Baltimore

It seems to jerk a certain chain with the right whenever it is discovered that the cop who kills or maims the black person is black too. The point made is that this is, then, a priori not a racist act.

There is a larger point here, a truth that is in real conflict with the conservative vision of America – for surely it is not only a racist act. The militarization of the police, and their elbow room to do illegal acts and acts of brutality, is not simply racist. It is also the effect of the way in which domestic affairs in America, since the Nixon era, have been framed in military terms – for instance, the War on Crime. It is also the effect of class. The overwhelming number of victims of police brutality are in the bottom of the income and wealth brackets. And the African-American population has long been on the bottom of the pole, statistically, with regard to wealth and income. It is a fact that nobody cares about in the United States that the Great Recession struck black households harder than anybody else. Pew Research had this to say in 2014:

“The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Likewise, the wealth of white households is now more than 10 times the wealth of Hispanic households, compared with nine times the wealth in 2010.

The current gap between blacks and whites has reached its highest point since 1989, when whites had 17 times the wealth of black households. The current white-to-Hispanic wealth ratio has reached a level not seen since 2001.”

1989 – twenty years of painful progress wiped out. Do we want to talk about this every day? No,  we don’t want to talk about this every day.  We will not talk about this on a boat, we will not talk about this with a goat, we will not talk about this on the tv news and we sure as hell won’t talk about this in the halls of Congress.

Clearing out the underbrush, then, we still have the fact that three of the cops charged in Freddie Gray’s death are black.

Here, I think we should turn to the indispensible Charlotte Linde and her ethnographic study of an insurance company. In explaining how the insurance company tells a story about itself, Linde made the point that the persistance of the company depends upon “drafting” people into that story: this she called  “narrative induction.”

 The title of her article is:  “The acquisition of a speaker by a story: how history becomes memory and identity.”

Narrative induction properly locates story as part of a process of initiation (which, being a “native” thing, or occult, failed to qualify for the verbal place held by identify with). Linde, in this paper, is obviously moving from her concern with stories people tell about themselves – the point of which is to say something significant about the self, and not the world – to stories people tell about the world. Those stories often are about experiences not one’s own. They are non-participant narratives.

Linde divides the NPN process– as she calls it – into three bits: how a person comes to take on someone else’s story; how a person comes to tell their own story in a way shaped by the stories of others; and how that story is heard by others as an instance of a normative pattern.

This is all about how the police work. Police departments lean on their members to become police, to identify as police, to see their enemies as the police define their enemies, to define their friends as the police define their friend. As Linde points out, most of the work on this kind of thing has been done in religious studies. Specifically, the study of metanoia, conversion stories. But there’s metanoia and then there’s metanoia. There’s St. Paul on the way to Damascas, and there’s Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, on the way to the relative wealth of a Toyota Car Dealership, owned by his father-in-law. That’s why Linde, not having access to St. Paul, opted to study the trainees of a major American insurance company in the Midwest. Linde is interested in class issues. In particular, stories of occupational choice. In her Life Stories book, she presented some evidence that professionals present their occupational choice stories in terms of some vocation or calling, while working class speakers present it, more often, in terms of accident or need for money. Philosophy professors rarely will say, for instance, well, I needed a steady paycheck, looked at the job security of tenure, loved the idea of travel and vacation time, so I went into philosophy. They will give a story rooted in their view of themselves as emotional/cognitive critters.

Police work, in America, has often served as a transitional profession, over generations, from working class to white collar. Since police unions successfully raised the benefits and pay of police forces in the eighties in cities around the country, the benefits are sometimes comparable to that of a middle manager. However, it is very much the case that, like philosophy professors, many a cop will say that they always wanted to be a cop – not that, all things considered, driving a truck paid less than being a policeman. There’s a strong vocational charisma, here.  Blue doesn’t erase black and white, but the kind of white that the police represent – that formed the police consciousness, so to speak – is a legacy that the integration of police departments has not negated – merely modified.

