tolstoy and me: a romance

Unfortunately, he is not so wrong, that king of Dahomy, in the interior of Africa, who said not long ago to an Englishman: God made this world for war: all the kingdoms, great and small, have practiced it at all time, although on different principles. – Joseph de Maistre.


Though I have long ago rid myself of an intellectual belief in a personal God (retaining a superstitious belief which it is beyond my power to annihilate, and that follows me like the black dog followed Faust), I have never let go of the old and new testaments – as is obvious from every sentence I write. The King James version leers out at you, like the gargoyles above the lintel of some decayed old manse, with the fug of mold and pee all around it. The prophets between them serve as the best school of politics I know – in particular, the denunciation of elite corruption, seen in the round – seen as the sum of a seemingly disparate set of episodes and habits. The new testament is an altogether iffier thing, and I can understand why Nietzsche thought it was a crime against literature to put the two testaments together. However, the crime, if there is one, is against a classical aesthetic that Nietzsche’s own writings joyfully transgress – in part, obviously, due to the influence of the Bible. Out of the Bible comes the Menippean tradition – rather than out of Menippus, for who the fuck reads fragments of Menippus? Jesus brings home the sugar, while the prophets, like Joni Mitchell’s mom, provide the deeper meaning

I was raised on the Bible, but it wasn’t until I achieved the estate of a man, or at least the age of drinkin’ and legal fuckin’, that I took up Tolstoy. And it is through Tolstoy, still, that I see the prophets or the gospel – as a ruthless means to dispel the cloud of unknowing that can clog up one’s sensorium. See with the eyes in my head and feel with the pads of my fingers those things which we are taught not to look at, though they make up the greater part of our life. Tolstoy had a sense of the shockingness of the gospel, and was willing to go to the line for that shock. That making strange that the Formalists so loved in Tolstoy, it comes in part from the Bible. I’ve been thinking about Tolstoy, lately, thinking that I should look up what he has to say about happiness. Of course, when you start reading Tolstoy, if you are a certain type of person, you can get intellectually drunk. He feeds the desire to slough off the dead life in one convulsive movement, no matter what the cost, like some fur coat in an overheated room. Your skin crawls to do it. That’s a desire that generally doesn’t surface; it stays below, covered, of course, by tv, porn, shopping, exhaustion, and staring in one’s cubicle at flickering screens for hours. The routines, the routines – you can’t leave them, or you are lost.

Tolstoy, then. This is one of the things he says in a letter he wrote to an American pacifist group. It is published in his works as the Letter on non-resistance:

Christian teaching does not lay down laws for everybody, and does not say to people, “You all, for fear of punishment, must obey such and such rules, and then you will all be happy’; but it explains to each individual his position in relation to the world, and lets him see what results, for him individually, inevitably flow from that relation. Christianity says to man 9and to each man separately) that his personal life can have no rational meaning if he counts it as belonging to himself, or as having for its aim worldly happiness for himself or for other people. This is so because the happiness he seeks is unattainable: (1) because, as all beings strive after worldly advantages, the gain of one is the loss of others, and it is most probable that each individual will incur much superfluous suffering in the course of his vain efforts to seize unattainable blessings; (2) because, even if a man gets worldly advantages, the more he obtains the less they satisfy him and the more he hankers after fresh ones; (3) and chiefly because the longer a man lives, the more inevitable become the approach of old age, sickness and death, destroying all possibility of worldly advantages.”

LI is blown away by the fact that Tolstoy, here, anticipates our argument about the positional economy and the creation of emotional customs in which happiness operates as both the norm and the motive – and our argument about the hedonic fallacy, the problem with projecting happiness, a mood, upon circumstances, which are not a mood and can’t feel a mood – and finally, our notion that the happiness culture ruthlessly liquidates the imitatio that distinguishes the ideals and figures of different ages, making all ages align to an ideal of youth, against which they are judged. That Tolstoy merges the positional economy with the market economy wholesale is something that I will let pass for the moment (or maybe not – the liberal moment arises from the realization that the industrial and market system do not inherently create such win-lose relationships), because I’d prefer to take this passage as a directional cue. Since I want to explore the deeply sick reactionary tradition of pessimism, giving it its due, I need to get out of the pessimistic framework for a second to assure my readers that I am not a revolutionary conservative, and that my protest against happiness triumphant is not going to end up leaving us dripping in a bunch of Heideggerian mush.

