not an issue that needs to be settled soon, and maybe I am just to lazy to be a real intellectual.
I perhaps should not confess this but I really enjoyed watching the Panthers-Falcons game yesterday. Europeans tell me that American football helps perpetuate America’s culture of violence. I think that they are correct. But I really really really hope that we can transform our culture of violence without eliminating football. I also really really hope that to save our planets environment I do not have to give up watching TV, or taking a vacation in Switzerland, Germany is really really nice this time of year. Sometimes I even forget how much I like Switzerland and Austria.
Michael Anderson:
Every human being lives a separate life in a separate body, and dies alone. One’s life must be a person’s own, not predetermined before birth by totalitarian ideas about their nature and function, and not subject to monitoring or guardianship (in the case of women) by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate, but worked out by ourselves, for ourselves.
I resent the intrusion of Capitalistic, Marxist, Statist, Scientific, or whatever kind of authoritarian ideas (and the force that seems to accompany them), trying to force me into a pigeonhole of “lifestyle” and behavior. That is not to say that I choose to NOT be part of humanity….I DO. That does not say that I do not acknowledge my subjectivity, or cultural and social influences…I DO. And I’m not entertaining any Libertarian notions, either. I believe in respect, and, speaking for myself, that makes me feel a lot better about submitting or joining or being a part of a larger group. But I demand the freedom to be left alone, if I choose.
Our present society, and I include notions of modernism or post-modernism, doesn’t seem to include respect….except if you have money and power, and are male.
22 September 2009, 12:12 pmKim Sky:
Forget Shorter Showers – Why personal change does not equal political change — by Derrick Jensen
Quote: Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?
Link: Url: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801/
25 September 2009, 12:30 pmSteve:
Not just Theodicy. Radical christians have a special problem in addition to theodicy: How did the path to salvation fall into the control of near total darkness, how did the body of Christ end up hunting down and murdering people with jewish bloodlines? It is one thing to explain evil with free will, etc. It is another to explain how God would be so completely defeated in his attempt to save his own wayward children, and by what.
25 September 2009, 1:36 pmCurt Kastens:
Kim, thank you for the link. I bookmarked that site. I agree with the author that the political angle can not be neglected. Personal change will not be enough to save the planet. Furthermire it will take political change to bring about personal change. So many people are to weak to change with out being forced to. They will not vote for some one who will tell them what they need to hear but do not want to hear either. Things look bad, really bad. If I did not have an illogical superstitious belief in a non human force acting on our planet I would have no hope what so ever. As it is I have very little hope. Perhaps that explains why I am homicidal. Unless things change quickly our children will not be having children. Now if that is not tempo tasking there is no such thing.
25 September 2009, 4:21 pmStan:
Christianity — perhaps more specifically, Christendom — has a lot to answer for as a historical actor.
As to defeats, that’s a human invention.
What makes one a Christian, and what constitutes a church, as opposed to the historical phenomenon of Chrtistendom, is a far far more complex matter than the history laid out here. I’m happy to have the conversation.
25 September 2009, 4:56 pmSean:
to Kim –
Kim, I think it’s because people imagine their own efforts can’t amount to much in the big picture, so they do things that they feel will help, however individualized and however small. The extent to which the average human feels powerless is much greater than most of us are willing to admit publicly. A common thing I see/hear/read among those who express readiness to do something positive is, “but what can I do?” Most people don’t imagine they have any real personal power. Even among those who do imagine that power, a lot of them can’t imagine steps to implement that power. This is why thinking in terms of fellowship, in community, is so important. And therefore it’s also why divisive tribalistic thinking and rhetoric is so destructive. Such division saps the energies of those who might feel an urge to do something positive, it turns those energies toward complaint and division.
25 September 2009, 6:30 pmStan:
On Derrick Jensen, who I enjoy reading and think a great deal of: There is a false dichotomy at work here between personal and political change; and it has always seemed ot have a little chip on its shoulder. It echoes the old dualism about instrumental versus expressive. Little noticed background on that duality — it is gendered, mars and venus stuff. It calls out “sissy” a little bit, and I say this as someone who has been deeply guilty of reproducing this dichotomy in my own past words and actions.
25 September 2009, 7:32 pmSean:
Stan –
On instrumental vs expressive, I’m wondering if I’m following you accurately. For example… would “instrumental” mean taking up arms, versus “expressive” being holding a hand-written placard in protest? Is that the source of the male/female, toughguy/sissy duality? Either be a man and fight with a weapon, or be a woman and fight with words? That sort of thing?
I will confess that I’m not keen on incrementalism myself, for myself… I find it makes me lazy. So I’m a bit impatient when I think of social efforts, and inclined to criticize the incremental approach because I fear it won’t result in any meaningful changes. But at the same time I realize the points I made to Kim above, that many people have a hard time imagining what they can do to help improve things, and for those people, a tiny increment may seem to require massive efforts and superhuman courage… meaning, it’s not a tiny increment to them, not at all. So when I think outside myself I recognize my own urge to require something big and forceful, but I try to temper that with the observation that not everyone can or will aim in that direction.
26 September 2009, 9:23 amStan:
In real life, women and men are both instrumental and expressive… the two are not divisible (the dualism again that claims some separable “objective” realm). But common, long standing beliefs are that men are more instrumental and women more expressive. Women, in fact, are often way more instrumental than men, doing much of the household labor, expecially in rearing chidlren, but that is kind of dismissed as non-work, non-instrumental. What gets recognized; then what gets valued? Derrick’s critique is aimed at pacifism, and he has said that explicitly. So the debate begins with violence vs non-violence, then gets separated out into non-violence = expressive (and impotent, or worse, collaborative with power), and violence resistance + instruemtnal (ie, effective).
His analysis of our situation is keen and deep; but on this question of response-to-proclamation, he is wrong imo. And, as someone who was on the same page until I dropped out of left organizational politics, and was vocal about it, I speak for myself when I point out that I was hanging onto some gender in wolf’s clothing (a warfighting ethos). But I’ll go a bit further, and say that notonly is this ethically an issue, but that — in our specific time and place — violence, or “action,” is often a response to impatience and a sense of impotence, and not a “realistic” response to actual conditions, wherein violent resistance is taken by powers far greater than ourselves as a convenient pretext for crushing resistance.
27 September 2009, 5:17 amSeb (changing his name again):
It’s important though, to separate action from violence, and to separate action as being either expressive or instrumental. Already it’s been pointed out that it’s a false dichotomy to begin with: what would be purely and exclusively instrumental, and purely and exclusively expressive? There are so many chinks in this chain that it’s almost embarrassing that such little things haven’t been dealt with. Possibly because they’re so minute and so obvious that no-one bothers. Some folks see the problem and go: “well, that’s an obvious problem, anyone can see it, so why bother with an answer” and that’s that.
Sidetracked….readjusting…
Regarding incremental approaches and eventualism: Why so linear? If “progress” (generally speaking, here) is measured in intervals, of course nothing will get done… it’ll peter on the outset. In the end, it’s all prediction: It’s impossible to measure when the eventual has been or will be reached… but combine that with a slow-and-steady approach that looks into the future, there becomes too many variables to consider. A can lead to B, but it can also to C, and then you’re stuck wondering where to go from C (I think a lot of intellectualizing and scenario-making causes this malaise).