The right has never recognized racism as a structure – in the same way that it has refused to recognize class as a structure. Alas, the latter has now become mainstream: as the countervailing power of labor unions  has dwindled, there is little sense, even among supposedly lefty academics, of class or for class. There’s been a large blindness about the class based imaginary that makes it hard to understand class conflict when it rears back and punches you in the face. In Freddy Gray’s case, you have a trifecta of racism, class conflict, and the militarizaton – or should I call it the death squadization? – of the cops.  

goddamn it: we exist!

There are sounds that torture our animal souls beyond endurance, as is discovered by children the first time they scratch a blackboard. The car alarm, untended, in the city night makes the surrounding apartment dwellers dream of firearms and blasting not only the car, but the owner. Then there is the classic crying and screaming of the baby or toddler on the plane flight. It is an amazing fact of natural history that the lungs and vocal chords, otherwise so undeveloped, could raise such mature decibels of sound, and for so long! I once shared a trans-atlantic flight with a two year old girl, six or seven row back, who was evidently sick, in some kind of pain, and able to scream ceaselessly for about two hours. Her parents couldn’t calm her. I would put that girl, at that moment, up against the lead singer of Metallica for sheer volume any time. Yet, being a parent myself, I had no appreciation for the guy in back of us who kept suggesting that she should be stuffed in the bathroom – I dreamed of stuffing him in the bathroom, dousing his head in that weird aluminum vortex of a Boeing toilet, flushing him into the ocean.  

However, our animal nature’s are as keenly attuned – or at least I find mine is, and I don’t think this is special with me – with a perhaps evolutionarily attuned sense for another variety of sound, one that gives us a rare and complex pleasure…

A story: every week day, around 5:10 p.m., I walk the three blocks to the Y pre-school where we keep Adam.  I always leave in a bit of a disgruntled state, since I suddenly realize, around 4:30, that I have a ton of things to do that I now don’t have time to do. But as I approach the school, I always have this moment – not the best moment of the day, not every day, but always in my top five – which comes about simply because I stroll past the wall of the outside playground that abuts the sidewalk. I can always hear inside that wall the sounds of the children, who  I know are strewn about the slides, the plastic car, the plastic castle, the swings, the area in front of the small basketball hoop, and in circles around the teachers, and who are chirupping, screaming, talking, shrieking with joy (their running in the wobble of the voice), laughing and weeping over some crisis. The whole din always seems to touch some spring within me: I feel an affective state we do not have a noun for. It is something like hope without an object.

Kant, of course, is the great without-an-object man. For Kant, beauty was disinterested. Art of any type is fundamentally purposive but without a purpose, a use. We have lost our way if we are thinking of what use we can put beauty too – how we can photoshop it, for instance, to sell a product. We have lost our way to what the aesthetic is about. Well, we can dicker with Kant here – in fact, all of our culture dickers with Kant here – but the feeling of hope I am describing is something like this purposiveness without a purpose. I hope, but I don’t hope for the future. There’s no moral conclusion to my hope, like  hope that we will all someday hold hands and sing. It is a feeling of great expectation without thinking that anything much is going to happen. I know that I’ll pick up Adam, get his stuff, the empties from lunch, go to the store with him, go home. The end, as Adam says, turning the last page of a picture book. These things do overlap, perhaps, my feeling – if I Venn diagramed it out, there’d be the minor expectation of the routine with Adam overlapping the hope without an object, surely.

But that unoverlapped part, it seems to me that the hope is just this: that we exist.

Goddamn it. We exist.

competition three

Sorry, I am under the gun on other projects. Writing this in fragments

If I take a turn and throw a dart at a dartboard and then someone else takes a turn and throws a dart at the dartboard, we don’t say that the darts competed – we say that the players competed. Competition, here, is rooted in games played by humans – its old, situated meaning. It is not projected onto nature, or that part of nature which is constituted by an artifact of  a plastc stick  with a metal point at one end and little fins on the other end. Nor would we say that the dartboard competed with the darts.

