Death
Around 100 billion human beings have been born by best estimates, and around seven percent of them are now living. That seven percent will die, too, as will all the people who come after them. Every child born today will die. I will die. You will die.
As surely as the moment you are in right now, reading this, that moment when you become a corpse will arrive with the same immediacy and become as irrevocable as five minutes ago is now.
There is an idea in modern culture that death is the opposite of life, life being a reified abstraction that can be transferred across time and space, ignoring the actual bodies of the living – which will die – and the actual lives of people – in the concrete sense – as I write this, I am alive as a specific person in a specific time and place. The abstraction life can be measured and monitored, even in individuals, as we can observe in any technologically replete hospital room. It’s opposite, death, occurs when the metrics of life are absent. Stan is in the hospital, and his ECG is bouncing along in a visual display accompanied by beeps to let the professionals know that he has a pulse. Stan quits breathing, his heart slows and stops, accompanied again by the flattening of the electronic line and the beep has become a domesticated electronic scream. Stan’s brain cells begin to perish, and he shits himself. Stan is now dead (concrete); that is, death – the abstract opposite of the metric-life – has won. The doctors and nurses and machines that were enlisted in the struggle against Death and on behalf of Life have lost.
Catherine Pickstock, whose dense but fascinating book, After Writing, says that death has been converted in modern thought from being a part of life into being the opposite of life.
In her chapter entitled “Signs of Death,” Pickstock situates this transfiguration of death in the Enlightenment.
[A] shift in attitude has occurred, where a former cultural familiarity with death and its integration into life is replaced by a retreat from death in a double gesture of denial and mystification… In general, the main reasons offered.. for this retreat focus, to differing degrees of intensity, on, first, the drift towards immanentism, culminating in the triumph of reason in the Enlightenment, according to which, death is the last remaining scandal [in the antique sense, as a stumbling block -SG] which refuses to be mastered; and, secondly, advances in medical science which mean that in the West, so-called “untimely” death or deadly epidemics occur less frequently, encouraging the synecdochal dream that mastery over disease presages an eventual triumph over death itself. And so contemporary historians appear to have shown that the apparent imminence of scientific triumph over death finds expression in an evasion of the continuing reality of death.
She calls this evasion necrophobia; then she proceeds to show how modern necrophobia paradoxically becomes necrophilia – the love of deadness. Reified “life” transcends actual living beings, being comprised instead – as hospitals show us – of a system of metrics, an ontological flattening, based on the totalizing claim that reality can be reduced, atomized, and finally captured. To effect this capture, we first needed to learn how to defeat time – which is understood as the carrier of death.
Pickstock calls this capture of time “spatialization.” Everything is understood only after it is filtered through a scientific grid of some kind, frozen as a scatterplot on a graph, wrapped in a protective layer of measurements against the flux of time – with rationality having the last word. There is a question begged, of course, with this “rationality,” and that is the conviction that everything is apprehendable – and therefore available for our use and subject to our power and control, through the application of science.
An example, writ small (pun intended). This blog post. I am writing. Unlike when I speak to you in person, where my embodied words pass away as quickly as they are spoken (a function of time), when I write, I am attempting to capture time, to press the pause button, to contain this bit of the world in a little package.
Enter repetition. Gutenberg through the digital age, the packages of atemporal reality can be reproduced en masse, an immense exercise of power.
Our world writes, leaving the written and reproducible word in books, ads, magazines, billboards, instruction manuals, street signs, maps, etc. We live in a written world, a world dominated by virtuality; and there can never be a proper comparison between our written world and that of any former society where orality – spoken speech – was primary. These former societies, correspondingly, were characterized by a “cultural familiarity with death and its integration into life.” Neither time nor death were enemies; but these were other people whose lives, quite often, were lived in liturgical communities, and in a universe that was animate and mysterious. The preservation and reiteration of that mystery was, among other things, an exercise in humility.
Language becomes formative of all when that language is hegemonic. That may be a shade tautological, but the point is, language is the practice that produces meaning, often is ways that are invisible in the same way that hegemonic cultural norms become invisible – naturalized into inescapable axioms.
Ever since Descartes, the tendency of language in Western culture – which has been exported across the world via capitalist expansion and commodification – has fetishized the fact. Facts are organized into the schema – a spatial allegory. Science calls facts and the fact-supported schema, truth, which it then attempts to isolate (freeze, spatialize) to discern more facts.
Spatialization is therefore a ritual order which monitors the desires of the masses, achieving domination as much or more than the control of ideas about reality as by military forces and visible, voted-in apexes.
There is a word that describes how this shift in language and ideas conjures a “spatialized” universe that is inert, dead, driven by inertia: objectification, which is a species, above all, of power. An objective universe – one that has been taken out of God’s hands and placed in our own, one that has been – a la Carolyn Merchant – de-animated. A dead universe. A dead “objective reality” is desacralized; it is made available to satisfy the desires of the living. This shift to a spatialized and available universe on the one hand grants great power to those who have power, but it also creates a terrible sense of vertigo. The world that surrounds us is dead, and it threatens to swallow us all up in that endless deadness. We need to place a barrier between us and all that space. We have created a dead universe out of our necrophilia – the attraction to the non-living schema – which we now need to conceal in order to get on with our lives – which are totally separated from death, because to die is fall into the abyss.
This necrophilia can be seen already in the early-modern focus of attention not on the deceased, but on his survivors and their display of piety in the erection of elaborate tombs and monuments. Although these displays appeared to be bestowed in the direction of death, such monuments in fact consecrated the appearance of life by attesting to its perseverance, thus sheltering life from death. Later, this evasion of the dead and the dying is manifest in the extradition of the dead to a position at the margins of the city during the industrial era, the removal of the dying to the functional space of hospitals, in the discrete elimination of corpses, and in the domestication and beautification of death which has taken place from the Romantic period up until the present day American cult of “morticians” and “death parlors.”
The reductions of science are derivative, not primary. I look out my window, and I see a squirrel feeding. That actual squirrel is understood by science as a series of derivations – animalia, chordata, mammalia, rodenta, sciuramorpha – none of which are this particular squirrel, who is alive in front of me now. The elevation of these derivatives is not unrelated to the elevation of the financial derivatives that have caused so much mischief for the last few decades (not today’s preoccupation, however). It is the transposition of truth from something revealed and temporal into something timeless, universal, non-living, and understood as a spatial analogy – this is where the squirrel fits, inside a taxonomy, frozen for all time. It is immortality of a sort, but an icy immortality that flies over the heads of the actual mortal beings it has left behind. Pickstock calls it the “textual calculus of the real.”
Language has become “a linear, informational sequence,:” according to Pickstock. Language becomes simply a microphone for those “facts.” The grammar is asyndetic, that is, spare and unadorned, privileging the nouns. It claims to precisely capture the “real.” Instead, it has captured us.
