Bite the hand that feeds you

Plato, when doing philosophy, often used a method familiar to any 17 year old with a passion for music: he would pull out a line from one of his favorite singers – Heraclitus, Democritus, Parmenides, et al. and finger it until it gave up its meaning. Unfortunately, the history of philosophy, from Heraclitus to Elvis Costello, shows that philosophers are less and less inclined to linger over these gnomic spasms that come in – as though fully formed in a whole other universe - from the outside, while they are more and more concerned about creating logically coherent structures in this world that they can argue for and against.

However, I, like Plato, think it is worthwhile pondering the weighty obscurities summoned like spirits in a great phrase. For instance – to return to Elvis Costello for a moment – it seems to me that the proper measure of that phrase in his song, Radio Radio, which goes: I want to bite the hand that feeds me – has not yet been attempted.

Of course, the naïve listener might think that this is pure resentment. The naïve listener instinctively takes the side of the hand, and is thus lost. However, the listener who has a larger sense of the dialectical peculiarity of the human situation would not so quickly go over to the hand’s side. Instead, this listener might consider that biting the hand that feeds you is, at least in some urgent cases, the  necessary prelude to understanding just what it is that the hand is feeding you. This is not only the truth of punk – it is the truth of satire, of film noir, of all kinds of insomnias, ideological and personal.

Biting the hand that feeds you is a lot more difficult than it might seem, especially when the hand is so much larger than you, and you are so dependent on the hand that you can barely stand without it.  

Reading Marx reading me

I resist the teleological interpretation of Marx – that all of Marx is there in every text, and if a text seems to say something that contradicts all-of-Marx, then we just have to either categorize Marx’s works to shunt it to the side – it was polemical! – or decide that it was an unfortunate collateral gesture. On the other hand, I’m not sure that my idea of Marx as constructing his all-of-Marx-ness in his text really purges the teleological impulse completely. Take the issue of the notebook, or the draft. We have these things. They were preserved. But the facile notion that Marx, too, having these things, goes back over them suffers both from lack of proof and automatic assumptions about research and writing that I have found, both in my personal experience and as an editor of others, to be false. I have found, instead, that one’s vital discoveries tend to fade and change and be renewed – that old intentions get submerged by new ones. Yet characteristic themes and inclinations will assert themselves, and the repressed will return.

This is why I favor the problem-based approach to reading monumental texts. For any theme or thesis carries with it both the problems it responds to and the new problems it creates. A problem is as much a token of memory as a thesis. Stripping a writer of his problems – translating his text into something like a list of answers such as you can find in the back of the math textbook - trivializes him.

3 versions of liberty

Last night, as I lay in bed and waited for sleep, like a good little insomniac, I thought about the dialectic of freedom. It didn’t put me to sleep. So, here I am, the next day, putting words to my sleep deprived thoughts.

In the Anglosphere, the problem of liberty has been narrowly framed by a tradition reaching from Benjamin Constant to Isaiah Berlin, in which the supreme contrast is between negative liberty and positive liberty. In Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin speaks of negative liberty in terms of compulsion:

“I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no human being interferes

with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a

man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by other persons from

doing what I could otherwise do,I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is

contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as

being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.”

Positive liberty, for Berlin, is the liberty implied by “being one’s own master.” It is, in other words, autonomy, and not simply being buffered from various coercive acts.

However, in philosophy, as in Looney Tunes, there is more than one way to skin a cat. And, in philosophy as in Looney Tunes, in the end the skinned cat will slink back with a whole new skin. It is the nature of the beast. Novalis said that God is a problem whose solution is another problem, which is a high falutin way of saying the same thing.

So instead of beginning with freedom as being, firstly, a matter of the human, let’s begin with the ancient notion of freedom, which from the Daoists to the Stoics consists of being free from property. The sage and the fool are the paragon figures of freedom – one, by an act of generosity, liberates himself by the simple but massive act of giving away his chains – and the other has no chains to impede him anyway, but exists as a conduit for God’s occasional flashes of lightning.

This idea of freedom derives its coloring from a world view that projects a society of slave or serfholders on the cosmic order. The generous act – the act of giving away – is a form of power, and it has a certain sacred backlighting.