I am not dragging in Tolstoy here from some whim, mind you. I think Tolstoy represents a break with both the programmatic happiness culture in the 19th century and its sworn enemy, the pessimists. On first glance, one might think that you could just draw a line between Joseph de Maistre, through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Tolstoy, and from Tolstoy to your pick of the litter of twentieth century reactionaries. However, even a cursory reading of Tolstoy would disabuse you of this supposition. The line breaks at Tolstoy. The reason that the line breaks is Tolstoy’s absolute turn against violence. The pessimists - and here the dark promptings of de Maistre are the mole in the works – turned to violence not just as a temporary solution, but as a redemptive force. It was Isaiah Berlin who pointed this out in a famous essay on de Maistre. But don’t think LI has gone soft in the head about Isaiah Berlin. His notion is that de Maistre is the godfather of both left and right totalitarianism, and that is an exculpatory gesture that makes cold war liberalism just an innocent accomplice to the building of nuclear threat world. Don’t believe that at all. Let’s just say that liberalism is up to its ass in war culture, and many of its cold war spokesmen spent as much time denying this as they spend pimping for another war, another intervention. From all points of view, Tolstoy’s notion is considered eccentric, or mad, or unworkable, or an excuse to continue the old system.

All of which leads me to… Thou shalt not kill, the Tolstoy essay I’ll look at in my next post, I think.

the winner of the noose award is...

There has lately been a heated contest, among America’s most beloved pundits, for the coveted Strom Thurmond Cup for the Advancement of Racism. Andrew Sullivan, defending his sterling role in the Bell Curve controversy, was of course everybody’s favorite. It was a perfect racist double cross – Sullivan both advocated an obviously racist thesis about the inferiority of blacks and pretended that he was only making a space for an interesting scientific exploration. Sort of like Mission: fear of the Black Planet. Now, the way racism in the white establishment has to travel is through such second hand disguises. You can’t bring out the tar and nooses, like in the old days, although you can indignantly rebut the very idea of rednecks hanging nooses on trees as having anything to do with racism – it has to do with high spirited references to, uh, Westerns.

Such was the state of play until a dark horse, Slate’s own William Saletan, donned the sheets and went for straightforward racism of the good old fashioned type – even backing it up with references to Philip Rushton, which is a little like backing up a thesis about the predominance of Jews in Banking with a reference to Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Slate, being a piece of property of the Washington Post, is certainly surprising us. You would think the Post would be a little averse to becoming a forum for a White Citizens Council discussion – but you’d be wrong! Because Slate is brave… Slate is independent … Slate is contrarian. Thus, the fondness for the cutest, sweetest, butter doesn't melt in my mouth race baiting, but only of the very very very very scientific type, which could only be objected to by, in the immortal words of Saletan himself, liberal creationists! That’s telling us. It is all scientific and cut and dried, this white superiority to that African race.

So, Saletan wins this year’s noose. And I know what I hope he does with it, the punkass bastard.

the disappearance of osama bin laden and the my pet goat presidency

The time seems ripe for going over the way in which the Bush administration deliberately let Obama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan to manipulate an unnecessary and disastrous global war on terror. We’ve done this before, of course. But since we are now in the passenger seat, watching the consequences rush forward through the driver’s window – and since the usual shitheads, the O’Hanlon-Kagan crowd, are suggesting their usual shithead policy to deal with it (send U.S. soldiers that are apparently created by magic to occupy a Pakistan that is just aching and shaking to have its nukes taken away by a loving ally) – it is always a fun and fitting thing to marshal the facts and inferences. Where at one time malign, fucked up behavior on the part of the Bush administration might have seemed implausible, after seven incredible years of devious behaviors, second and third rate thinking, and a consistently juvenile policy of thoughtless aggression, wrapped in an impenetrable aura of entitlement and impunity, our theory seems all the stronger. Dismayingly, it has never made a dent in the blogo-chatter sphere.