Although asyndeton is presented as the ideal representational structure for bypassing mediation, and undoing the division between mind and matter, it is nevertheless predicated upon that very division. The absence of conjunctions in asyndetic syntax ensures the omission of all clausal relations and hierarchies, in favor of a serial juxtaposition cast in the genre of the catalogue or list. Thus the events narrated or objects described in asyndetic prose are necessarily presented as obtainable, scrutable, and given…
We believe that we can theoretically know all there is to know, because everything is available through the categories of this “textual calculus.” We have “squeezed the universe inside a ball” with the notion that all there is, is available to us as terrestrial beings. The whole, dead universe. And so the power of this making-available has made the human being – in the disembodied abstract – sovereign over a realm of deadness, the very deadness that threatens to swallow up the actual humans – alone now in their egos – who occupy this Kingdom of Exteriority.
Reality itself, as objectified, and represented in unhierarchized and disjoined clauses, is rendered static and inert, beyond any possible manifestation of difference, a condition tantamount to closure or indifference, thinly disguised by the jagged display of its promiscuous juxtapositions…
…although the spatiality of juxtaposition and absence of connections communicate a consoling permanence and immobile density to the components of the catalogue, ultimately this unity is shattered by the inherent violence of linearity, or the perpetual outrunning of clauses… This hidden violence and disarray induce the reader to abandon the passive role of recipient, in order to engage in a private re-establishment of coherence. Thus, the citizen of the spatial city experiences the need to control, but only as a palliative expedient, within the confines of private hermeneutic activity. Furthermore, the citizen unconsciously experiences its relation with reality as consisting in control by force.
That need to control and that sense of vertigo that drives us away from the context provided by death as part of life is felt as a lack. We begin to dream of the things we require to fill the void.
This lack resides at the heart of capitalist economy which organizes wants and needs amid an abundance of production, so that desire is secularized, and equated with the fear of not having one’s needs satisfied.
Catherine Pickstock is making a much larger argument in her book, one related to liturgy – she is an Anglican theologian, after all. The point I wanted to explore here is her description of spatialization and some of its outcomes – in particular her characterization of modern culture as necrophilic, presenting itself as necrophobic.
We are necrophilic because we do not participate in something meaningful and universal – within the abyss resides the textual calculus. It is literally disembodied, creating what Pickstock calls a “pseudo-eternity.” Our categories, our taxonomies, our calculations and grids, transcend the lives of individual persons. But since they are themselves constituted in the experience of embodied human beings, who are faced with an existential crisis – that this pseudo-eternity holds nothing for them at the hour of death. Nothing. This is what is at stake; and this is what must be domesticated.
She names this as “a supra-linguistic philosophical logos, independent of time and space … a rationalistic gesture which suppresses embodiment and temporality.”
In this world, where each person is a goldfish in her bowl, terrified of the breathless exterior, we feel compelled to concupiscence. We want everything, faster, now… we lack. If the time is not “filled,” we are vulnerable to the recognition of that exterior – with its howling deadness.
I’ll let her have the last word (a long one for your cogitation):
This accumulation was driven by an anxiety to cancel lack and to retain presence through identical repetition. But such apparently guaranteed possession interrupts the inevitable passage of life into death, and mistakes the passing away which is life for sheer deletion, so effecting a pseudo-eternity of mere spatial permanence which, unlike genuine eternity, is exhaustively available to the human gaze. Such pseudo-eternity is composed of things which are only preservable and manageable as finite, and therefore as “dead.” On this basis it can be claimed that modernity less seeks to banish death, than to prise death and life apart in order to preserve life immune from death in pure sterility. For in seeking only life, in the form of a pseudo-eternal permanence, the “modern” gesture is secretly doomed to necrophilia, love of what has to die, can only die. In seeking only life, modernity gives life over to death, removing all traces of death only to find that life has vanished with it. And so there is a nihilistic logic to this necrophiliac gesture, this sacrificing of life to a living death so as to ensure that when death arrives to unmask life of its tinsel, he finds only the presence of absence, life reduced to the deathliness of equivalence.
Underlying the modern negotiation of death is the assumption that by reifying a quality, one obtains access to it in its true nature. However, this act of reification suppresses its real nature, which is to remain open. Hence if death and life are seen as discrete and opposed, then existence itself is turned into a closed object – which is to say, given over to death. And it is true that such a production of death can serve many interests. The invention of the baroque anguish of death permitted the fully fledged inauguration of the ethic of accumulation and sacrality of investment. New mercantilist operators in alliance with experimental philosophers were able to take advantage of the situation by advancing – or inventing – risk, and then offering – or rather, marketing – the supposed “necessary” security to counter it. The secret idea behind this economy is that death is unnatural to life, and yet the protocol of such machinations, predicated on desire as lack, moves by means of the oscillation of supposedly natural life and supposedly unnatural death. For the murderous outrunning of the obsolete and derelict by innovation is a production of the very death it proposes to obfuscate… the production of anxiety of mutability is the condition of possibility for absolute power.
DeAnander:
Here’s a somewhat more accessible discussion of necrophobia, the flight from death and the dying, and the horrendous cognitive/emotional bind that leaves us all in as we see our industrial western culture starting to die…
I’m not sure I follow all of Pickstock’s argument (which somewhat ironically is phrased in the academic language of abstraction, conceptualisation etc), but I think I get the gist of it. I do believe that the fear of death — fear of something rendered alien, unfamiliar, and hence far more terrible by our relentless attempts to banish it — drives our insatiable appetite for Stuff. The challenge posed by Jenkinson in the interview above is daunting for those of us raised in our death-denying, death-worshipping culture: when something is dying, when someone is dying, our task is to *be present*.
I suspect that the denial and terror of death that Pickstock described is somehow implicated not only in the destructive power of our economic and social rules, but also in the difficulty we (as individuals, as a culture) have in perceiving that damage, in perceiving the sheer amount of dying that is going on all around us. Seeing “the world” as already dead, we don’t seem to grasp the urgency, the tragedy, and the imminent peril as ecosystems fray and fail on every side. Those of us who do, are treated as slightly loopy by the apparently-confident (but imho secretly terrified) mainstream culture, wrapping itself ever more tightly in layer upon layer of Dead Stuff in its panicky flight from death, change, and time…
Anyway, though I find Pickstock somewhat ponderous I think I am in sympathy with what she is describing. This inability to feel, perceive, and honour the life (and death) of the world is near the root of our ills, of the ills of patriarchy (with its rejection of the female as the symbol of all the messiness of biotic reality), the ills of the machine culture (which seeks to reject/replace biotic reality entirely).
19 December 2012, 9:41 pmStan:
There is definitely a link between necrophobia-philia and biophobia. Sterility is a huge theme in our culture, as we’ve noted once or twice before. I was listening to William Cavanaugh doing a lecture in Australia on the phenomenon of consumerism. He says that consumerism is not driven by greed – except by a few producers – but that it is a form of psuedo-transcendence that obtains more in the wanting than the getting, because as soon as the desired thing is yours, it becomes dead. Novelty is the key; he calls it “transcendence through novelty.” Puts me in mind of fashion of every sort, just for beginners…
The ads don’t tell us that this or that will satisfy our lust for possessions; instead, they suggest that the acquisition will bring things like beauty, freedom, love, belonging.
One of Picstock’s extended metaphors is that of baroque architecture, to which she compares spatialized society, with its impressions of diversity, originality, and freedom – all contained and displayed within the bounds of the baroque building – the promiscuous display of spectacle and elaboration attached to and trapped within rather conventional building. Our culture creates the counterfeits of freedom and originality within a safely contained ideological space that is obscured (distracted from) by fascinating display. Sound familiar?