I think the only variable is the length of time between each interval, independent of the others. Many little things can add up to one big shift later on. And now with the net, just one little thing can add up to one big thing. ex: a youtuber found a teargas canister fired by the Honduran police. It was marked as being property of the Peruvian police. Within a day or two, the Peruvian congress is demanding a hearing from Peru’s Government Minister. And yeah, they’ll equivocate till the end of time, but the question will still remain how that teargas got into Honduras.
If that little action alone — no violence, and in-fact dependent on the feelings of the Hondurans who filmed that video — if that little action isn’t instrumental (actually, can someone help me out here: was that action largely expressive like I think it is?), what is meant by instrumental anyway?
Help me out here
27 September 2009, 5:41 amSean:
Stan, thanks for that perspective. I have an observation on this part:
violence, or “action,” is often a response to impatience and a sense of impotence, and not a “realistic” response to actual conditions
That’s a bit closer to what I was saying about my own impatience. Depending on one’s intellectual inclination, a situation can seem more immediately in need of change, or less so. To me it turns on how well one’s brain can gather connections among events and take them to possible conclusions. Some people have the gift of knowledge synthesis leading to foresight and for them, predictive assessments are not that difficult. Others don’t have that skill.
The more intuitively gifted a person is, the more likely that person can find him- or herself impatient. To say it another way, using a Myers-Briggs typing analogy, look at how many people are INTP types. INTPs are the ones who can (among other things) synthesize information and make predictions on possible outcomes. No matter whether you agree with the 16-type methods of Myers-Briggs, this particular facet of the INTP type is a real intellectual gift/talent that is held by humans, and it should not be so readily dismissed by the majority of humans. But it is, and I don’t know the reasons why.
When I read Derrick Jensen, I typically find myself thinking he has that gift, and therefore is impatient.
27 September 2009, 11:24 amKim Sky:
left organizational politics = war-fighting ethos ?
Wow. One could say that about christian/islamic politics/religion — is not the war-fighting ethos the problem?
Where does it come from? Impatience and a sense of impotence as you state. The glorification of revolution/man-man-stuff/revenge/action.
Derick Jensen in this particular article makes suggestions like voting or organizing. He does advocate violence — even though he does not practice it himself! I’ve seen him lecture to the young and impressionable. What the Hell? Violence becomes hip and groovy when he so eloquently analyzes the world around us?
Anyone seen the Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (2008) –The Baader Meinhof Complex
http://www.baadermeinhofmovie.com/
Well done indeed.
Back to dropping out of left politics. Why? Left politics like anything else is in transition. Perhaps it can evolve more completely if not abandoned? Any philosophy/religion is just a tool, so I suppose dropping one for another is part of the American phenomenon. So I’ve read, perhaps a myth, Americans change religions more than any other nation. The loss of one lover or friend — eventually to be replaced by another?
Who are we going to influence? What change do we seek? Left politics, the of seeking some kind of socialism, where society reflects in its composition, a compassion and support for all humanity?
Is it not the structures/institutions/laws that define us? Where do we go to study this? Where do we go to learn how to change these things?
Perhaps you’re correct in moving on, seeking enlightenment through a re-analysis of Christianity? When the goin gets tough, I revert to Art. A friend continues to tell me that I should become a Missionary, that I have always been and will be so deeply committed to my ideals that there is no other logical place for me in this world, unless I advocate for God (though he is an atheist). That art and religion are one. A place where combining the logical and illogical can flourish, can touch us where nothing else can.
ANYWAY. I am too emotional to hack through the pages of Marx or the Bible. For me the answer always lies in the novel.
I recommend two:
Sister Carrie – by Theodore Dreiser
Doctor Zhivago – by Boris Pasternak
Of course a huge list could be compiled of novels that reach deeply into the very essence of existence.
27 September 2009, 12:52 pmStan:
D’accord, Kim.
Forgive me any rambling, but I have a very painful back injury that I’m treating with Ibuprofen, Vocodin, and “herbs,” so my head’s a bit slow.
I want to reiterate something here — I have the greatest repsect and admiration for Derrick Jensen. As I said in relation to Catharine MacKinnon recently, I am standing on their shoulders in some way every time I state a thought about gender and, with Derrick, civilization.
DJ’s deconstruction of “civilization” is canonical, imo. On the front of Insurgent American (our neglected, half-finished, abondoned house — I’m going to work hard to rehabilitate it next spring), I have linked with the authors whose messages were pesonal paradigm shifts on account of their stunning clarity: Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight, Sandor Katz’ The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, and Derrick Jensen’s two-volume Endgame. I will add that Derrick is also just a first-class writer, reason enough for anyone who likes reading to get his books and read them.
With DJ and McK, I walk down the path with them 99% of the way — which is probably 90% further than I go with Normal. The tiny little, not so tiny bifurcation at the end of the path is the junction of enemy-making. This is surely a momentous split in many ways, but I am not so near the actual arrival there that I turn away from my comrades earlier than I have to. The dilemma for me, in my own thinking about enemizing — delaring an enemy is delcaring a war — is how to acknowledge that we can’t prevent others declaring us an enemy, and figuring out how to subvert that by not “Othering” the one or many who are maltreating us. Yoder writes about this; and it’s a pretty tall order.
That individual we were rescuing from individualism, can s/he find an anchor-point of meaning in life, if the self is at the center of the moral universe? It seems like Hobbes is lurking under every rock if this is the case. But then what? How do we know – in common with each other – what is The Good, as work or as telos? For myself, peacemaking — refusing to declare enemies (not the same as saying — as Nathan did to David — “You are that man.”) — is the compass. It can be quite powerful. Back when the Montgomery Improvement Association, that organized the momentous bus boycott, decided en masse to present themselves to their own jailers, the devil was exposed and the change became inevitable. The change didn’t happen right then, but the bow was torn and the Titanic was going to sink.
I like your introduction of novel recommendations, and encourage others to do the same.
My recommendations:
Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer.
28 September 2009, 6:30 amThe Color Purple, Alice Walker.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (not really a novel, but novelesque), Annie Dillard.
The Dollmaker, Harriette Arnow.
Sean:
Walker Percy’s final novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, is pretty solid existential musing in an interesting story/plot/theme. All 4 Percy novels I’ve read have been interesting existential stories. The other 3 I’ve read — The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, The Moviegoer.
William Gaddis wrote 4 novels, 3 of them fairly sprawling, on the question of authenticity and the struggles inherent in trying to be true to one’s own talents in a world that prostitutes everything… and most of all prostituting the notion of integrity. The novels are — The Recognitions, J.R., Carpenter’s Gothic, and A Frolic of His Own.
One of my favorite books to recommend people who seem in some way deficient in their understanding of how human beings have devised a multitude of ways to manipulate other humans is The 48 Laws of Power, edited by Robert Greene. Greene’s book compiles lessons throughout history related to what he has construed as 48 major laws of human behavior regarding obtaining and/or the use of power over other humans. Some of us humans have suffered under the hands and words of masters and mistresses of manipulation and don’t need Greene’s book to show us how human society works unfair advantages. Others are encouraged to read Greene’s book. It’s fascinating and repulsive at the same time. It can help a person navigate hierarchies of power in bureaucratic institutions and work places. Or it can be used as a Machiavellian bible of sorts, to help one become a petit-tyrant.