Among the early moderns, those stalwart visionaries of a capitalism to be, the coordinates of freedom are reversed. It is here that Berlin’s two freedoms have there focus. The propertarian notion of liberty is that, precisely, the preservation of one’s property against encroachment is the essence of freedom. The libertarian tendency in the U.S. is just the psychopathological outgrowth of this revolution in values. For the ancients, of course, this would have been absurd – it is as if the slave imagined he were free by carefully protecting his chains against all comers.

The third idea of freedom I’d call the existential one – with a strong mixture of Marxism. It echoes the ancient wisdom, while absorbing the historical lesson of modernity. For the existentialist, like the Marxist, makes property subordinate to life – and in particular, to time. Marx’s approach to the labor embodied in properties – which sees the measure and dynamic of that labor in time – is a key insight here. Freedom can’t be divorced from the time one spends laboring. For the Marxist, and the existentialist, capitalism has, in essence, abolished the old aristocratic categories of the serf, the slave and the poor. The poor no longer exist as a social residue and charity case, but as an exploitable mass from which class power is extracted. In the Marxist vision, all labor exists to be routinized, mechanized, and made more efficient for capital. On the other side of the divide, however, stand the capitalist who are also pursuing routines. For a time, those routines are valorized to a hypertrophic extent: while the cashier is replaced by the automatic checkout machine, the CEO is attributed a mystical power of governance and leadership, instead of considered in terms of the regression to the mean that governs his sector. The latter then is paid enormously, while the former is paid less and less. The former’s time is, in other words, devalued.

Eventually, Marx expected all professions to become proletarianized. This hasn’t happened yet, as we have an elaborate and not well understood guild system that keeps the doctor and the dentist from falling victim to the mechanization instinct of capitalism. One can easily imagine that eventually, the artificial economic paradise carved out by these guilds will fall, too. At some point, pure capital, pure property, will reign supreme over a propertyless mass, which has paid with its time for its surroundings, but does not, when push comes to shove, own anything – rather, every thing, underneath a veil of middle class security, is actually rented.

Freedom, from the existentialist point of view, is the project of actually releasing human time from the system of property relations in which it is held captive. The existential version of freedom, then, is both utopian and highly dependent on the movement of the social towards the final crisis of the capitalist system.

Now, given these three ways of thinking about liberty, we can understand why the libertarian is such a fascinating figure for the liberal. It is as if they form a couple, with the libertarian being the trickster and the liberal being the straight man. Together, they represent the fool position. Meanwhile, we wait, we wait patiently, for the arrival of the sage.

Jesus's politics

Every oncet in a while, it is a good thing to think about Jesus.
I read a typically odious oped by that typically odious neo-con, Pascal Bruckner, in the Sunday Le Monde, and I thought of this post I wrote a while ago in my blog. This is the reason I like Jesus more than creepy Nouvelles Philosophes:

Jesus’ politics.

As the few who have actually read the Gospels know, Jesus said relatively little about sex. For him, it was a thing that occurred in the structure of families. Jesus didn’t much like families. He was only half joking when he said that he had no patience for him who didn’t hate his mother. He thought if you entered into a marriage, that was the end of it – no divorce for you. Of course, marriage, back in Jesus' day, wasn't the love match it is today, but an exchange between parents and clans in which the individuals exchanged had little say. So this is a hard saying to understand -- was it a way of warning men not to desert their wives and children?

In any case, he looked upon the marriage and family racket as hopelessly perverting -- there'd be no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the Kingdom of Heaven.

On the other hand, Jesus had numerous opinions about wealth. He unequivocally thought that the wealthy would not be in the kingdom of heaven. He thought that they were scanty in their sacrifices, and pushy in their lives, and in general a diabolical nuisance. Just getting wealthy, Jesus thought, probably entailed doing things that would send you to Hell. He had no hesitation about saying so. When a rich man came to him who had sacrificed much of his wealth, Jesus famously said that it was harder for the rich to get to heaven than for the camel to get through the eye of a needle. This saying is one that the most literal American fundamentalist suddenly gets all liberal about. But the meaning is made clear by what Jesus did before he made that comment – he clearly thought that the rich man hadn’t given enough. He hadn’t really destroyed his wealth.