Her ultimate criticism, however, is the way in which this society moves everyone inevitably toward an isolated and acquisitive self. We have a Jessica Benjamin quote somewhere here that says, “As the principle of pure self-assertion comes to govern the public world of men, human agency is enslaved by the objects it produces.”
There’s the “object” again, the dead thing to be grasped and controlled and consumed. A universe of indefinitely reiterated stone idols – silent as the broken effigy of Ozimandias.
Haven’t slept since forever, so now is not the time, but there is another distinction that Pickstock cites that is worth some thought – that is the difference between performance and participation as modes of living.
20 December 2012, 4:17 pmStan:
I am a big fan of Cavanaugh as a theologian, but his analysis of “prosperity” here is applicable to the above as just good social criticism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cAWuRj51iE
20 December 2012, 8:19 pmcabdriver:
Plenty to reflect on in these passages.
Just as a preliminary observation, this discussion of necrophobia/philia brings up what I notice as the ultimate pessimism of so many ‘materialists’, including ‘progressives’. They seem to think they have Death figured out; and hence, Life. Viewing Death as the ultimate negation leaves Life as meaningless, beyond what one can accumulate as transient ego satisfactions or Pleasure Points in the course of a lifetime. No matter what one’s personal idealisms or good works, they’re always tinged with despair. They don’t really count, because they’re futile in the face of Death, which they’ve defined as the ultimate triumph of nihilism.
Listening to such people opine on philosophical matters, I often get the idea that they’ve convinced themselves that considering the possibility of a greater mystery is for the Faithful- you know, the suckers. The immanent material world of appearances containing all reality, one ends up with this:
“We believe that we can theoretically know all there is to know, because everything is available through the categories of this “textual calculus.” We have “squeezed the universe inside a ball” with the notion that all there is, is available to us as terrestrial beings. The whole, dead universe. And so the power of this making-available has made the human being – in the disembodied abstract – sovereign over a realm of deadness, the very deadness that threatens to swallow up the actual humans – alone now in their egos – who occupy this Kingdom of Exteriority.”
(But there’s a consolation prize, such as it is: you get to adopt the stance of tough undeluded cynical Realism- and hence, Wisdom, or at least it’s posture. All important, for an ego that’s concluded that Knowledge is Power, with the corollary that admitting that one doesn’t know is an admission of Powerlessness. The horror! Without Reliastic Pessimism, how else can one obtain any measure of power at all, within the all-encompassing realm of ultimately meaningless inert nihilism?)
It seems to me that once you buy into that, the reasons for actually sticking around and involving yourself in the affairs of Life inevitably diminish, especially once one passes the physical peak that usually crests between 18 and 30. It’s so unfair, considered from the default point of view of the human bandwidth…we’re supposed to be getting faster, stronger, healthier, gaining companions and never losing them, the longer we stay in the game!
But that isn’t how it plays out. So- if that’s all there is- life turns into a steadily more desperate endeavor. From the moment one ‘figures that out’, and accepts it as Cosmic Truth.
21 December 2012, 10:35 amChris Nolen:
Stan,
21 December 2012, 1:54 pmLong time no see or hear! I read your bio in wikipedia. You’ve had quite a journey on this earth my friend. I see you may be living in Michigan, hope you’re truly enjoying yourself. I also noted that you’re studying the scriptures. I don’t know where you’re at in your walk with Christ, but the scriptures are very clear when it comes to materialism. The problem with American culture is that materialism is glorified in all form of advertising, media, music, movies, internet, and books. People have things as their god instead of God himself. It’s a real simple concept that everybody thinks that having a relationship with God/Christ means that you can’t have fun in your life. Peace by with you my friend.
God Bless you and your family this Christmas.
an old friend,
Christopher L. Nolen
Michael Anderson:
“….Our culture creates the counterfeits of freedom and originality within a safely contained ideological space that is obscured (distracted from) by fascinating display. Sound familiar?…”
A dark, murderous Disneyland.
We love to watch OTHER people and creatures die, but are “deathly” afraid of our own demise. Cannibalism. This post is SO relevant to the latest headlines. Death outside of us is power.
We recently got an Xmas letter from some in-laws who live in rural eastern Oregon. They hunt. He works for a bullet manufacturer in Bend. Almost the entire letter was description of the “military-style” equipment they use (their hunting trips resemble combat patrols), and calibers of weapons and modifications to the man’s “beloved AR-15 platform.” The gal who wrote the letter called hunting a “spiritual” experience.
And I play cello in the New York Philharmonic….
22 December 2012, 12:15 amStan:
@Chris, Merry Christmas to you and your family as well.
@CD/MA, et alia, Pickstock is going after Derrida pretty hard in her book; and again, I find it interesting that the same discomforts with postmodernism afflict Christians and leftists and a lot of so-called 2nd wave feminists (I have been annoyed with them from all three POVs.) In each case, there is a critique of disembodiment (and its seemingly unconscious walk into nihilism) directed against certain versions of postmodernity – esp those that have become themselves nearly doctrine in the academy.
If modernism corresponds to the rise of capitalism, then postmodernism corresponds to the consumerism (with its emphasis on performance and “choice”) of late capitalism.
22 December 2012, 8:15 amMichael Anderson:
Postmodernism also is intertwined with (more pronounced) object fetishization. Giving inanimate things a life of their own, thus replacing your own life. What you own can certainly say a lot about your individual psychology. Perhaps that is part of taking away the mystery, a readily identifiable exterality.
I do not believe that an (honest) scientific spirit is at all incompatible with awareness of God or divinity. One can search for scientific truth and still respect the ultimate mystery of the universe. That would, I think, put a responsibility on us to tread lightly, and to realistically assess what we do in this world. And to be patient and grateful.
22 December 2012, 9:32 amcabdriver:
“…postmodernism corresponds to the consumerism (with its emphasis on performance and “choice”) of late capitalism.”
And Image, too. Like the importance of branding, and identification of status and sign/signification, based around consumer behaviors like “accessorizing”. An initiation that begins as early as the toddler stage in some cases, at the behest of the parents.
In some ways, I understand it. Human groups and have always put emphasis on things like totems, heraldry, and similar types of symbolic identification. And, for that matter, personal style has often held importance for individuals- although most often that’s traditionally been a preserve of only the most high-status individuals in a group. But these days it’s trending toward becoming a universal. That American dream of “every man a king” (or, more accurately, “everybody as self-entitled royalty”.
I can even sympathize with that aspiration to democratize that status. Although I’m dubious about the conditioning and motivation underlying it, and how that tends to play out for the self-worth of people, and their concern for others.
In the original school of it, totems and heraldry were not something to be purchased. They were something handcrafted, customized with specialized context and content- by oneself, gifted as a reward, or through some other ritual that imbued the garb, costuming, or furnishing with special meaning. An authentic Mardi Gras Indian costume is hand tailored and embroidered, typically using a lot of labor input from the person wearing it. You can’t just buy one off of the rack. Same with a Mardi Gras float.
But the commodification of Image has become a principal driver of modern mass marketing.
I admit to some ambivalence about that; I’m capable of appreciating manufactured goods for their design, as objets d’art. It’s the all-pervading exaltation of it that I can’t get behind.