28 September 2009, 9:54 amJames M:
To Sean, et al … not sure I get the INTP analogy exactly, but that is definitely the personality-pigeonhole I identify with most strongly … this analysis of the type is so descriptive of me as to be almost depressing (“the individual” hates to be rendered so predictable and devoid of mystery.)
And I don’t know if I possess the gifts you describe, especially in comparison to some people here, but this INTP has thought a lot about DJ’s point of view … and has come to a similar conclusion to Stan’s above. While, from what I can tell, pacifism seems not always practicable (and the reflexive exhortation to it can sometimes come from a place of unexamined privilege,) I am still one of those fools who believes in changing “hearts and minds” rather than blowing stuff / people up. On the subject of novels, here’s a good exchange from PD James’ The Children of Men:
Julian said: “Then we have to change the moral will. We have to change people.”
Theo laughed. “Oh, that’s the kind of rebellion you have in mind? Not the system but human hearts and minds. You’re the most dangerous revolutionaries of all, or would be if you had the slightest idea how to begin, the slightest chance of succeeding.”
Julian asked, as if seriously interested in his answer: “How would you begin?”
“I wouldn’t. History tells me what happens to people who do. You have one reminder on that chain round your neck.”
She put up her distorted left hand and briefly touched the cross. Beside that swollen flesh it seemed a very small and fragile talisman.
There is quite a bit of Theo in me, probably somewhat of an INTP himself – the skeptic, the cynic. A fair bit of Julian the idealist, too, clinging to that “small and fragile talisman”; both characters have an uneasy coexistence in my mind. But whether the “hearts and minds” option is truly viable, I certainly cannot identify any more with the violence-oriented revolutionaries in the book or in the real world — for religious reasons, yes, but also partly because of the recognition of that aforementioned false instrumental / expressive dichotomy (though I didn’t previously have the words for it – thanks Stan.) Because acts of violence — speaking pragmatically as opposed to morally in this case — even though they may be instrumental in their design (blowing up dams, etc.,) do have an expressive component, and that expression as it typically reaches the eyes and ears of the masses in our corporate propaganda-saturated media environment becomes distorted beyond any resemblance to its original intent, and will almost always be counter-productive, I suspect, in a manner that outweighs any supposed benefits of the violent acts. (I’m speaking more to the American situation here, where revolution is not exactly ‘in the wind’ at this juncture. I don’t know that this applies in other contexts where temperatures are a little hotter, metaphorically speaking, and the mass consciousness is more open to a revolution.)
I think one big focus of any “revolutionary” activity right now ought to be the creation of compelling propaganda. Doesn’t have to be underhanded Goebbels-type output, or even benign NLP mind tricks a la Lakoff — but rather, stuff like, well, “The Story of Stuff.” Outside of Guy Fawkes / “V for Vendetta” fantasies in adolescent boys’ heads, we do not have the power or the numbers to seriously challenge, in a physical way, the system. (Have a look at this video if you possess any doubts about that.) And acts of violence, in this environment of complacency at least, seem unlikely to gather more numbers to any cause to make a difference. But if we’re smart enough, we can help change the narrative.
“The Story of Stuff” – a little, fairly cheaply-produced internet video – is now being used in many schools as a teaching aid. Those same schools that have always been the indoctrinators of wage-slave, consumer-drone, buy-and-dispose living. It may not go far enough in its critique for the all-or-nothing crowd, but it’s getting a foothold and changing minds, planting seeds — enough that right-wingers are getting pissed off about it. The democratization of media technology that enabled that video is helping level the playing field, if just a bit more, with the system … and I think there might be some hope in that.
P.S. Stan, I hope you feel better soon. Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in knowing about any of the foo-foo California New Age remedies that have helped me with my back problems
29 September 2009, 3:48 amStan:
Thanks James. My big foofoo remedy will be to stop doing back-breaking work. Working on some plans in that regard over the next few months… a race against debilitation. (:
On that propaganda thing (you are definitely onto something, James… the battlefield is in our heads), my fantasy is a saturation strategy of cultural criticism. De and I talked about “meme warfare” a lot in the past (missing her right now in these discussions).
In my fantasy, there are several web sites devoted to popular culture and its criticism.
Example: I work with volunteers very often, and in listeneing to them and my own colleagues, I can say with some confidence that what many people do these days, who are slogging home from the job (no matter whether that’s a construction site or an office cubicle), frazzled and already dreading the next day, and yearning for the next weekend, are going home and watching Law & Order reruns (they are on more than one cable channel). It is easy, easy to be passively engaged, a respite from the tedium of our lives, as much as a lot of people feel they can manage… to be entertained (unciritcally) for an hour or two or three, before we go to bed and get ready to go back to our cubicle, job-site, or facility.
So there are, for the sake of argument, say, a million-jillion people who watch this show (a modern day Dragnet, with rapid-fire dialogue and a smattering of postmodern reparte, that uses the skeletal facts of real crimes to construct often intricate short-term fictional plots that show how smart its characters are). One of my fantasy websites is “Unpacking Law & Order,” wherein two or three sharp cultural critics go through each episode, deconstruct the plot lines to show the conventions, then deconstruct the conventions.
Another, that De and I talked about once, might be on the Lord of the Rings trilogy film (with reference, by those who have read them, to the book trilogy) — same thing, unpack different aspects of it, race, gender, anti-urbanism, etc.
De helped me a lot on the Man on Fire critique that pointed to the underlying imperial masculinity memes operating throughout the story.
There are films and television shows out there that already have tremendous followings, and often fanatic interest in the characters, the actors, the set gossip, and so on. So there is this ready-made audience, with these light-data streams pouring through their cerebral cortices without any critical filters at all. But they are familiar with the stories, so when you use the stories to demonstrate the unacknowledged cultural conventions, you’re at least writing about something with which folks are widely familiar.
I’d like to see sites like this (perhaps they’re out there already) for every popular telelvision program and film. What’s up, by the way, with the emnphasis on forensics now (Bones, CSI, etc.)? That’s a cultural critique in itself. One ISO person – I can’t remember who right now – once wrote that it might be an attempt to draw attention away from the thuggish actions of actual police on the street (by placing them safely in a lab). Mebbe, mebbe not. How about it’s an apologia for technocracy? How about the primacy of science? How about the need to believe that the world is predictable (through characters that look like ad models as our media).
I see intellectual activity and intellectual intervention as a dialectical process, more to the point, as a process of “binding and loosing.” We concentrate (bind) our thinking in small affinity groups, where we tease and test and forge, then we take our own re-formed consciousnesses back out into the world (loose) and into popular consciousness. Propaganda presumes a competitive-antagonism of some sort; but cultural critique is more revelatory (demystifying) than argumentative. The critic doesn’t argue for or against, say, a film, or against someone else in a pre-packaged controversy. The critic says to a sharing audience with something already in common (the experience of these stories), what are some of the things in this story and its presentation that we may not have noticed. It’s not so much antagonistic as inivitational.
A dozen of these fantasy web sites, in my fantasy, go viral in cyberspace, then show up in the same conversations that people would have had about their favorite shows and movies, only now with critical spectators.