The facts are pretty simple. Six years ago, the CIA, which had the most connection with opposition groups in Afghanistan, had succeeded in using a limited American force, in conjunction with a number of Afghani warlord-headed forces (given a misleading unity as the “Northern Alliance”), and supported by heavy air cover, to force the fall of Kabul (November 13) and drive Osama bin Laden’s paramilitary force into the mountainous region southeast of the capital city. The fall of Kabul was greeted as a turning point in the quick war by the press. By December 10, the Defense department was treating the defeat of the Taleban as a fait accompli, and issuing misleading press reports, like this one:

“Al Qaida fighters near Tora Bora are reported to be putting up stiff resistance as the operation to dislodge them from their mountain stronghold continues. U-S officials say the operation is making moderate progress as anti-Taleban forces on the ground push forward on several fronts. The American military is still not sure where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is, but officials believe they have a general idea.
In the southern part of the country, Afghanistan's new interim leader, Hamid Karzai, has settled a dispute between tribal chiefs over who will control Kandahar, which the Taleban surrendered Friday.

Under the agreement, Kandahar's pre-Taleban governor, Gul Agha, will resume his position. He will be assisted by Mullah Naqibullah, who accepted the Taleban's surrender.

Pentagon officials says U-S Marines are having success in preventing armed Taleban and al-Qaida fighters from fleeing southern Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan.”

In actuality, the U.S. marines were not having success in preventing armed Taleban and al Qaida fighters from going into neighboring Pakistan. And in actuality, the U.S. had a pretty good idea that Osama bin Laden was in the cave system in Tora Bora.
Peter Bergen has written several articles about Osama bin Laden’s “disappearing act” – which is more act, obviously, than disappearance. In a 2004 article about Tora Bora, he underlines two things: one is that Tora Bora was a pretty well known location to the Americans – it had been extensively used during the guerilla war financed by the U.S. in the eighties; and the other is that far from the Pentagon throwing in its U.S. marines en masse to capture Osama bin Laden, the Pentagon was being curiously stingy about resourcing the end game:

For some perspective on Jalalabad, I spoke with Dr. Muhammad Asif Qazizada, the deputy governor of Nangarhar, the province that contains Jalalabad. In his office, in a splendid blue-domed nineteenth-century building that was once the winter palace of Afghanistan's kings, Qazizada explained why Jalalabad and the nearby mountainous redoubt of Tora Bora were the perfect places for bin Laden to stage one of history's great disappearing acts. In his early twenties Qazizada worked as a medic in Tora Bora when it was an important base for the Afghan resistance to the Soviets. At the time, he recalled, Tora Bora was a warren of caves and fortifications defended by machine guns and anti-aircraft batteries. Because it offered easy access by foot to Parachinar, a region of Pakistan that juts like a parrot's beak into Afghanistan, it was also an ideal place from which to mount hit-and-run operations against the Soviets. Indeed, bin Laden fought his first battle against the Soviets, in 1987, at Jaji, an Afghan village that abuts Parachinar.

During the 1980s, Qazizada said, Tora Bora was the object of several Soviet offensives, one of them involving thousands of soldiers, dozens of helicopter gun ships, and several MiG fighter jets; so solid were the fortifications that the Soviet offensives were held off by a force of no more than 130 Afghans. For this reason, Qazizada believes, bin Laden chose the region as his hideout and escape route in November of 2001. When the two-week battle of Tora Bora took place shortly afterward, in December, it was fought largely by the forces of local Afghan commanders, supported by small numbers of U.S. Special Forces, who called in intense air strikes against al-Qaeda's positions. But Tora Bora's mountainous topography worked to bin Laden's advantage. "It was difficult for the Americans to attack," Qazizada says, "and there was a way to flee."