Yet competition, as we all know, has long overflowed the agone. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the game has long been recognized as a prototype for other, “serious” kinds of social activity.

We automatically associate competition in nature with Darwinian evolution. That model of competition, as Marx saw, owes a lot to the classical economists. Marx meant this as a criticism of the whole theory of Darwinism, as though a model taken from a temporary form of social practice was inherently falsifying when applied to natural science.  Engels, more sympathetic to Darwin, tried the same trick by applying dialectical materialism to natural history, although without really delivering himself of some serious, systematic book. Marx of course forgot his own huge debt to the  classical economists as wel, which showed, at the very least, that a systematic reference is not an act of allegiance or an unconscious surrender to ideology. In any case, Marx’s notion has been taken up by intellectual historians to the point where it has become a truism – as Stephen Jay Gould put it, “Darwin grafted Adam Smith onto nature”. However, as Trevor Pearce has tried to show, the idea of competition in nature between “species” is backgrounded by more than the Scots philosophers. He points out that the idea of competition relies on the larger notion implied in Darwin’s famous phrase in the  Origins: “all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature.”  It is within this framework that we speak of the “competition” of, say, the quagga mussel  which has “invaded” the Great Lakes econsystem and outcompeted another invasive, the tiger mussel.  

Pearce, while acknowledging the influence of Malthus on Darwin, claims that not enough is made of the influence of other natural philosophers, and in particular, Linnaeus. When Linnaeus wrote of the oeconomy of nature, he did not have in mind incipient capitalism. He had in mind a notion that was connected to the great chain of being and the metaphor of the household – and ultimately, of the court. 

monsters

The sleep of reason isn’t the only thing that gives birth to monsters. Language does, too.

Last week, Adam and I were walking to the store when we passed by a big office building on Wiltshire. The building presented a big window to the street, through which one could see a very empty atrium. I’ve passed by this building hundreds of times without thinking much about it. Adam posed his standard question to me – what’s that, Daddy? I said it was an office building. He seemed a little disturbed that it looked empty, so I assured him that somebody worked there. He repeated my words. It amused me that he said somebody like it was somebody’s name.

The next day he mentioned somebody again, telling me that somebody is in his office. We were walking home. I said that somebody is in the car and somebody is in the house we passed too. Daddy. Funny daddy.

Little did I know that somebody seemed ominous to Adam. And his multiplication was a bit terrifying. Gradually,  I understood, but not before somebody had assumed terrible proportions. Now when it gets dark, Adam talks about somebody being in his office. This morning, as we walked out the door and went to the left – our standard route to Adam’s school – Adam broke into a run, and kept looking backwards.  I caught up with him, gave him the standard adult rap about don’t ever do that, and he told me that he’d seen somebody.

Somebody haunts us. So, actually, does Mr. Nobody, from the Goodnight Moon book. These monsters come straight out of our language, which has dreamt them up. I’m going to have to figure out how to ratchet down the fear of somebody.

the island of laputa - competition 2

It is said that Chryssipus the Stoic held that there were, for all problems, true solutions. But he also held that at times, we can’t see them – and those times called for a morally disciplined silence. It is in this spirit he approached the paradox of the heap – the sorites. The paradox is as follows: if we construct a heap from seeds, say, we can, by adding seeds successively, reach a point where we might say that we have a heap, and identify that with the number of seeds we have used – say, 200. And yet, when we subtract one seed, we are disinclined to say that we no longer have a heap. Given that fact, we might play the game by claiming that we haven’t reached a heap no matter how many seeds we use in order to avoid identifying the heap with a certain number of seeds – but then, paradoxically, we will never achieve a heap. In fact, we don’t really seem to be able to quantify a thing like a heap; neither do we want to say that the heap is a quality when clearly it can be analyzed into its separate parts. To borrow a term from contemporary logic,  there is no “heapmaker” – so how can there be a heap? Chryssipus, according to Sextus Empiricus, recommended that “when the Sorites is being propounded one should, while the argument is proceeding, stop and suspend judgement to avoid falling into absurdity.”  Analytic philosophers, such as Mario Magnucci, who wrote a seminal paper on the stoic response to the sorites, have attempted to incorporate Chryssipus’s response into standard Western logic. To me, the stoic response is closer to the notion of Mu in Rinzai Zen. The famous Mu Koan goes like this: a disciple of Zhaozhou, a Chinese zen master, asked him if a dog has the Buddha nature. Zhaouzhou answered Wu – Mu in Japanese – which means no, empty, vacant, and – it is said – applies in different ways to the question: that there is no dog, that there is no Buddha nature, that the dog does not have Buddha nature, and so on. In other words, the answer is meant to break the mental habit of thinking that the way of assembly – where distinct parts are put together – and the way of disassembly, where distinct parts are separated, are grounded in the real. Indetermination is neither a fact of the real nor not a fact of the real.