To get back to my earlier comment: I think that much of the phenomenon of consumer goods worship has to do with the relative permanence of “stuff”, compared to the mortality of the human body. For that matter, one can prize an accumulating bank balance in much the same way, even though it isn’t even experienced through the senses at all, except through gazing at charts and columns of number figures. Beyond the level of utility for fulfilling security about basic material needs, the “appreciation” of ones personal assets is pretty much carried on in an ideal realm of thought. It’s as if increasing wealth works as a demonstration of a great work to negate that age-old nemesis of the material realm, particularly for the mortal physical container: entropy.
Maybe this helps to explain why many wealthy people have such a horror of having their tax rates rise, even by a small percentage on the margins, when by any reasonable measure they and their progeny are already materially secure and, uh, living large, in a way that wouldn’t diminish from a mer 2% marginal tax increase. It’s the principle of the Thing!
23 December 2012, 8:38 amStan:
What do you think about Cavanaugh’s thesis, ie, that consumerism has a liturgical quality – that it is a form of worship that is carried out through repetition of a ritual (the same thing Jesus-chasers do on Sundays, only different)?
Somewhere way back we were talking about human beings being “storied.” Communities are formed around stories, and that is fractal – repeating the pattern at diverse scales. There are stories nested within stories. The story of Adam and Eve. The story of the Bolshevik Revolution. Pandora’s Box. The water jar boy.
Advertizing is in many senses based on developing short-short-short stories. My skin was a mess, and I feared I would be ostracized. Mojo Filter Skin Cream cleared up my acne at the same that it removed my neurosis; I now have a smile plastered across my face 24-7 because I am happy, I belong again, I don’t have cooties. It’s a story.
Anyhow, that other thing Cavanaugh said is that ads and public relations promise more than a thing. They promise a pseudo-transcendence. I watch tv, maybe more than I should (tho it holds a stranger and stranger fascination for me). On almost any ad, there are smiling faces. On a lot of ads, there is a sad face followed by a happy face (like with Mojo Filter Skin Cream). But they don’t tell me that Mastercard will get me things. They tell me that Mastercard will give me… freedom. Whatever that shit is that people keep killing over it, I can have it with a Mastercard.
Perhaps I’ll keep a log of tv ads… it can be funny as hell. My favorite ads are “germ” ads, like the new one now where a giant blob of angry snot chased a woman through the street (the blob being a nascent cold), then she whipped out the snot-blob kryptonite, which was whatever shit they were selling, whereupon the snot-blob disappeared, the woman breathed a sigh of relief, and was then seen happily bopping along _smiling of course – as a full member of the human community again.
23 December 2012, 5:19 pmcabdriver:
I’ll have to read or listen to William Cavanaugh in order to make or reference any specific observations about his points. But in the more general sense, the insights about the pitfalls of prizing material objects as ends in themselves or placing undue importance on their particular qualities has been part of a lot of spiritual wisdom traditions, both as religious and philosophical instruction. Note various commentaries on “idolatry”, “maya”, “desire and transience”, “avarice”, “gluttony”, etc.
Authentic wisdom not being a commercial commodity, it gets short shrift these days. Or maybe wisdom always has gotten short shrift. Wisdom is pretty much indifferent to the techniques of flattering or ego stroking, and that perceived deficiency is often enough to lead humans to regard it as threatening, and to respond to its input with disdain, dismissal, puzzlement, annoyance, etc.
I speak here from firsthand experience as well as from observation. I think that the human condition is by nature insecure; it’s part and parcel of being a mortal being. But I’ve noticed that some people seem to be “old souls”, and they access a sense of self-possession and diffident equanimity more easily than others. If that quality isn’t wisdom, at least it doesn’t comprise an obstacle to accessing it. I am not an old soul. I’ve been part of the folly of the youth market many times over. There’s a person like me born every minute.
That said, I did quit TV for a real long time. Years, more than a decade. Long enough to eventually find myself unplugged from a huge number of cultural connections with my fellow Americans, including my peer age group. I started watching it again, first on an occasional and then semi-regular basis, around 15 years ago. And now I’m back in the “normal” range of being culturally conversant about TeeVee again. Still, ever since the first time I completely removed the input of television from my life in 1981, after a year or so on the fast, I was never the same person. I’ve certainly never looked at the phenomenon of TV the same way. My critical distance from it is at a serious remove from the perspective of most other people I encounter. I don’t take the News Cycle seriously, for instance. And I view advertising as a form of stage magic. Or three-card monte.
The TV ads that give me the willies are the ones for psychopharmaceuticals. Lunesta. Cymbalta. Abilify. And the booze ads on cable. At the time that I first evicted the Box from my house in 1981, TV ads for those products were forbidden. I continue to be amazed at the process of acclimation and acquiesence to the power of the tube by the American public that there wasn’t mass outrage from the outset at the notion of powerful mind-altering prescription medicines being direct-marketed to the public, for consumers (“patients”? not really) to request from their physicians. I mean, it’s bad enough that the docs can earn bonuses from drug companies for writing more prescriptions of one substance or another.
“…that other thing Cavanaugh said is that ads and public relations promise more than a thing. They promise a pseudo-transcendence.”
Advertising is suggestion. And the products are meant to work as “active placebos.” So you aren’t just buying, say, shoes to keep your feet dry. You’re buying an Experience. A mental Set, stuffed full of positive- transcendent- connotations.
But-
“You can talk yourself into anything, but how do you get out of it?” Neal Cassady
24 December 2012, 12:23 amMichael Anderson:
For several years I worked in a mall, selling shoes, and I can DEFINITELY attest to the liturgical quality of consumerism….have we forgotten about worshipping at the church of “Mammon”—-your local mall? Especially at this time of year, when more-or-less legitimate liturgical (religious) symbols & images are are superimposed on the object worship of Christmas presents for bottom line of profit. And, in a month, they’ll be in a landfill or at Goodwill, after the high has gone. Consumerism, a manifestation of Capitalism, takes things, icons, symbols, both material and spiritual, and corrupts them.
Waiting for the mass throngs of holiday-crazed consumers just outside the door at 7:00 AM on Black Friday is a mind-altering experience. Cultural anthrpology indeed.
I am with cabdriver on TV. Took me a lot longer to do, but the change occurred!
24 December 2012, 5:31 pmKim Sky:
A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman, a book about Medieval Times states in her forward of the book:
“the Christian religion … Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and the after world was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is on that the modern world does not share, no matter how devote…
“The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages.”
31 December 2012, 12:29 pmStan:
Tuchman is wrong. Her theology is wrong. Her history is wrong. Her conclusion is wrong. Modernity appeared within Christendom, and as a reaction to the breakup of the church during the Reformation, and the subsequent strengthening of the nation-state. Modernity is perverse Christianity, even where it has appeared in a non-Christian historical context; because it was spread by Western hegemony. There was never a “replacement.”
There is a longer explanation of this, requiring a kind of genealogy of ideas/development/conflict. But this approach is supersessionist, that is, she treats history as if one epoch simply supersedes another, like an overthrow. This approach skips over the evolutions of the 16-17-18th Centuries as if they were a mere moment.