What happened next was seen but not seen by the U.S. press. I’ll quote myself, here, from my more extensive post about this, July 28,2006:

“Anyway, I recently came across Army Times reporter Sean Naylor’s account of the battle. According to Naylor, the incompetence factor (although he doesn’t put it so bluntly) can be laid at the feet of General “Kick me in the ass” Franks, who operated in our heroic Afghanistan war as a conduit for the senilities of Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld, of course, didn’t want the Afghanistan war to involve regular troops, on the theory that that is where the Russians went wrong. No, we’d used bombing and our super duper special forces – initial decisions that we are paying for today. Anyway, the American force that approached Tora Bora at the end of November, 2001 was extremely small, and depended on Afghan allies that were busy feuding with each other. According to Naylor, as the siege proceeded, the Air Force flew over the twenty mile passage between Tora Bora and Pakistan and recorded “hot spots” on their heat sensing equipment. Now, CENTCOM, unbelievably, had never considered the possibility that Al Qaeda’s forces could escape from Tora Bora – thus, there were no guards on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the hot spot data did provoke some consultation:

“The Generals in Kuwait recommend[ed] bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks [who, you will recall, bravely lead our heroic troops from a boat in Florida] and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds,” was Control Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on the video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending to their flocks at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible.”

Implausible is a kindly word. Let’s recall what was happening back at the scene in Tora Bora. This is from the NYT Magazine’s rather thorough article about it in 2005:

“The American bombardment of Tora Bora, which had been going on for a month, yielded to saturation airstrikes on Nov. 30 in anticipation of the ground war. Hundreds of civilians died that weekend, along with a number of Afghan fighters, according to Hajji Zaman, who had already dispatched tribal elders from the region to plead with bin Laden's commanders to abandon Tora Bora.” – Mary Ann Weaver, NYT, 9/11/05

Recall, also, that at the time Franks was displaying this untoward shepherdophilia, the U.S. was accepting payment from the Northern alliance in captives gathered at random – the camel driver, the Avon salesman, the cab driver – and subjecting them to the waterboarding, beatings, and sometimes murder that they obviously richly deserved.”

The military is still scratchin’ its head, apparently, as to when OBL ‘disappeared’. For years, the standard Bushie defense of what obviously happens when you saturation bomb an area in front of a force and leave its rear untouched by explosive and unguarded by any force was that OBL could be anywhere. Now, one of the things that we have been taught, over the past seven years, is to swallow verbiage that an average six year old could debunk, since that is usually the age, according to Piaget, in which the logical faculties kick in. The age in which the logical faculties kick in for war mongers is obviously much later - sixty-five? seventy-five? hard to put a number on it. Remember, though, that Piaget drop outs run this land of ours. And benefit enormously from their pseudo-incomprehension. It is the system of the big fix. And in that vein: we bet that not a single reporter will, at Bush’s next press conference, press the president on why the facts of the case seem to lead to the conclusion that the U.S. intentionally let OBL escape. And ask whether, now that Pakistan seems caught in an act we have all seen before, that was such a bright idea. In fact, Osama bin Laden is now not mentioned in our King’s present – it upsets his dainty mechanism.

On the other hand, we know that Osama bin Laden is not as dumb as the U.S. press. He made the logical conclusions long ago. And he has followed through on his end of the gentlemen’s agreement. Instead of attacking the U.S. on U.S. soil, again, he has aided in a series of attacks that tiptoe around U.S. soil. Attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Spain and the U.K. To attack, say, NYC again would be a dishonorable act against his host and protector, George Bush.