What did this show just tell me to fear? What did it tell me to trust? How does it tell me I ought to be? How does it construct the world?
29 September 2009, 6:56 amseb:
Gonna have to recommend The Wire to you, Stan. It might help with your back problem, if it can be solved by vegging on the couch.
Then again, it might not be a good recommendation. I brought up Buffy the Vampire Slayer a while ago, wondering what critique there was, and De said one thing and Elaina said a whole nuther thing. Mm… what fun.
But it’s a move away from the good cop/bad criminal thing. Also: watch Powaqqatsi.
29 September 2009, 7:30 amStan:
I love The Wire. It’s about capitalism. Same for Deadwood. Marlon Brando said that’s what The Godfather was about, too — capitalism.
My thumb is up too for Powaqqatsi.
29 September 2009, 10:46 amSean:
Agree with Stan about The Wire and Deadwood.
@ James M –
The linked INTP profile is a pretty good one, although it’s a little bit laden with pseudo-scientific jargon. When it avoids that nonsense I find it pretty useful. I have taken the M-B test probably 30-40 times and every time but once, I came out INTP. The oddball was INTJ. I have read probably 6 or 7 different descriptions on the INTP “type” and I usually find them at least 85% accurate where I’m concerned. Contrarily, I have read the other 15 “types” and none of them suits me very well, with the exception of INTJ which feels like about a 65% fit.
When I think about the points I dislike, the one that seems the most double-edged is the strong will toward individualism. I think it would be healthier to be more cooperative in outlook, to be less disdainful toward average, majority or “mainstream” thoughts. But it’s difficult when I find that many of those mainstream thoughts or behavior modes are things that I discarded at an early age.
I can recall thinking something like this at around age 8 or 9 — if the bent of my intellect is toward thorough, accurate explanations of all things experienced, then I want to avoid what others have experienced whenever their experiences do not mesh with my own. Thus if someone else found dull and boring something that excited me, I chose to follow my instinct rather than adapt to the herd and find dullness and boredom when they weren’t my actual experience.
I can’t explain what enables me to make intuitive leaps where others struggle to see the basic stepping stones. I’ve never known what drives that ability. I know only that it is there in my mind, and that it has provided me with accurate conclusions and explanations of things far more often than not. The negative side of this is, as I said above regarding Derrick Jensen, that it causes me to be impatient. And, that’s the same thing I see in Jensen’s writing. Is that projection of my own traits? Perhaps. But I think the notion of “projection” is overused at this point in American social discourse. In fact I think it’s so overused as to be relatively meaningless, and bordering on a mere pejorative.
29 September 2009, 11:53 amSean:
@ Stan –
I’d like to see sites like this (perhaps they’re out there already) for every popular telelvision program and film. What’s up, by the way, with the emnphasis on forensics now (Bones, CSI, etc.)? That’s a cultural critique in itself. One ISO person – I can’t remember who right now – once wrote that it might be an attempt to draw attention away from the thuggish actions of actual police on the street (by placing them safely in a lab). Mebbe, mebbe not. How about it’s an apologia for technocracy? How about the primacy of science? How about the need to believe that the world is predictable (through characters that look like ad models as our media).
I think the explosion of Techno-Forensic TV relates to these themes:
1) telling Americans that the Po-Po are powerful and have every techno-advantage
2) telling Americans that the Po-Po are noble and “always get their man”
3) telling Americans that “perps” deserve to be hounded and their civil rights ignored
4) telling Americans to be afraid of “perps”
5) telling Americans that technology will save us from every negative
6) telling Americans that the Government is your friend and not one of the negatives
and then the obvious one, selling products during the every-6-minutes advertisement break.
The ludicrous stories and hyper-artificial dialogue make it impossible for me to watch any of those shows (CSI: Everywhere; Cold Case; Bones; Numbers) for more than a moment or two. However, if one wants to see some decent drama regarding forensic work, one can watch the first two seasons of a Canadian series called DaVinci’s Inquest on the website Hulu. Here’s a link: http://www.hulu.com/show/1550
29 September 2009, 12:33 pmStan:
All the more reason we need to study this stuff beyond the ideological judgements — judgements that are necessary but not sufficient. Can we start conversations about these cultural products with people who consume them that don’t start by calling the consumer an idiot or a consort of the devil? There are reasons — not well-understood — that people like that Dragnet dialogue.
When we studied the film 28 Days Later with a small group here, everyone had noticed that it was a zombie genre, a scifi genre, and a dystopian genre… but until it was pointed out, most of us didn’t see how it was also an old, very conservative and gendered convention (“damsel in distress”).
No need to take that further and further. Let people chew on that, the damsel-in-distress convention, and it raises a lot of other questions. What about the masculinity-as-redemptive-violence theme? And the technology-fetishism?
Lots of stuff to mine there… if only we could get good commentary out to a lot of people free.
29 September 2009, 4:16 pmBruce F:
I came across an interesting critique on the “rules” that govern how torture is shown on TV/film. Along the lines of what Stan suggests, the author spelled things out without being too confrontational.
http://www.theawl.com/2009/09/why-dont-you-or-obama-believe-that-torture-is-torture-because-the-culture-industry-said-so
None of the comments seem to ask the question of who makes the rules or why they are so closely followed, script after script.
29 September 2009, 5:34 pmStan:
Roy on surviving the crash of liberal democracy.
29 September 2009, 7:33 pmSean:
Stan –
All the more reason we need to study this stuff beyond the ideological judgements — judgements that are necessary but not sufficient. Can we start conversations about these cultural products with people who consume them that don’t start by calling the consumer an idiot or a consort of the devil? There are reasons — not well-understood — that people like that Dragnet dialogue.
Totally with you here.
What I find artificial about the dialogue is that it’s a narrative with one sentence told by each player in a scene, rather than a player/character saying what he/she knows. I don’t know anyone who has conversations like the former, my friends and I all follow the latter convention. I’d like to know who talks in that sentence-at-a-time narrative style.
If I had to guess on the “why?” question I would attribute it to short attention spans, the reluctance of scriptwriters to believe people can follow a character for more than one sentence at a time. Part of me says it’s about beautiful women and handsome men being the story, with the narrative being secondary at best, and another part says it’s because the actors are not smart and can’t do more than one sentence at a time.
That’s my cynical take. I’m probably only partially correct, but it’s how I feel when I watch that stuff. Either way I’d love to discuss this further and will happily participate in the discussion.
29 September 2009, 8:57 pmseb:
I’m such a fanboy. I hear Stan liking The Wire and Powaqqatsi, and it makes my day
I think it’s best to start on a fairly universal film or TV show. I think we all know what’s going on with Cops and their spin-offs (CSI, et al… deep down, isn’t that the truth?)
But it’s important to recognize the good to form a real dialectic. That’s why I suggested the wire, flaws and all.
Who’s up for Battlestar Galactica (the remake)?
29 September 2009, 9:07 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Sean…I agree with your critique on dialog on these shows, and also can say that I can’t watch them because they just don’t seem REAL to me….same reason I haven’t been to a movie (in a theater) since ’96. But it seems humans can be programmed to think any which way about as easily as it is to come up with a new breed of hornless cow.