Th individual has always been given great worth within Christianity (as a beloved child of God), but modernity redefined the individual as one without either history or place. Modernity did not enter the stage as secularism. That was merely an unforeseen outcome. Most of the great modern philosophers between 16-18 C were themselves churchmen of some kind. But with Duns Scotus and Descartes, both churchmen themselves, came the introduction of the isolated (placeless, ahstorical, unstoried) ‘individual’, and with the objectification of nature (what Carolyn Merchant called “The Death of Nature“), the door was opened for what we see today.
1 January 2013, 7:07 amKim Sky:
Tuchman and introduction.
In her book she details the multitude of insanities that the various Church people/organizations practiced, which was more than perverse Christianity. The rise of disenchantment/rebellion and alternative Christian practices. Which lead into the evolutions of the 16-17-18th Centuries.
Quote: “The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw…”
“When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this…”
It seems in some ways the reformation helped to take power away from the Church? Which was a necessity.
1 January 2013, 2:16 pmStan:
There is no doubt that the Reformation was brought on by the abuses of the church hierarchy (the church is all the people). Luther’s main complaint was the selling of indulgences, eg. But the claim by Protestants that sola scrpitura, reading the Bible in the absence of a tradition, was sufficient to solve the problems, turned out to be a huge miscalculation. Because everyone that came along interpreted scripture differently, and within a short time, Protestants were fighting other Protestants.
Each powerful sect aligned with a respective political authority for its protection and propagation (French Catholics, English Anglicans, Swiss Reformed, Scottish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, et al), to which each subordinated itself. The increasingly powerful nation-states (who were in many respects even more abusive of people than church authorities) became primary; and given that they were founded for the purpose of war, they went to war, often with religious cover from their subordinated church authorities. The smaller sects were persecuted (like Anabaptists).
But the nation-state was a political form that emerged under the control of the merchant class, and there remained enough religious pluralism to create problems in each state… which would eventually be solved by establishing religious tolerance (as long as no religious group challenged the power of the nation-state), whereby merchants of various church denominations could do business without the friction of religious disagreement.
What she doesn’t say in the book, I’ll wager, is that church at the local level was far more diverse – including within Catholicism – than what we read when we focus solely on those conflicts that became visible.
When I use the word “disenchantment” in this context, I would use it in the Weberian sense – that when we learned to objectify the world, it lost its magic, its enchantment, its sacredness; which opened the way for the kinds of ecologic devastation we see today.
But the Reformation was a symptom, along with disenchantment (and eventually Polanyi’s disembeddedness), not only of political intrigue and conflict that involved states and churches, but of certain key philosophical turns that were embraced with special enthusiasm by the rising merchant class and their new allies, natural scientists. I’m about to post a kind of long thing here on the history of witch persecutions, which shows that the witch persecutions were driven more than anything or anyone else by key figures of the Enlightenment (which was a self-consciously male movement).
Tuchman, like most establishment historians, is sound on her “facts” as far as that kind of thing can go, but her characterizations – “the Christian religion … Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and the after world was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is on that the modern world does not share, no matter how devote… The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle Ages” – are wrong.
Late Medieval Christians did not believe in something called the “life of the spirit,” nor did they place this imaginary and anachronistic construct into any schema. Christian belief (to this one I hold today) is that the Incarnation sanctified earthly being and the physical body. The belief in a separated spirit that ascends through various unearthly spheres was part of a heresy – gnosticism. That is why I say her theology is wrong. There was no rupture in a belief that was not predominant that created modernity (the supersessionist fallacy), but an increasing emphasis on making money and on making other people dependent on money (capitalism), which was justified by various philosophical constructs, which did not emerge outside the church but within it (ergo Illich’s claim that modernity is not anti-Christian, but that is was the outcome of the perversion of the Gospels – by the criminalization of sin and other wrong turns).
There was never a straight line that followed the church, went through some “rupture,” then emerged as freedom from religion. That is why I say her history is wrong. Her conclusion that this church rupture caused modernity apparently takes no account of the several more powerful historical currents that culminated in modernity, but instead posits one singular cause – the rupture of a principle that can be shown not to have been a principle, and the complete evasion of the complex history that is covered up by this kind of simplistic retrojection.
Yes, the church lost power, but it had been doing that already for quite some time; and the vacuum was not filled by the power of “actively living individuals,” which is just an ahistorical liberal shibboleth, but by the nation-state.
2 January 2013, 8:05 amMichael Anderson:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/01/china-great-famine-book-tombstone?CMP=EMCNEWEML1355
“…Tombstone meticulously demonstrates that the famine was not only vast, but manmade; and not only manmade but political, born of totalitarianism. Mao Zedong had vowed to build a communist paradise in China through sheer revolutionary zeal, collectivising farmland and creating massive communes at astonishing speed. In 1958 he sought to go further, launching the Great Leap Forward: a plan to modernise the entire Chinese economy so ambitious that it tipped over into insanity.
Many believe personal ambition played a crucial role. Not satisfied with being “the most powerful emperor who had ever ruled China”, Mao strove to snatch leadership of the international communist movement. If the Soviet Union believed it could catch up with the US in 15 years, he vowed, China could overtake Britain in production. His vicious attacks on other leaders who dared to voice concern cowed opposition. But, as Yang notes: “It’s a very complicated historical process, why China believed in Maoism and took this path. It wasn’t one person’s mistake but many people’s. It was a process.”
@ Stan:
Read bits and pieces of “The Death Of Nature” on the review site. An impression I got was that the creation of surplus value & accumulation of wealth, as well as the collaboration and sleeping together of government and commerce, known in some more modern instances as Fascism, is not something that is confined to our so-named Capitalist age, but seems to be a part of our historical DNA—-this Guardian article was timely in its connections, especially creating something from nothing…sheer fearful fantasy, backed with the barrel of a gun.
An example of (one) monstrous atrocity committed by a system and an ideology. I am waiting for a similar situation here.
This seems like a key component of “original sin”. ???
2 January 2013, 8:15 amStan:
The Death of Nature describes how the idea of the subject-object dichotomy appeared, and how nature got put into the latter category. I don’t recall Merchant concluding or even implying that surplus value (a term created for industrial production) as the primary means of wealth accumulation pre-dates the Enlightenment. As Polanyi shows in The Great Transformation, money-making as a means of securing a living or accumulating wealth has been around for thousands of years; but what marks capitalism in its emergence is the creation by states of so-called self-regulating markets, which then displaced other non-market economic practices – home production, redistributive economy, etc. It is not the market that created capitalism or modernity, but the ever more international market that dominates every aspect of life – which led to generalized commodification.
3 January 2013, 7:10 amHenry:
Earl of Portsmouth–Alternative to Death
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20890975/THE-EARL-OF-PORTSMOUTH-ALTERNATIVE-TO-DEATH-the-relationship-between-soil-family-and-community
3 January 2013, 8:49 pmDeAnander:
I can see that “Tombstone” is a book I should read and don’t really want to. It’s so hard to navigate one’s intellectual course between the frothing demonisation of the Left that set the tone for official discourse in the US since McCarthy, and the documented errors and crimes of actually-existing socialist regimes… I’m habituated and reflexive in defending Maoism from kneejerk rightwing trashing, and yet I suspect that Tombstone is not just a propaganda piece but a serious work of history. Sigh.