While there is, currently, a great deal of kowtowing to a bunch of pissants who call themselves Christian in contemporary American culture, one can be confident that, if Jesus is within the ballpark of being right, most of the Christian right, from George Bush to Pat Robertson, are going straight to hell. It isn’t really even a close call. All are wealthy. All retain their wealth in the face of a world in which masses starve. All have let these people starve during the whole course of their lives. Some, such as Pat Robertson, have acquired their wealth through such bloody associations that they are obviously immoral. But Jesus really didn’t make a lot of distinctions here. Gays are never condemned by Jesus. The wealthy are, time and time again. As for the clergy that coddles the wealthy and themselves become rich, they are what Jesus called Whited Sepulcres, filthy on the inside. Among the certainly and for sure damned, one can spot some easy prey: the creators of the Left Behind series (sin against the holy ghost, wealth), Dr. James Dobson (wealth, refusal to visit those in prison, definitely on the left side of the Son when he judges the quick and the dead), Newt Gingrich (are you kidding me) and many others who are going to go where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. It is, of course, Limited Inc’s burden that, as an atheist, we are probably ending up spending the afterlife with a bunch of yahoo evangelical leaders. Just our luck. Many of these men are under the misapprehension that Jesus gives his unconditional approval to heterosexuality, confusing viagra with virtue. Jesus made know his contempt for the family whenever he got a chance; his contempt for the mere industriousness that leads to wealth (behold the lilies of the field), his contempt for profiteers on the poor (you have made my father’s house into a den of thieves), etc. As for the collectivity of Congress, they have as little chance of making it to heaven as a vampire bat has of winning best in show at your local kennel club. If there is one crowd that has beast written on their foreheads, it is this one. Hopeless, from the divine point of view.

However, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, hardly anybody believes Jesus anymore, especially Christians. Shaw said that Christians are, almost to a man, followers of Barabbas: worshippers of ostentatious power, self-pitying about their cruelties, absolutely unable to sympathize with those lower than them if they aren’t allowed, at the same time, to strip those lower than them of all dignity – in other words, cannibals and freaks and the usual good booboisie you see buying steaks in the grocery store. Shaw thought certain of Jesus’ communistic ideas might work in today’s society. We don’t. That is, as a majoritarian stance, what Jesus taught leads to chaos and cruelty. The Grand Inquisitor is right about that. But as a minority stance, here and there, it is an experiment well worth doing.

The Kantian baby

The Kantian baby – imagine that there is such a thing for a moment – exemplifies corporeally the Critique of Pure Reason. Reason is, as anyone who has hung around babies knows, the mouth, which anything can enter that the baby can reach and pull. It obeys the purely formal law of its size.  If it were big enough, the baby would put a car, a street, its parents, the house, or the sky in it. But it isn’t that big, so the baby puts in, say, the tip of the tail of the cloth green cat, or – if the parent isn’t wary – the circular wooden bead, or the rounded end of the rectangular parental pinky. It is here that synthetic aprioris are born, and they will proceed to dance like fairies around the baby’s cradle, in a fusion of now and shape, lulling him to sleep. But as we have already mentioned, the supreme bliss of reason depends on reaching and pulling. On, in fact, picking – that supreme tool of understanding, analysis, which resides in the hand. Picking and grasping – this is what the hand does (English, in its genius, even makes grasping synonymous with understanding. Henry James’ characters may look like Edwardian adults, but they, like babies, are always “grasping” mentally; it is a word that he loves, as though the hand’s warmth were needed to fight through the verbal fog which his characters so often pull over themselves). Admittedly, the picking is hesitant at first, and what the eye and body seem to aim at – here’s the pacifier, here’s the squeaky toy – is often not what the hand lands on. Instead, the hand frankly stutters there as it is in the full force of its arc towards the object, and instead what do we have? We have the edge of the blanket, we have a pen, we have the ear of the green frog doll (or is it a frog? With that cat’s ear?). But gradually the hand and the incredibly delicate fingers get better at the whole hand eye coordination thing, and then we pick – we pick the little chain of links of the earring or necklace, we pick and grasp and pull the handle of the coffee cup (sending it on a fatal, romantic dive towards its one true love, the keyboard of your computer). These are picked out of the continuum, grasped, pulled. Oh insatiable fingers!