@ Stan—I guess if you want to start conversations (and start the little voices going) with folks who swear by this stuff, you have to do it in a way that doesn’t raise their hackles. Example—was talking with a guy who hunts and fishes and enjoys things military (and was in ‘Nam), and we got to talking about jet fighters. Came around to the A-10 Warthog armament…the Gatling Gun in the nose that fires DU ammo. He knew the plane was a tank-killer, so I explained to him why DU is a great armor-piercing material, and the construction of an armor-piercing round (arrrgghhh!)…and then casually threw in the fact that it’s nuclear waste with a half-life of 4.5 billion years…got him thinking. Gotta talk their language…even if you don’t watch TV.
I just keep thinking—Don’t be opposition….don’t start fights you can lose…remember those toes.
30 September 2009, 12:35 amSean:
@ Michael Anderson — or square tomatoes!
30 September 2009, 10:59 amSean:
Seb – I remember the original Battlestar Galactica fairly well from my youth, and I have rented and watched all of the episodes of the first 3 seasons of the remake. I liked the remake a whole lot better, much more interesting characters, great suspense on who were the hidden Cylons, human flaws in the leaders, benign (or so she thought) authoritarianism by Mary McDonnell’s President character, and the twisted psyche of Gaius Baltar. All those things made it very watchable. I liked that Starbuck was a woman and moreover, a believable one. Overall the characters were interesting and complex, much more an adult drama and much less a “Star Wars brought to TV” — which was how I saw the original. I liked Colonel Tighe probably best of all, as characters went. The tension of Cylon vs Human, with some of the Cylons being very human indeed (i.e. Boomer), was intriguing. Caprica’s “voice” in Baltar’s psyche was a great twist.
30 September 2009, 7:21 pmseb:
My favorite metaphor was the cylon vs. human thing. I think it went straight to the heart of otherness perfectly, and the downward spiral it creates. I’d recommend it to anyone for that alone.
You gotta watch the rest, Sean!
1 October 2009, 11:03 amRichard:
I’m late to this thread (I held off on reading it till I knew I could do it all in one gulp). I loved Derrick Jensen’s Endgame books. I can definitely see myself as impatient, in the sense meant in this thread. I struggle mightily with trying to articulate dissatisfaction with much of modern life, in the context of a left that not only valorizes that modernity (and technological change! as if technology just changes all on its own, as if it’s not wrapped up the very capitalist process we’re supposed to be opposed to!), but frankly disdains pre-industrial life.
Can you suggest one or two books each by Dworkin and MacKinnon one might start with? I’ve been wanting to read their stuff for a while, but have been unsure where to begin (though for MacKinnon, I see you mention Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, which sounds promising). (Not too long ago, I placed two Dworkin books on hold from my public library, but they never appeared. All of a sudden they’re not available. Don’t know if the library had discarded them, or if they’d been lost/stolen.)
Stan, are you familiar with the work of Peter Brown on late antiquity/early medieval Christians? I’ve read but a little, but I think it’s helped a lot (especially as we try to unthink questions surrounding individualism, problems of modernity, and so on).
Also, can you say where the Charles Taylor quotes used by Hauerwas come from?
7 October 2009, 1:24 pmKim Sky:
The Truth Will Not Set You Free by Chris Hedges
Okay. This IS the article. What I’d been thinking about for the last couple of years. Extracted are what I thought his premise and conclusion were (some of which is Hedges quoting Stuart Ewen).
The premise: Stuart Ewen argues that the forces for social change — look at any lengthy and turgid human rights report — have forgotten that rhetoric is as important as fact. Corporate and government propaganda, aimed to sway emotions, rarely uses facts to sell its positions. And because progressives have lost the gift of rhetoric, which was once a staple of a university education, because they naively believe in the Enlightenment ideal that facts alone can move people toward justice, they are largely helpless.
Conclusion: We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.
[a couple of years ago, i attempted to get accepted into an artist think place in the Netherlands, proposing the above, didn't get accepted.]
“Read ‘The Gettysburg Address,’ ” Ewen said. “Read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography or his newspaper. Read ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ Read Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man.’ All of these things are filled with an understanding that communicating ideas and producing forms of public communication that empower people, rather than disempowering people, relies on an integrated understanding of who the public is and what it might be.
Url to article – The Truth Will Not Set You Free:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/20090629_the_truth_alone_will_not_set_you_free/
Books:
“Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture” by Stuart Ewen
“PR: A Social History of Spin” by Stuart Ewen
“Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” by Chris Hedges
13 October 2009, 9:48 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Kim Sky:
While I agree that rhetoric is necessary and absent among the left, I’m not sure I buy the whole emotional games part of it. My rhetoric text (Effective communication for the technical professions, by MacLennan) defines rhetoric as the practice of getting people to do what you want them to, through arguing with them. It defines communication as an interaction between the audience, speaker and message, i.e. fitting the message to the audience. As an example, when I tell Muslim friends of the exaggeration of Serbian crimes in the Bosnian civil war, I find I need to explain that the mass graves vary from about 5 to 700 people, that Bosnian Muslim scholars (especially Tokaca) estimate about 100,000 dead on all sides, and that, yes, serious crimes, e.g. ethnic cleansings and mass rapes occurred. I cannot simply bring in Herman or Chomsky, and say that it is bunk. So emotions are important in rhetoric, not the totality thereof.
Another such a weakness of the left is that we tend to go doggedly after one objective, sometimes missing the broader picture – I was arguing with someone on wikipedia on the Bosnian genocide page, and he was/is vigorously arguing that the war death toll not be included in the Genocide page, as that implies that the ‘genocide’ was a subset of the war (an uncontroversial statement, to be found in many sources), and is thus an application of Modus Ponens (i.e. if p implies q, and you have p, you have q), which constitutes original research according to wikipedia policy. My immediate reaction was BS, but after two days of mulling over it, I checked the defining text at the top of the Bosnian genocide page – the reference that claims that “Bosnian genocide” is in general usage, is a specious interpretation of a headline. Really, we leftists do have a hard time recognizing new patterns…
14 October 2009, 12:36 pmStan:
Wanted to drop in to clarify and refine, after having received an email from Dr. Hauerwas in which he suggested I look deeper into the nuances of “Christendom” as described by John Howard Yoder. Thanks to Dr. Hauerwas, and here is an excerpt from Yoder’s essay, “Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics”:
He is commenting on Karl Barth.
Exemplary community (like the house churches of “primtive Christianity”) that stands apart from the world in its refusal to acknowledge the ultimate sovereignty of any power except the Lamb. Christendom (a process, not wholly overlaid on the life of Constantine) abandons proclamation of the Lamb’s sovereignty to contest for worldly domination… the exact opposite of what Christ did with serial refusals to take power, culminating with his political execution, as an example of fearless proclamation.