Anyway, words that struck me from an Amazon review: “… the immediate reason for starvation in the countryside was excessive procurement of foodstuffs, especially grain, to feed the urban population as it rapidly expanded with industrialisation, also for export to earn foreign currency to finance industrialisation.” Gee, sounds a whole lot like extractive colonial agriculture. Sounds a lot like globalisation. Like “free trade” and other neoliberal recipes. Sounds awfully familiar and awfully ironic. I wonder how many people worldwide have died as a result of colonial extraction of biomass to the imperial cores… I guess maybe not as many in quite such a short time — as Mao said at the time, he was determined to catch up with England.
Depressing.
4 January 2013, 12:44 amStan:
Grand schemes for grand visions make for grand catastrophes.
4 January 2013, 6:00 amMichael Anderson:
“Grand schemes”….and it really doesn’t matter which side of the ideological divide you are on.
4 January 2013, 1:02 pmDeAnander:
Well put. See also: Fukushima Dai-Ichi. BP oil platform in flames. Shell rig on the rocks.
Grand schemes for grand visions (of technocracy and profit yoked together)… grand catastrophes.
The old Greeks were right about the hubris thing.
4 January 2013, 9:07 pmDeAnander:
I want to float the idea, which is haunting me of late, that we (as a species, as a culture) have reached some kind of limit of human competence, of human capacity to deal with immensely complex and grandiose systems.
4 January 2013, 9:08 pmDeAnander:
Here’s my argument: as systems (empires and their management, legal systems, technologies) become ever more complex, ramified, and fragile, the percentage of the population able to understand and manipulate these systems becomes smaller and smaller (this capacity is probably some kind of freak talent like idiot-savantism or perfect pitch). The reliance placed on these systems, and the potentially catastrophic effects of their misfiring, become larger and larger. So the odds on catastrophe become greater and greater until they are nearly 100 pct. It is the Peter Principle writ large: that civilisations ramify and complicate and double down until they overreach not only their material resource base, but the reservoir of human competence and integrity needed to keep things together. Things fall apart: the centre cannot manage or surveil well enough, opportunities to game and corrupt the system multiply exponentially as complexity increases.
It is not a popular point of view. I don’t much like it myself. But is it not possible that there is a level of complexity at which there is no longer a sufficient number of humans in the population with the capacity to manage (let alone honestly) such complexity, and management and competence start to fail?
We see corruption and incompetence at all levels all around us, one scandal and one disaster after another. Perhaps we should blame each incompetent and corrupt individual; I’m OK with handing out some blame for individual bad decisions and bad conscience. But perhaps we should *also* blame the ratchet effect of the technomanagerial (and earlier the imperial) tendency, to ramify and complicate past the limits of what a functional and healthy human community (think Dunbar here) can understand and support? Are we not all — all of us — in over our heads?
4 January 2013, 9:15 pmStan:
Waaay over our heads.
This is actually a perfect analog, or extension, for Dunbar’s number, which places a limit the number of friends and other relations one can handle. Just as Illich describes two watersheds for technology or institutions, the first where it makes things better, and the second where it begins making things worse (goes iatrogenic) –
…there seems to be a period where control of systems is optimized (stage 1),
then another where self-organization is conceived of as control when it is actually self-organized inertia (and people who think they are in charge are not)(stage 2),
a series of revelatory events (like those you cited) that discredits the belief in control (when people think they can regain control, but they can’t)(stage 3);
and then a long dissolution stage as systems stutter into malfunction, disrepute, and irrelevance (stage 4).
I’ll suggest we are in late stage 3/early stage 4. Given that the periphery unravels first as the cores progressively adapt and turn to cannibalization, the people in the core are often the last to recognize that no one is in control.
(We must work in the garden. We must decommission nuke plants and guard their dangerous contents for thousands of years. I’m trying to reconcile these two imperatives.)
5 January 2013, 8:21 amDeAnander:
Was just talking to my podner this morning (we have recurring conversations about Doom, which I’m not sure is a good thing) about hegemonic belief systems; I was comparing hegemonic European Catholicism of the feudal era on (a Constantinian Christianity, strongly tied to systems of state power) with the cult of Progress post-Enlightenment. The belief system is so central to the culture that for the average person there is no “question of faith” — it’s the water you swim in, the air you breathe.
And I was thinking about the myth of technocratic Progress and how it has dethroned God and replaced the divine with the human, with a myth of human omnniscience and omnipotence. To say what we’ve just been saying here — that as a species we are in over our heads, that our artifacts and systems have become more complex than we can understand or control — is a modern heresy. To assert the fallibility of Homo Technologicus today is equivalent to questioning Papal infallibility in an earlier era of hegemonic belief. Just witness the disproportionate anger and bluster generated on most any discussion forum if one suggests that humility might be a better survival strategy than technocracy
Any takers?
5 January 2013, 8:00 pmStan:
Oh yeah. That is the history I am studying right now, in particular on the emergence of modernity from the Reformation; and I am learning a lot that I never knew, and a lot more that I may have vaguely suspected, and still a lot more that I didn’t know at all.
What Illich claims in the lovely book you gave me, The Rivers North of the Future, is that modernity is not the opposite of Christianity, but that is a perversion of it. That’s what makes it so difficult to critique or even understand outside the usual glib and supersessionist fantasy that Reason came along and overthrew Faith, and voila, modernity.
Historians of ideas and historians of perception (like Illich and his colleague, Barbara Duden) make this process intelligible, and help to see the critical turning points in that unpredictable transition. Illich points to the crimninalization of sin – and the juridical mindset that this introduced (in the face of the Gospels, where Jesus was engaged in a struggle against the legalism of the scribes and Pharisees); and the institutionalization of charity/hospitality. Here is a good review from the blog Sublunary Sublime.
The church was pulled into politics, at first only out of expediency, and never exercised real and direct political power except during the Crusades, in part because during the early Middle Ages, there were often places where no real governance reached, and the feudal system, such as it was, was still itself underdeveloped. The tension between political authority and the moral authority of the church was always there, and the various intrigues involved in this epoch were related to this instability. In the wake of the Crusades, the church as institution (which can be separated in many respects from local parishes which had formed) had become incredibly corrupt and venal, which sparked a lot of resistance within the church. The break caused by the Reformation began inside the church (Luther, for example, never set out to break from Rome); but with the introduction of Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura, the idea that the Bible could dictate the ways of a moral community without either scholastic authority or church tradition, variable readings of the scriptures led to very different interpretations, and the church fragmented into a hundred pieces. The predominant protestant churches as well as the Roman church each aligned themselves with local political authority, in which they adopted a kind of analog to Carole Pateman’s sexual contract – where men exchange protection for the obedience of a wife – when the church submitted to political-military authority for protection. The emerging nation-states were making laws, but the general stability of society was still predicated on shared values (Christian values) among the population, without which those fragile state could not have survived.
But capitalism/consumerism grew out of this milieu, and with them, a wholly new set of temptations, now seen simply as desires (with little account that desire has been consciously fabricated by capitalists). Here we are close to our mutual critique (De) of certain postmodernists – the apparent inability to see that hyperpluralism is itself confined to the material world, and that it is understood more than anything else by certain postmodernists as something akin to “consumer choice,” and “inalienable right.”