Of course, reason rules – the fingers pick in order to raise the thing picked to the mouth, which opens in all innocence, naively, hopefully. Reason is a dreamer. But as we  look back, we are amazed at all the picking we’ve done, our miner’s work on the continuum. The continuum, however, is vast, our equipment is disproportionate to the world it is set loose in, and in the end we have picked up so few things, even metaphorically, that we will probably die longing, our fingers wrapped about one more shape – a plastic tube, the fringe of a polyester/cotton coverlet. Still, I admire that instinct for picking and grasping. I honor it here, as much as I can, in these sentences.

cultural relativism and me

I think of myself as a cultural relativist, but I am constantly irritated at my fellow culture relativists and the debate they wage with their antipodes, the various kinds of moral absolutists. I have a list of complaints, but I will hold back the full thesis, and content myself with merely two of them.

1.       The wrong enemy. There has been a long and, to my mind, futile hunt and peck debate between the relativists and the absolutists concerning the universality of this or that custom or norm. Relativists like to point to things like the fact that the pharaohs of Egypt married their sisters, and absolutists like to point to the universality of the incest taboo. This debate was waged to an extent in the ancient world, but in modernity, it was the discovery of America, and the difference of the Americans, that kickstarted it in the seventeenth century. Seventeenth century writers loved to list the odd beliefs and customs they found among the Americans, and from these lists sprang the science of anthropology. From these lists sprang, as well, modern historiography, as the discovery of American difference led to a re-reading of the classics, and the discovery that the ancients were not the civilization that the European humanists took them to be. Lafitau, remarking that the beliefs of the Iroquois reminded him of nothing so much as the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, was on to something. That something was: European civilization was, at its root, un-European. In fact, looking around at the vast majority of the European population (which consisted of peasants) and the folk beliefs that flourished in villages and courts, Voltaire joked that the territory of the savages began twenty five miles from Paris. He was exaggerating – savages inhabited the streets of Paris and the halls of Versailles as well. It was not just the Nahuatl who believed men could change into beasts – this was a belief solidly upheld in court in Rouen in the 1690s.

However, cultural relativism is not the thesis that there is no universal norm. It is the thesis that there is no society that upholds and follows an absolute norm. In fact, cultural relativism gets its strength from the universality of normative structures. What the relativist observes is that those structures are not coherent, but conditioned, hinged, in a double bind one with the other. Characteristically, a norm binding on individual members of a collective does not bind a collective itself, which may well demand that the individual make an exception of every norm in the service of the collective. On the blog, Crooked Timber, a few weeks ago, there was a discussion of universal norms stemming from a post in which one of the Crooked Timber writers proposed that no society condones torturing to death infants for pleasure. This was a curiously conditional absolute – why was the “for pleasure” included? Because of course the ruling class in collectives routinely demand that the members of the collective go to war with other collectives, and in so doing they demand that children be tortured to death – as they were in Hamburg and Hiroshima, in Stalingrad and Falluja, for instance. The justification for bombing and warfare is, however, serious – seriousness is the real legitimating foundation of the collective’s norms. Here, of course, in modern liberal republics, we run into a little logical problem, in as much as the collective is supposedly ruled to the end of allowing people to pursue their happiness – and it seems that a roundabout case could be made that babies are then tortured to death for the pleasure of the collective. But there is no real need to make that  torturous case about torture – all the relativist claims is that the structure of excuses, of the temporary suspension of norms as a norm, is universal in all collectives. There are, then, no morally homogenous collectives. All collectives have hinged norms, structures that code other structures and, in effect, annul the absolute condemnations that run through those structures.

2.       Judge not that ye be not judged. There is, in liberal societies in which cultural relativism has flourished, a tendency to say that the moral of cultural relativism is that you cannot judge other cultures. This idea quickly leads to the idea that cultural relativists have to accept Nazis, slaveholders, etc.

Once again, this confuses the cultural relativist argument. In fact, the conflicting structures that the relativist observes are all based on judgment. A collective holds to its identity by judging, differentiating itself. The relativist does not conclude from this that we need another absolute at another level, a trans-cultural one – for there is nothing in that other level which would “solve” the problem of hinged structures. Far from claiming that the individual can’t judge other individual in other cultures, the relativist claims that the individual can’t help judging other individuals in other cultures. A collective will use the idea of absolutes to create exceptions for absolutes – this is how social logic differs from logic.