19 October 2009, 7:29 amDimitrije Corav:
The Word of God has a history that seems to be overlooked here in significant ways. “Reorienting to the Word of God” as opposed to the dangerous innovations of the Constantinian church and, may I presume, of the whole history of the Church between Milvian Bridge and the Reformation seems to imply a pristine and primitive Christianity that was handed a Bible more or less as is (but in Greek, I guess) that was subverted to the purple and to popes and popery. Who decided the canonicity, deutero-canonicity or non-acceptablility of the various texts that competed for Scriptural status? Didn’t the Word of God need the Church, not just for interpretation, but for authority? I ask honestly, are pre-reformation churches beyond the pale here? I used to read your stuff avidly, Stan, but when you converted, I thought you’d lost it, stared too long into the–well, I suppose the firmament, not the abyss. Then I had a sort of partial epiphany myself. “Partial,” because faith has not (not yet?) come for me, been granted me, however you like. But, as far as I’ve gone towards Christianity, it’s been towards the churches, Catholic and Orthodox, to which I have family and social ties. I recoil (personally) from Protestantism. And one reason for this recoil is the idea of the sole sufficiency of Scripture. All that as context for my questions above. Thanks.
21 October 2009, 1:14 amStan:
I think the reference is shorthand to the Word made Flesh, ie, Christ. Yoder (and Hauerwas who studies and writes about him) is adamant that Jesus had a politics — that as an historical figure, a human in the world, this is inescapable. Discernment of one’s own age is necessary to understand its moral and political content, so we can’t freeze-frame existence into 1st Century Palestine; but the principles are there, The Beatitutdes are foundational, and the summation is in love…. the neighbor (the one you’re with, stranger or not) and (more difficult here) the enemy, for in the possibility of the enemy’s redemption lies our own.
This was only secondarily about theology, but more about finding some common ground between a particular theology and the kind of skeptical anti-modernism that has been the blog’s zeitgeist. I don’t want to entertain theological controversies, nor will I even take the first step to “defend” theology from someone’s modernist ontology. Apples and oranges.
The politics are pacifistic, not passive. It’s church that has taken the most dramatic and backward turn: from exemplary community to state-allied (and later, state-subordinate) institution, complete with the hierarchies of imperial despots.
What is under critique here is “the individual,” one uprooted by abstraction, in a world where the sacred and that which enchants are reduced to complicated pavlovian responses in a dead universe. We brought up “enchantment” with Hornborg; and it is so important because that which no longer enchants (it has been DIS-enchanted) gets used up, defiiled, profaned, destroyed… eg, nature becomes a basket of “natural resources.” The Midrash on Money does bit of amateur theology on this; but FS is not primarily populated by Judeo-Christians (except culturally, of course).
The psychological reinforcement of this pattern of disenchantment (inhering in the notion of the decontextualized individual of liberalism) is not dissimilar to that cognitive dissonance that leads slaughterhouse workers to actively hate (profane) the animals they are required to kill. So the “ideological” justification (they’re stupid, dirty, stink) is always in trail once this desacralization/disenchantment marches forward.
And I did stare into the well too long. It’s an old habit. (:
21 October 2009, 5:02 amKim Sky:
Regarding Christendom – I’ve begun reading Frederick Douglass’ autobiography — wow. There is a lesson to be learned about the application of Christianity in the South, back in the 1700′s. Douglas states that the very worst slave owners were Christian, using the Bible to justify their treatment of the slaves.
“I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
Anyway, don’t have time now. This is a historical background to the current mode that we have.
Important read.
21 October 2009, 10:19 amMichael Anderson:
It looks like the more conservative elements of Catholicism are making a bid for the more conservative elements of Anglicism—speaking of [gender-oriented] hierarchies, of an institutional nature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/world/europe/21pope.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
PS…being around, and looking at water is good for you! I see the Bay here every day now, and it soothes me. Contemplation does not necessarily lead to concupiscence.
21 October 2009, 11:35 amBob Watson:
What is under critique here is “the individual,” one uprooted by abstraction, in a world where the sacred and that which enchants are reduced to complicated pavlovian responses in a dead universe. We brought up “enchantment” with Hornborg; and it is so important because that which no longer enchants (it has been DIS-enchanted) gets used up, defiiled, profaned, destroyed… eg, nature becomes a basket of “natural resources.”
This seems Manichean to me. Statements like these always remind me of this from William James’ “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”
“Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I passed by a large number of ‘coves,’ as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes—an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions.
The forest had been destroyed; and what had ‘improved’ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty. Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the achievements of the intervening generations.
Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one’s old age and for one’s children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and one’s bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.
Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, “What sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?” “All of us,” he replied. “Why, we ain’t happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation.” I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very pæan of duty, struggle, and success.
I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.”
22 October 2009, 11:16 amRichard:
Hey, you all might be interested in the latest issue of Radical Anthropology, pdf available here. This issue is in many ways about “how fundamental willingness to share–food, stories, lipstick, medicine, beads, dances, childcare–is to humanity”. I would particularly recommend Camilla Power’s interview with Darwinian feminist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, whose latest book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, sounds fascinating, and Moran Finnegan’s imagining of an “egalitarian body” via her investigation of female body rituals among the Mbendjele Yaka hunter-gatherers in Central Africa. Interesting stuff, I think, relevant to our concerns in this thread, as well as in general.
23 October 2009, 5:58 pmJames:
Individualism–collectivism: here’s a good review of “Red Flag.”
The Red Flag
Communism and the Making of the Modern World
Western progressives nostalgic for the Soviet Union shouldn’t get too excited by the global financial crisis. A fine new history of communism shows why.
by John Gray
New Statesman (August 27 2009)
It cannot be long before progressive opinion begins to look back on communism with nostalgia. Whatever they may have been like in practice, communist states were established to embody ideas that progressives understood and to a large extent shared. The Soviet Union and Maoist China were seen as advancing the cause of humanity and many on the left judged it best not to make too much of any crimes these regimes committed along the way. However imperfectly, communism continued an authentic tradition of European radical humanism.
One of the many virtues of David Priestland’s The Red Flag (2009) is that it places communism squarely in this tradition. Citing Marx’s description of Prometheus as “the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar”, Priestland shows how Marx’s Promethean world-view has animated communist movements and regimes throughout their history. In the preface to his dissertation, Marx wrote, in the words of Aeschylus: “In sooth all gods I hate. ‘Tis better to be bound on a rock than bound to the service of Zeus.” In Marx’s variation on the Promethean myth, heroic humanity wages war against religion, inequality and subservience to nature.
Priestland shows that this modern mythology was propagated right up to the end of communist Russia. As a graduate student at Moscow State University in 1987-88, studying (in secret) Stalin’s Terror half a century earlier, he found himself “at the centre of a curious communist civilisation: my neighbours had come from all corners of the communist world – from Cuba to Afghanistan, from East Germany to Mozambique, from Ethiopia to North Korea – to take degrees in science and history, but also to study ‘scientific communism’ and ‘atheism’, the better to propagate communist ideology at home … The system was unravelling and revealing its secrets, but it was still communist”.
Just over twenty years later, that curious communist civilisation has all but vanished from the face of the earth. There are still states ruled by communist parties – Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and China – and the last ruling communist party in Europe was pushed out of power only a few weeks ago in Moldova. But except for North Korea and, in a limited way, Cuba, no country anywhere is governed, even in theory, by any version of Marxism. Marxist-Leninist insurrectionist movements still exist, with remnants of the Shining Path still active in Peru and Maoists leading a coalition government in Nepal for a time. But the new civilisation that Lenin believed he had founded in 1917, which Sidney and Beatrice Webb admired in the 1930s after touring Ukraine at the height of the famine, and which for all its faults western progressives believed was unshakeable, has ceased to exist.