Not only did religion – which was the force that held society together prior to the law – become optional, when morality was moved from a moral community to the mind of an individual, the distinction between what is desired and what is desirable became detached from any tradition or practice at all. Sola scriptura had devolved into sola self. States increasingly had to deal with the inhering conflicts of increasing pluralism of thought; and would eventually displace now privatized religions-plural and reintegrate moral and political authority by making the nation-state itself the object of worship necessary for social cohesion. In a section I will do soon on the Civil War, there will be some stuff on how that war consolidated American nationalism as a civil religion (and a great book on this is Harry Stout’s “Upon the Altar of the Nation“).
6 January 2013, 7:05 amcabdriver:
I haven’t read Tombstone yet, but I did just read the New Yorker review of the book, which agrees with this conclusion:
““… the immediate reason for starvation in the countryside was excessive procurement of foodstuffs, especially grain, to feed the urban population as it rapidly expanded with industrialisation, also for export to earn foreign currency to finance industrialisation.”
Another important component that the review emphasized was the wholesale exaggeration of harvest statistics by bureaucratic functionaries who felt compelled to tell their superiors only what they wanted to hear- all the way up the line- which of course resulted in a massive corruption of the data. A classic example of the problems of coercive authoritarian political power hierarchies, per Karl Popper: when everyone feels compelled to lie to their superiors, the actual goal becomes covering ones own ass, instead of maximizing the harvest. Honest and accurate information feedback is replaced by lies that pile up to the point of systemic collapse. And no one wants to confront the mounting cognitive dissonance until the collapse assumes monumental proportions.
Meanwhile, the Maoist power structure itself was in metrics-worshipping mode: given a choice between believing the paper optimism on their charts vs. the real-life outcomes of the masses in the countryside keeling over in the streets and butchering frozen corpses for protein, they choose the reports. After all, the starvers are living out in the sticks; you never see those people anyway. And, well, who dares to tell the Great Helmsman that his finely tailored apparel is in fact nonexistent?
The Taoists offered their own tactfully parsed general critique of that sort of thing many centuries previously, of course. They also advocated moving off of the grid, so to speak.
6 January 2013, 8:54 pmcabdriver:
A brief tangential comment: I’d like to mention a book that I am reading currently- A Brief History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.
Whoa. If there’s such a thing as a modestly written tour de force, this book is it.
To sum it up, briefly: it’s a history of the advance of human knowledge that demonstrates how little we know- or even can know- about our own situation; and it’s an examination of what we’ve been able to learn about the material realm that vividly illustrates that, to a fantastic extent, it’s essentially phantasmal. No new age cloud-castle jargon required; Bryson manages to do this simply by assembling statistics about the scale and scope of, yes, nearly everything, along with essaying a few comparisons about the scale and scope of material nothingness. As best we can imagine it, which is a task so ludicrously beyond the human cognitive bandwidth that it is laugh-out-loud funny. Really. Woven through the pages of this book are dozens of dry numerical cosmic facts that amount to nothing less than Zen koans, any given one of which could be meditated on for weeks in the hope of achieving existential praxis.
Okay, waxing a little rhetorical there…but my main takeaway from this book so far is that far from being a treatise on the innate superiority of the historic advance of Rational Scientific Knowledge superceding any need or even utility for consideration of spiritual questions, it practically deamnds the activation of humility, a sense of wonder, an appreciation of beatific vision…all that, and more.
6 January 2013, 9:26 pmMichael Anderson:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=9405
Neoliberalizing Nature and Privatizing the Air
Patrick Bond: In 2013 bankers will increase their efforts to make money out of the climate crisis and put a dollar value on everything
7 January 2013, 2:05 pmMichael Anderson:
Kind of Orwellian….or, if you read the funnies, Dilbert-ian.
http://mgx.com/blogs/2013/01/06/coos-county-sciolist-society/
“…Sciolism is an uncommon word for an all too common attitude in Coos County. The word, according to Merriam Webster, defines “a superficial show of learning” and a sciolist is a person with a “smattering” knowledge who pretends to be an expert on some subject. Local sciolists can be easily identified by their vociferous use of dazzling buzz words coupled with an ability to speak authoritatively and with conviction while at the same time not actually saying anything or providing information not already obvious….”
7 January 2013, 2:44 pmdavin:
With regards to the liturgical character of consumerism, de Certeau discusses in a few places, the “celibate machine” (in one case, Duchamp’s “Bride stripped bare” and elsewhere as the television). In the first case, the machine depicts an absurd, mechanized sexuality, functioning, but separate from its other. Locked in a state of unconsummated desire, I think of it as the contemporary courtly lover, feverishly desiring, but only objectively, impersonally. Elsewhere, de Certeau uses this language to talk about the child in front of the tv. Contemporary readers often mistake this as a critique of broadcast media, but it is really a critique of consumerism…. of a machinic libidinous celibacy, always going, but never conneting. Deeper than this, and than courtly love, one might think of the Augustinian restlessness, the soul’s deep yearning for interpersonal communion…. and consider the nihilism involved in hijacking such spiritual intensity to sell unattainable things, the sterility that this brings to the social sphere.
9 January 2013, 9:54 pmStan:
Thanks Davin. Nice to see you hereabouts.
10 January 2013, 7:31 amKevin:
Hero or Murderer?
by Laurence M. Vance
Chris Kyle, a former Navy SEAL, and the U.S. military’s most lethal sniper, was deliberately and fatally shot recently by another veteran while on a gun range.
According to Star and Stripes, Kyle had been awarded two Silver Stars, five Bronze Stars with Valor, and two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals. He is officially credited with more than 150 kills during four tours in Iraq; he is unofficially credited with up to 255. Kyle won’t say just how many people he has killed.
“I don’t care about the medals,” Kyle told the Star-Telegram in a 2012 interview. “I didn’t do it for the money or the awards. I did it because I felt like it was something that needed to be done and it was honorable.”
I blogged about Kyle twice last year, once in January and once in February. I included this quote from him:
It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don’t regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn’t save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I’m not naive, and I don’t romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.
And also this excerpt from his book, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History:
Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy “savages.” There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there. People ask me all the time, “How many people have you killed?” My standard response is, “Does the answer make me less, or more, of a man?” The number is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives. Everyone I shot in Iraq was trying to harm Americans or Iraqis loyal to the new government.
Will Grigg also wrote about Kyle in 2012.
After Kyle’s death, I blogged that “You reap what you sow.” However, what really got apologists for the U.S. military in a tizzy was this tweet by Ron Paul: “Chris Kyle’s death seems to confirm that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’”
Conservatives, naturally, because they are in love with all things military, were quite upset. But others expressed their “concerns” as well.
Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer chastised Dr. Paul, calling his tweet “insane,” and calling Kyle “a modern, American war hero.”
Another veteran said that “Ron Paul has been reading too much Laurence Vance.”
Senator Rand Paul responded: “Chris Kyle was a hero like all Americans who don the uniform to defend our country. Our prayers are with his family during this tragic time.”
Some libertarians weren’t too happy with Paul’s “social media strategies, or basic skills of persuasion.”
Wannabe-libertarian Glenn Beck (“I’m becoming more and more Libertarian every day”) termed Paul’s statement “despicable,” “ugly,” and “offensive.”