What a win win situation the two have produced for each other! The GWOT spawned a vast, unnecessary war that generated, in turn, an excuse for an unprecedented and pointless buildup of the military that in turn - oh the dominos! - generated unprecedented profits up and down the line for companies even only peripherally touched by the Santa Claus policy of the Pentagon; Bush sailed into a second term on the comical pretense that he had shown himself a strong leader (when, in fact, we have never had a modern president who is so paralyzed by panic in the face of critical situations - the man who kept reading My Pet Goat as he wondered who he was and why he was there on 9/11 is the same guy all the way through the past six years, a second rate golf pro’s mind stuffed into the body of another rich man’s prodigal son); and after an obvious down period following the disorganization of Al Qaeda in 2002, OBL reconstituted himself as a kingmaker in Pakistan, training the Taleban forces for edging into Afghanistan again, connected to a number of Islamicist groups who have ingratiated themselves with the Pakistani rural population in a number of ways, not least of which is a proto-social welfare system that is more efficient in rushing aid to, say, earthquake victims than the government itself. We are about to hit another harmonic convergence as Musharref increasingly looks like he is doing the dictator’s death spiral, a thing we have seen before. And we will continue to swallow lies and bullshit like troopers on our way to an ever more malformed relationship with the rest of the world.

How to be a left conservative in one easy lesson

In Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Man, she makes the following shrewd hit at Burke:

There appears to be such a mixture of real sensibility and fondly cherished romance in your composition that the present crisis carries you out of yourself; and since you could not be one of the grand movers, the next best thing that dazzled your imagination was to be a conspicuous opposer.

Wollstonecraft was echoing the suspicion that dogged Burke throughout his career – that he was an Irishman who valued cleverness over sound thinking, celebrity over sense. One of Wollstonecraft’s polemical moves is to crucify Burke’s Reflections on his early essay on the Sublime – an essay that moves from paradox to paradox. Her strategy makes for a few strange paradoxes itself, since basically she portrays Burke as a fashionable sentimentalist – a man of a certain kind of womanly cast – while she herself represents manly reason.

The Burkean paradox in the essay on the sublime out of which his system springs is to separate pain and pleasure as distinct qualities unconnected by the continuum of sensation by which they were defined by people like Hartley – and, in general, in the sensationalist tradition:

Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape, and bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a rose; or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain; or, having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose on the other hand, a man in the same state of indifference, to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a subtilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.

Such a view of pain and pleasure cannot, obviously, submit to calculus – on the contrary, it not only rejects the utilitarian calculus, but the whole idea of founding societies on ‘indexes of happiness’ in which pain and pleasure, quantified, can be matched against each other. In Burke’s view, it is simply impossible to even speak of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, since this mistakes the essence of happiness. This is what is behind the most famous passage in the Reflections on the Revolution in France:

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in — glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

Burke, of course, was writing before Smith’s economics had been joined to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The ‘delightful’ vision of the Queen refers us back to the essay on the sublime once again:

It is most certain that every species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation, from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation, and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight …”

Now, there is a sense in which this passage can be overemphasized. In the Great Transformation, Burke does not figure as an opponent of capitalism. He was, in fact, one of Smith’s partisans. It was quite in keeping with Burke’s principles that his loyalty would be at once to an enlightened system that restrained the government from granting monopolies and a feudal political order that largely depended on an ideological monopoly. What interests me, here, is the tension between, on the one side, the advent of an economic system which would profit the upper class for which Burke stood as an advocate, and, on the other side, the gross attitudinal changes that would subvert the legitimacy of the ancien regime order. Burke’s notions about pleasure and pain aren’t mere whims, even if they so appeared to Mary Wollstonecraft, but are fundamental to a philosophical anthropology which reacted against capitalism and socialism (considered to be of the same order), gradually gathering around itself a certain systemeticity, one of gestures and not logic (for it never fully lost its suspicion of systems), with a defense of irreducible human and social qualities that became anti-humanistic insofar as these qualities did not match up with the universal qualities projected by economics, physics, and psychology. This was the great contradiction that tugged at European societies up until 1945 – and when I say tugged, I might add bombed, battled, battered, slaughtered, imprisoned, colonized, and exhausted itself. The pessimism that I mean to hastily trace from Leopardi up to the conservative revolutionaries in Germany arose within this contentious space. Frankenstein’s creature is a casualty of this tension – the new man who comes into the world entirely without the unbought grace of life, though endowed with an irrepressible Lockean potential.