While radical humanism was the feature that beguiled most western intellectuals, it was just one of several elements in communism. Priestland presents a useful typology of the stories in terms of which the history of communism has been understood: the official one, derived from Marx, in which communist regimes were stages on the way to a world of harmony and abundance; a story of modernisation, in which communists were rational bureaucrats committed to developing backward countries; and a narrative of repression, in which communists imposed a totalitarian system on an unwilling population…
The Red Flag is a comprehensive guide to the biggest political delusion of the 20th century. Starting with the origins of communist ideology in the French Revolution, it presents an interesting analysis of Marx’s thinking as being shaped as much by Romanticism as by the Enlightenment. Priestland also examines communist governments and movements in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America as well as the Soviet Union, and discusses the Nazi-Soviet pact as well as Stalin’s ban on anti-fascist activity in Europe, concluding with a level-headed account of the communist collapse…
Priestland gives an astute analysis of the leader who unwittingly dissolved the Soviet superstate. “Gorbachev’s world-view for the first few years of his rule”, he writes, “was, at root, a Romantic Marxist one”. Later, Priestland notes, Gorbachev was as much attracted by neoliberal ideology. What Priestland does not tell us is that it was precisely this absurd jumble of ideas that endeared the last Soviet leader to western progressives. Gorbachev’s fantasy that the Soviet Union could be reformed and turned into a gigantic reincarnation of Swedish social democracy allowed Soviet communists to indulge the conceit that they had been right after all. Even more, it gave them the feeling they were still in some way relevant.
The actual course of events has left progressives beached. Russia – for nearly three-quarters of a century supposedly the site of a new civilisation that would abolish religion and nationalism – is a Eurasian power whose prime minister, Vladimir Putin, wears around his neck a Russian Orthodox cross given to him by his pious mother. China has reinvented itself as a Confucian capitalist civilisation, while the US flounders. Rather than rejuvenating any kind of socialism, the global economic crisis is showing the strength of the varieties of capitalism that resisted neoliberal dogma. None of these developments figures in any scenario envisioned by progressives. It will be surprising if, redundant in a world they could never have imagined, they do not rediscover lost virtues in communism. Might it not be time for a King Street Manifesto?
At the end of the first volume of his magnificent trilogy, Main Currents of Marxism (2005), Leszek Kolakowski (who died in Oxford last month) summarised the communist debacle as follows: “And thus Prometheus awakens from his dream of power, as ignominiously as Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis”. As a description of communism, this cannot be faulted. As a judgement on the illusions of much of the western intelligentsia, it is perfect.
The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World by David Priestland (Allen Lane, 676 pages, GBP 35)
25 October 2009, 6:29 pmStan:
There are three decisive breaks I have made with marxist communism. This is not the anti-communism that served as a broad ideological foundation for the build-up of an empire and a security state, but a critical and specific approach to what I see as common denominators for the marxisms: (1) this promethian notion – which is attachment to progress defined as further conquest of nature (and the reason I will never ever call myself a progressive), (2) its teleological acceptance and occasional celebration of war, and (3) directly related to the acceptance of war, its stubborn masculinism. These are all related through the latter (the masculinity-as-conquest meme).
This does NOT mean that (1) I don’t find marxist analytical methods to be very useful… they can be very useful, moreso than establishment propaganda dressed up as “economics,” (2) there is no way for anarchists, liberals, Christians, untitled, et al, to work with marxists around issues of justice in particular situations… they can and certainly will, or (3) that I or anyone else cannot be friends with many very decent, caring, and committed people who identify themselves as marxists.
I have cross-posted a new thread from Louis Proyect as a very good point of engagement — his well-researched, engagingly written review of Inglorious Basterds.
I feel like this post was shoe-horned into the thread for the purpose of posting the book review (apologies if I am wrong), but that’s cool if it’s not a habit. It may, in fact, serve to re-ground the philosophical discussion of individualism, if folks are still there.
I guess this particular post also raises my fourth objection to marxism: it’s attachment to centralized, main-blow strategies (which I reject on the purely secular ground of efficacy prior to my deeper objection to its inevitable tendency to violent overthrow… and a violent, repressive aftermath).
Mahmood Memandi has written a good deal about how Marxism-Leninism played its formative role in the 20th Century. Very intriguing stuff.
I apologize for my inattentions to the blog lately. My family is undergoing a very busy, complex, and dramatic change right now (more on that when we can count all our baby chickens), and it is sucking up our time and energy like an F-5 tornado.
26 October 2009, 7:28 amSean:
Well said, Stan. Your objections to Marxist-Leninist themes mirror my own. I don’t see a “dictatorship of the proletariat” being any better a form of dictatorship than the one held by the corporate/business class. One gang of crooks for another. There’s no reason to believe working class people won’t get suffused with their own power and become brutalizers. What in human history shows dictatorships to be benign when in the hands of the workers?
Marxist-Leninist ideology also represses the individual for a bizarre form of collectivism whose terms will be dictated by a small group. This is human nature. We are, as a group, followers by nature. The only type of collectivism that can survive is one of small numbers, where the number is small enough that the collective’s members agree on most everything related to power and its use. I don’t see that number being larger than perhaps 100 or so people. The larger the number, the more distinct become the petty quarrels. People will tribalize even within Marxist-Leninist “revolutions” — it’s seen when one examines the scope of “socialist” blogs and discussion sites. Secret handshakes and mandatory agreements on terms abound… too much insistence on pedantic authorities who hold the “secret knowledge” on what supposedly will make a “glorious revolution” work.
Marxist-Leninist ideology is a lot like Protestant Christianity — sects, quarrels, and leaders warring for supremacy. How ironic.
STAN: It is also eschatological.
26 October 2009, 12:18 pmCurt Kastens:
Anyone care to give their opinion on the suggestions of participatory economics (parecon)?
26 October 2009, 3:52 pmCurt Kastens:
War is always a tragedy. When unjust rulers step down after losing an election, or get assassinated or overthrown, and then get imprisoned or at least exiled, all of which rarely happen, I think that I have a real reason to celebrate. Can one mourn and celebrate simultaneously?
26 October 2009, 4:07 pmJames:
Re:I feel like this post was shoe-horned into the thread for the purpose of posting the book review.
Well, of course it was. That is why I posted the review–for the purpose of posting it. I’m not sure what intentions Stan thought I had in mind when applied the label of “shoe-horning,” however.
The reason I posted it was simply that, in my mind at least, the concept of individualism inescapably calls forth the idea of collectivism. Thus, when I came across the review in my reading online, this thread came to mind, and I thought it would add an interest element to the discussion.
26 October 2009, 5:20 pmIf Stan feels otherwise, it’s easy to delete the post or situate it elsewhere. It’s not my blog, and I am indifferent to the fate of the post.
Sean:
@ Curt Kastens re ParEcon –
Michael Albert sometimes impresses me greatly with his intelligence and his problem-spotting. However, when I have tried to engage Albert on discussion of how ParEcon differs from Marxist-Leninist systems, I have been rebuffed with dismissals related to my “not understanding the revolution” and/or my disagreement with the ParEcon origins in Marxist-Leninist thought.
In theory, if I ignore the roots in Marxist-Leninist thought, ParEcon sounds great. In theory it sounds like Proudhon’s dream.