But there is nothing honorable or heroic about anything Chris Kyle did in Iraq. He defended no American’s freedoms. He didn’t fight “over there” so no American would have to fight “over here.” Soldiers who kill for the state in unjust wars are murderers, not heroes. As Future of Freedom Foundation president and Army veteran Jacob Hornberger recently wrote: “Since the U.S. government was the aggressor in the war on Iraq, that means that no U.S. soldier had the moral authority to kill even one single Iraqi. Every single soldier who killed an Iraqi or who even participated in the enterprise was guilty of murder in a moral, religious, and spiritual sense.”
Here is a simple test to determine whether a soldier is a murderer or a hero. There are only fifteen questions and only one of two responses is possible so you should be able to keep track of your answers.
1. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and throws grenades at Americans. Hero or murderer?
2. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and incinerates Americans with a flamethrower. Hero or murderer?
3. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and blows up Americans with a land mine. Hero or murderer?
4. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and blasts Americans to kingdom come with a tank. Hero or murderer?
5. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and drops bombs on Americans. Hero or murderer?
6. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and cuts Americans in half with a machine gun. Hero or murderer?
7. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and launches missiles at Americans. Hero or murderer?
8. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and shoots Americans with a pistol. Hero or murderer?
9. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and maims Americans with mortar fire. Hero or murderer?
10. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and fires rocket propelled grenades at Americans. Hero or murderer?
11. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and shreds the flesh of Americans with cluster bombs. Hero or murderer?
12. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and burns Americans to a crisp with napalm. Hero or murderer?
13. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and destroys Americans with attack helicopters. Hero or murderer?
14. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States and kills Americans as a sniper. Hero or murderer?
15. A soldier from a country thousands of miles away travels to the United States via drone and performs targeted killings of Americans. Hero or murderer?
I don’t know of a single American who wouldn’t say, and say it fifteen times, that these foreign soldiers were murderers.
But why is it that when American soldiers do these things they are heroes but when foreign soldiers do them they are murderers?
Time for another test. Again, there are only fifteen questions and only one of two responses is possible so you should be able to keep track of your answers.
1. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they wore a government-issued uniform?
2. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they were just following orders?
3. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they joined the military to serve their country?
4. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they were patriotic?
5. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because their government said America needed a regime change?
6. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they joined the military because they couldn’t find a job?
7. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they were just obeying their commander in chief?
8. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they didn’t make their country’s foreign policy?
9. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they were drafted?
10. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because their government said there were communists in America?
11. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they joined the military because their father had been in the military?
12. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they just did what they were told?
13. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because their government told them they were fighting a defense war?
14. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because their politicians are the ones responsible for their actions?
15. Should we excuse foreign soldiers because they thought they were defending the freedoms of civilians in their country?
Then why do we excuse American soldiers for these same reasons?
U.S. foreign policy is aggressive, reckless, belligerent, and meddling. We don’t need a foreign policy that strikes a balance. We don’t need a foreign policy that we can afford. We don’t need a foreign policy that is like Reagan’s. We don’t need a foreign policy that is less interventionist. We need a wholesale repudiation of the past century of an evil and murderous U.S. foreign policy.
11 February 2013, 2:48 amHenry:
An Interview With Marshall Sahlins
The Destruction of Conscience in the National Academy of Sciences
by DAVID H. PRICE
Last Friday, esteemed University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins formally resigned from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the United States’ most prestigious scientific society.
Sahlins states that he resigned because of his “objections to the election of [Napoleon] Chagnon, and to the military research projects of the Academy.” Sahlins was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1991. He issued the below statement explaining his resignation:
“By the evidence of his own writings as well as the testimony of others, including Amazonian peoples and professional scholars of the region, Chagnon has done serious harm to the indigenous communities among whom he did research. At the same time, his “scientific” claims about human evolution and the genetic selection for male violence–as in the notorious study he published in 1988 in Science–have proven to be shallow and baseless, much to the discredit of the anthropological discipline. At best, his election to the NAS was a large moral and intellectual blunder on the part of members of the Academy. So much so that my own participation in the Academy has become an embarrassment.
Nor do I wish to be a party to the aid, comfort, and support the NAS is giving to social science research on improving the combat performance of the US military, given the toll that military has taken on the blood, treasure, and happiness of American people, and the suffering it has imposed on other peoples in the unnecessary wars of this century. I believe that the NAS, if it involves itself at all in related research, should be studying how to promote peace, not how to make war.”
The rest:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/26/the-destruction-of-conscience-in-national-academy-of-sciences/
26 February 2013, 9:13 pmMichael Anderson:
There was a confluence of articles for me a couple of days ago. One had to do with homeless people, one about long-term solitary confinement as a way of breaking down prisoners, one about an Iraq War vet’s decision to go into Hospice and end his life, and finishing Stan’s book “Hideous Dream”. All of them had in common the theme of human beings broken down, either intentionally by power elites or with the benign neglect & ignorance of the civilian population.
http://www.registerguard.com/web/news/sevendays/29536107-57/sleep-unhoused-street-alley-couple.html.csp
With all that unhoused face, how do we sleep?
Homeless members of our community are subject to danger and indignity, and we just pull up the covers
http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/kevin-rashid-johnson-and-oregons-isolation-torture-unit/
Rashid has spent most of his adult life in prison, and almost all of that time has been spent in various isolation units. This is a direct consequence of his actively resisting abuse from prison guards and their lackeys in the 1990s, and to his continued political writing and exposing conditions in America’s carceral nightmare ever since.
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/15045-one-of-the-first-iraq-veterans-to-publicly-oppose-war-will-die-for-our-sins
I flew to Kansas City last week to see Tomas Young. Young was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He is now receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary “Body of War.” He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him.
12 March 2013, 4:50 pmHenry:
Hugh Pickens writes
“After the Watergate scandal taught Richard Nixon the consequences of recording White House conversations, none of his successors has dared to do it. But Nixon wasn’t the first. He got the idea from his predecessor Lyndon Johnson, who felt there was an obligation to allow historians to eventually eavesdrop on his presidency. Now David Taylor reports on BBC that the latest set of declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls show that by the time of the Presidential election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence that Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks — or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had ‘blood on his hands’. It begins in the summer of 1968. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war that he knew would derail his campaign. Nixon therefore set up a clandestine back-channel to the South Vietnamese involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris. This was exactly what Nixon feared. Chennault was dispatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal. Meanwhile the FBI had bugged the ambassador’s phone and transcripts of Chennault’s calls were sent to the White House. Johnson was told by Defense Secretary Clark Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace. The president gave Humphrey enough information to sink his opponent but by then, a few days from the election, Humphrey had been told he had closed the gap with Nixon and would win the presidency so Humphrey decided it would be too disruptive to the country to accuse the Republicans of treason, if the Democrats were going to win anyway. In the end Nixon won by less than 1% of the popular vote, escalated the war into Laos and Cambodia with the loss of an additional 22,000 American lives, and finally settled for a peace agreement in 1973 that was within grasp in 1968.”
http://politics.slashdot.org/
22 March 2013, 2:29 amHenry:
Full article and audios of the above story at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21768668
22 March 2013, 2:38 am