Interestingly, absolutes are socially overdetermined. The absolute can introduce a vital, unstructuring moment into the collective. From Socrates to Rousseau, from Jesus to Mohammed, there arise representatives of the popular perception that the permanent state of exception claimed by the ruling class of the collective is wrong. These figures stage their protest on behalf of the absolute, and thereby create a kind of anti-social community – a sort of expropriation of the charisma of the powerful. In this moment of protest, a dream emerges – the dream of a morally homogenous, non-hierarchical community. This is one of the great prods to the softening and humanizing of culture. As a relativist, paradoxically, I am all for these instances of unstructuring, as long as they are not completely successful. For the dream of the morally homogeneous community, when it isn’t futile, quickly turns monstrous, as it purges those who threaten that homogeneity. Most of the time, the unstructuring moment succeeds not by converting the collective, but by weakening its inhumanity. The pacifist, the civil rights advocate, the seeker after truth –  I have tremendous respect for these righteous figures, who have modified the horror of life. Relativism, by contrast, has spawned only one doubtful prophet – Nietzsche. On the other hand, the recherché de l’absolu, which has spawned thousands of prophets, has spawned no wits – save Chesterton, who is an odd case. The wits largely fall into the relativists camp.

Liberaliness

Does nobody remember the election of 2010? The GOP did not run on cutting medicare - they ran on restoring the cuts Obama proposed. And running to the left of Obama, they smashed the dems, who had their hands tied behind them by the clueless prez.

With the new budger, O. has once again enacted the same strategy. As a political strategy, his idea seems to be that trading the votes of the Washington Post op ed crew (they will love the cuts to gross entitlements) for the votes of the majority of Americans (who hate the cuts to the entitlements they have earned over a generation of wage stagnation and peculation by Wall Street) is an excellent idea. It isn't that the Dem voters will vote for Republicans - they just wont vote. This is an easy dynamic to see. As a farcical sideshow, this disaster will be accompanied, in the comments sections of liberal blogs, with Dem operatives or Obama fans adopting strident and bullying tones towards those who find the strategy politically pathetic and economically noxious, to be followed by the same shills explaining the Dem losses of 2014 on "holier than thou" leftists and liberals. Such are the limits of politics in the era of the mock demoracy, as the plutocratic parties battle for the margins.
One cannot, then, see this from the point of view of seerious politics. There is no serious politics going on here - the viewpoint of the majority is going to be ignored by whoever they elect. So one has to view it as a form of entertainment, comedy on a low level. And of course the balony factory, aka the establishment press, will provide the stage directions for this farce in their own inimitable language, half high school cheerleader, half dimwit. Thus, the NYT today, in Jackie Calmes thumbsucker, presented us with this alice in wonderland analysis:

"The president’s views put him at the head of a small but growing faction of liberals and moderate Democrats who began arguing several years ago that unless the party agrees to changes in the entitlement benefit programs — which are growing unsustainably as baby boomers age and medical prices rise — the programs’ costs will overwhelm all other domestic spending to help the poor, the working class and children.

“The math on entitlements is just not sustainable,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, one of the few Democrats to unequivocally endorse Mr. Obama’s budget. “And if you’re not finding ways to reform, where do you squeeze? Well, then you squeeze early-childhood programs, you squeeze Head Start, you squeeze education and veterans.”

Ah, the small but growing portion of liberals who think that unsustainable medical costs are best met by - throwinhg those costs back on the individual! Its a whole new kind of liberalism, a sort of truthiness liberalism, which simply uses a new language - for instance, it used to be that the justification for entitlements is that certain costs can't be sustained by the individual household, but now, through liberaliness, we simply and easily reverse that notion and hope nobody notices that we are speaking nonsense. The NYT, always looking for the cutting edge and always finding it a couple years after it has become the boring norm, is charmed by the fact that it is small but growing - which is usually what the doctor says before he recommends surgery. Alas, the surgery that will be performed will separate the small but growing plutocrat friendly party - defending entitlements by eviscerating them - from the large but powerless body that cannot find any defenders among a political class that has merged entirely with the gated community crowd. It is the politics of the tumor by the tumor and for the tumor.

I can't wait for the Media to find the new Dem version of Paul Ryan to represent this small but growing liberaliness faction: Obama's heir!

In one way, this doesn't come as a surprise: Obama did say, in his first debate with Romney, that he and the governor agreed completely on social security. But I was caught up in the small delusion that the election of more liberal Dems to the senate would stifle Obama's liberaliness. It didn't.