Yesterday I ran across something that I found interesting, it was a distinction between Marxist-Leninist “socialism” from a free-market anti-capitalist collectivism. This set of points seemed more sensible to me because it continued to respect the individual where I see the individual needing to retain authority, in order to feel valued for him/herself and his/her own contributions. I’ll repeat it here, if Stan will agree to indulge me.
…………………………………
“There are two Socialisms.
One is communistic, the other solidaritarian.
One is dictatorial, the other libertarian.
One is metaphysical, the other positive.
One is dogmatic, the other scientific.
One is emotional, the other reflective.
One is destructive, the other constructive.
Both are in pursuit of the greatest possible welfare for all.
One aims to establish happiness for all, the other to enable each to be
happy in his own way.
The first regards the State as a society sui generis, of an especial essence,
the product of a sort of divine right outside of and above all society,
with special rights and able to exact special obediences; the second
considers the State as an association like any other, generally managed
worse than others.
The first proclaims the sovereignty of the State, the second recognizes no
sort of sovereign.
One wishes all monopolies to be held by the State; the other wishes the
abolition of all monopolies.
One wishes the governed class to become the governing class; the other wishes
the disappearance of classes.
Both declare that the existing state of things cannot last.
The first considers revolutions as the indispensable agent of evolutions; the
second teaches that repression alone turns evolutions into revolution.
The first has faith in a cataclysm.
The second knows that social progress will result from the free play of
individual efforts.
Both understand that we are entering upon a new historic phase.
One wishes that there should be none but proletaires.
The other wishes that there should be no more proletaires.
The first wishes to take everything away from everybody.
The second wishes to leave each in possession of its own.
The one wishes to expropriate everybody.
The other wishes everybody to be a proprietor.
The first says: ‘Do as the government wishes.”
The second says: ‘Do as you wish yourself.’
The former threatens with despotism.
The latter promises liberty.
The former makes the citizen the subject of the State.
The latter makes the State the employee of the citizen.
One proclaims that labor pains will be necessary to the birth of a new world.
The other declares that real progress will not cause suffering to any one.
The first has confidence in social war.
The other believes only in the works of peace.
One aspires to command, to regulate, to legislate.
The other wishes to attain the minimum of command, of regulation, of legislation.
One would be followed by the most atrocious of reactions.
The other opens unlimited horizons to progress.
The first will fail; the other will succeed.
Both desire equality.
One by lowering heads that are too high.
The other by raising heads that are too low.
One sees equality under a common yoke.
The other will secure equality in complete liberty.
One is intolerant, the other tolerant.
One frightens, the other reassures.
The first wishes to instruct everybody.
The second wishes to enable everybody to instruct himself.
The first wishes to support everybody.
The second wishes to enable everybody to support himself.
One says:
The land to the State
The mine to the State
The tool to the State
The product to the State
The other says:
The land to the cultivator.
The mine to the miner.
The tool to the laborer.
The product to the producer.
There are only these two Socialisms.
One is the infancy of Socialism; the other is its manhood.
One is already the past; the other is the future.
One will give place to the other.
Today each of us must choose for the one or the other of these two Socialisms, or else confess that he is not a Socialist.”
– Ernest Lesigne, as quoted by Benjamin Tucker in “State Socialism and Anarchism: How far they agree, and wherein they differ.”
………………………………….
That’s it.
27 October 2009, 1:28 pmCurt Kastens:
Sean, thank you for your response.
28 October 2009, 3:57 amI think that it would be fair to say the devil lies in details.
Imagine immunizations for example.
Imagine hog farms.
Imagine how people obtain information (education).
Imagine a system in which real estate is taxed yearly.
Imagine a system in which real estate is taxed when you buy or sell it.
Imagine a society in which it was illegal to hit your child.
Imagine a society in which it was illegal to hit your dog.
Imagine a society in which it was illegal to eat meat.
Imagine a world in which everyone drove 150 mph.
Imagine a world in which everyone drove 15 mph.
Imagine Radio waves.
Now imagine very powerful radio waves, lots of them.
Imagine snow, lots of it.
Imagine “radio active” snow, lots of it.
Imagine no snow, lots of it.
Imagine if there was no investment in poor countries with money from rich countries.
Imagine if there was a lot of investment in poor countries with money from rich countries.
One thing that can not be imagined is No money. That is a pipe dream. Period end of story. What can be imagined is some additional object that would be needed to complete an economic transaction. Would this additional requirement make life better or make life worse?
Oh yes I suppose that a person could imagine an end to money but they would be wasting their time imagining something that would never be real.
Imagine jury nullification in which one juror could nullify a verdict.
Imagine jury nullification in which it would take 3 jurors to nullify a verdict.
(When in use the term jury nullification I mean that all the jurors agree that someone broke a statutory law but that some refuse to find the person guilty because they thought that breaking the law in the case being reviewed was justified).
Imagine a world with no war.
Imagine a world with no bull fighting.
Imagine a world with no dog fighting.
Imagine a world with no boxing.
Imagine a world with no football or rugby.
Imagine a world with no wrestling.
Imagine a world with no horse racing.
Imagine a world with no swimming races.
Imagine a world with no chess.
Imagine a world with no Sequence.
Imagine a world with no war.
Imagine a world with no authority.
Imagine a world in which nothing is taken by force.
Imagine a world in which nothing is taken by deceit.
Imagine the world in a way that it could be.
Imagine the world in a way that it could not be.
Imagine a world in which most people know the difference.
Sean:
Curt — as long as you don’t want me to imagine a world with no lacrosse, I’m with you.
28 October 2009, 11:33 amCurt Kastens:
Thinking about the famous saying attributed to Jesus about turning the other cheek. I had previously written that turning the other cheek once is reasonable but turning the other cheek over and over again is not reasonable because it teaches others that they can take advantage of other people. But turning the other cheek is symbolically similar to accepting a deal in which you accept a less advantageous economic position. Why would someone accept a less advantageous position? Well possibly to make a deal that would otherwise not be made for one. Possibly to build trust with a new potential partner. Do a favor now so that you will be owed a favor, possibly even a bigger favor later.
15 November 2009, 1:29 pmOf course your potential partner would also take account of your potential motives for accepting a less advantageous position. Such a potential partner could take your decision to accept a less advantageous economic position or a decision to sacrifice personal gain for the common good as simply a short term tactical move designed to win a more advantageous position at a later time. So my impression is that the only way to over come such skepticism would be to accept a lower position over and over again. That would be much like turning the other cheek over and over again.
So lets say that you have demonstrated to your potential partner that you really are not interested in taking advantage of him or her but are really only interested in cooperation that provides benefits for both sides.
At this point are you better off than when you started? If both sides in a negotiation are interested in a concept of fairness that includes the needs of the other as equal to the needs of oneself and they both trust each other as much as twin brothers is this a better situation for the two than when each on is trying to get 55% of the pie even though because of his position he would be as well off with as his partner with only 47% of the pie.
Does this make any sense or do I need to try again? Maybe I could try it along the lines of why should we expect others to act unselfishly if we do not do so ourselves? Is there a point in which unselfishness actually becomes stupid because warps the thinking of other people? Perhaps the advice Jesus gave to turn the other cheek over and over again is valid after all? Perhaps it needs some caveats added to it.