advertisement for myself

I don’t usually advertise my journalism stuff on this blog. But today I will. I started my new column on academic books in the Austin Statesman today. Check it out. The deal is that I will, as the spirit moves the editors at the paper, be doing these roundups of two university press books now and then. The column debuts with a close look at Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms (which, I must say, I deal with mighty handily – my five pages of objections to the book boiled down to a pretty succinct seven paragraph takedown) and James Simpson’s Burning to Read. In the future, I’m going to try to chose books for each column that are a little more related – although making these books rub elbows was fun.

So tell your Ma, tell your Pa, and tell the person you know who works for a university press or who wants to publish some academic book. I think this column might be a first for a regular newspaper. And if it goes well, I’ll become the godfather of the academic publishing world. Those on my right hand I will elevate to their thrones in heaven, those on my left hand I will damn eternally. Or something like that. My friend Dave has often remarked that it is a lucky thing for the world that I never gained either wealth or power, since I have a cruel and dictatorial soul – wrapped in the body of a beggar. True enough.

faustian pessimism

So far in my happiness work I’ve been digging at the roots of the happiness culture – connecting that culture with the apparent freeing up of the positional economy as the industrial and market system established itself – looking for the routes of dissemination that connected a new vocabulary and a conceptual structure with the vocabulary and conceptual structures of ordinary language and ordinary practices – etc. But I have intentionally not, up until now, looked at another vocabulary and conceptual structure which emerged after the French Revolution and flowed into twentieth century fascism. This was the reactionary attack on happiness. When, in Thomas Mann’s Observations of a Non-Political Man – the famous essay that made him seem to be one of the conservatives in the Weimar period – he attacks happiness, he is signaling a taking of sides, a polemical position, with a conventional reference. When, hearing of the murder of Luxemberg and Liebknecht, Mann, in his diary, called them stupid Berserkers and “Beglückern”(quoted in Lehnert and Vessell, 30) – he is pointing to the same complex of things that served as the object of De Maistre’s attack on democracy and the rights of man in the 1790s.

When Mann writes: “I hate politics and the belief in politics. I don’t believe in a formula for the antheap of humanity, the human beehive. I don’t believe in the democratic, social and universal republic. I don’t believe humanity is made for happiness, I don’t even believe that it wants happiness…” - there 's a certain merging of intelligence and extreme dumbness there. Dangerous currents were obviously in play. Spengler, whose Decline of the West was published soon after The Observations (and was carefully read by Mann), wrote:

"Socialism – in its highest sense, not in that of the street – is like everything Faustian an exclusive ideal, that owes its populism only to a complete misunderstanding, even under the masters of words, that is is, namely, quintessentially a thing of rights, and not duties, that it is a casting aside, rather than a sharpening, of the kantian imperative, a neglect of, rather than a tightening of the directing energy. This trivial superficial tendency to well being, “freedom”, humanity, the happiness of the greatest number contains only the negative of the faustian ethic, very much in opposition to classical Epicureanism, for which the blessed circumstance was really the center and sum of all ethics. (I 500)

We can look back and see where that line of thought, that socialism, led to. But perhaps this ‘looking back” is a bit of a delusion itself, as though we understood the inner line of fate of a culture due to the accident of being born after the historical chaser to the metaphysical cocktail – a chaser composed of concentration camps, bombs, mass graves and Autobahns. Julien Benda, in the Betrayal of the Clerks, written in 1927, and revised in 1946, understood how central the attack on happiness was to the ideology of order, and how much the ideology of order was parasitic upon the order of war:

« More generally, the scarecrow of the men of order is the modern claim of the people to happiness, the hope of the disappearacne of war being only one aspect of this. In which they [the men of order] find a strong support in the catholic church insofar as it, for theological reasons, condemns man’s hope to be happy in the world below. It is nevertheless curious to see that the church has vividly accentuated this condemnation since the coming of the democracies (against whom it throws the reproach, in particular, of forgetting original sin). On could cite in this sense catholic texts which, before this time, one would have difficulty finding the equivalents. One can’t deny, for instance, that the attitude of Joseph de Maistre, proclaiming that war is the will of god, and that in consequence the search for peace is impious, had never been taken by Bossuet or Fenelon, but that it is intimately tied to the apparition of democracy, that is to say, the claim of the people to be happy. A claim which, according to de Maistre, leads to insubordination. Napoléon said : Misery is the school of the good soldier. Certain social parties freely say that it is the school of the good citizen. »

Given this intellectual lineage, it is time for LI to confront this aspect of ‘faustian’ culture – especially after Frankenstein. So we will do some posts about pessimism in the next week or so.

people have the power...

...to redeem the work of fools.

LI, much like the New York Times, Fox News, and Vogue, has an international staff of dedicated journalists working 24/7. Our correspondent in France, Amie, recently sent a far ranging response to our post about Mailer as a philosopher/buffoon, which she has kindly agreed to let us publish.

The passage from Hippias Minor really is remarkable, the way it articulates power, knowledge, justice -- and the 'subject' (in the double sense) of 'true' discourse. Who is speaking? Socrates seems to occupy all the positions in turn in this dialogue's theater -- Homer, Achilles, Odysseus! In the end he cannot even quite believe or agree with or even quite know what he is saying himself. In Socratic terms, this would mean, at this juncture, he doesn't know himself! And ah, what of the silent narrator, Plato 'himself', seated in the wings, 'merely' observing, recording, reporting. Quite.

Another remarkable aspect of this passage from an early and 'minor' dialogue is that this matter of the character and the discourse of a polytropos pretty much relates to THE question for Plato -- that would necessitate the booting of the poets from the Republic -- regarding that pesky jobie so hard to pin down let alone resolve: mimesis.

Er, not to worry, I'm not about to launch into a 'commentary' on the Republic! I do beg your indulgence if I cannot help but relate these amazing passages to what is happening in this here Republic of France. You've likely heard of the strikes underway by the Unions and students, and can well imagine the punditry in response. The unions and students are portrayed as spoiled and self-centered, ungrateful of their privileges. "France" is told it can longer live in the 60s and 70s and must modernize, i.e., accept the generous reign of the 'free' market, the benevolent rule of the 'invisible hand'. (Thatcher and Reagan are the very models of modernity, don't ya know!)

As a pharmakon to the nauseating punditry, I've been reading Rimbaud's Saison and am struck again by the magnificent tenir le pas gagné. AR wanted to have done with canticles to Science and Magic, liars all! Alas, their hymns to the invisible hand still need to be fought, exposed, mocked. The fucking invisible hand has blood on it! The question for the 'seer' is to render it visible, legible in its violent mechanisms. One needs to have the 'eye' for it, as you say. And of course such an 'other' eye has its violence and madness...

Such hymns are not content to just praise their Holy Invisible Hand which smites public services and reduces them to rubble, which is for the public good - if only the infidels could see! The choir knows that its praise and good work is in vain if it does not also accomplish an abasement of public discourse, the effacement of social relations.

Sorry. I rant. But one last comment. I might be wrong, but I think the hymns to the invisible hand go hand in hand with what you call Happiness Triumphant. Unless I'm mistaken, the latter has ab-solute disconnect as a defining characteristic. It is like a perpetually and feverishly expanding bubble that can never be or have enough. A bubble that nothing can touch or burst, that knows nothing of the voluptuousness of a touch and of mortality, except in the form of fear and fascination, of revulsion and murder.
"Enough" is the title of a very beautiful short text by Beckett. Here is the last line:

Enough my old breasts feel his old hand.”

And for more on the strikes, and Sarkozy’s ‘strategy of the scapegoat’ – which consists of provoking the most vulnerable unions to strike in order to pick off, piecemeal, the whole system of unions, a la Thatcher – see many of the posts at the Betapolitique site.