Too often, disputes among historians about the rise or decline of some historical property fail to acknowledge that rise and fall are sorites. Hence, arguments become very vicious about what the risemakers or the fall-makers are, and when they occur. Accepting that historical narratives have a sorites paradox at their center helps us clarify the half-fictitious natur e of the business. Even if one doesn’t stop and fall silent, like Chryssipus, one has to accept the possibility that finally, withdrawal is the correct response.

Which is an elaborate detour on the way to approaching the vexed question of the “rise of capitalism” in Western Europe, which basically means England and France, in the eighteenth century.  Of course,Great Britain and France were mainly agricultural –as was the US until 1900. But the question is not just about the rise of industrialism, but the monetarization of agriculture and the emergence of a market system – and the emergence of a “spirit” of capitalism.

That spirit has been poked and probed since, well, the eighteenth century itself. One aspect of it seems to me to be a little less sore from the prodding: the re-evaluation of competition.

 In James Steaurt’s  Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767), there’s an interesting footnote that briefly outlines a counterfactual history stemming from the hypothesis that the Fall neveer took place.

“Hence I conclude, that had the fall never taken place,the pursuits of man would have been totally different from

what they are at present. Mayl be allowed to suppose, that in such a happy state, he might  have been endowed with a faculty of transmitting his most complex ideas with the same  perspicuity  with which we now transmit those relating to geometry, numbers, colors, &c. From this I infer, there would have been no difference of sentiment, no dispute, no competition between man and man. The progress in acquiring  useful knowledge, the pleasure of communicating discoveries , would alone have provided a fond of happiness, as  inexhaustible as knowledge itself.”

The joke in making paradise into  the Isle of Laputa was no longer funny fifty years after Swift to the moral philosophers of the Scottish school – nor, in fact,  to the whole tribe of improving theoreticians who Burke attacks in the Reflections.

More on this later.

  

an analysis of competition for amateurs

There is a story told about the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott. He was talking to a meeting of clergy. One of them asked him how they should decide whether someone who comes to them for counseling should be sent to a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst. Winnicott memorably said: “If a person comes and talks to you and, listening to him, you feel he is boring you, then he is sick, and needs psychiatric treatment. But if he sustains your interest, no matter how grave his distress or conflict, then you can help him alright.”

I think Winnicott’s criteria for separating sick and problematic characters can be extended to what the essayist’s “expertise” is. If, as an essayist, you are dealing with a topic that is boring you, probably it needs to be sent to a specialist. But if it is problematic and fascinating, then you can deal with it.

Lately, the topic that I have been itching to write a mini-essay on is “competition”. Competition is one of the colorless words of our time. To be colorless is to be over-understood – so understood that one loses touch with what, exactly, the sense of the concept is.

For instance: the other day I was reading, in the New York Times, a story about “terror birds” – massive birds that lived tens of millions of years ago and that, when laying down and dying, as a favor to paleontologists of the future, left gorgeously articulated fossil remains. As in any story about a now extinct species, the coda has to involve how they became extinct.  In this case, as the story had emphasized how the terror birds prayed on the incipient mammalia, all rodent like beasts, at the time, we had a vague stake in their existence and disappearance.

The fossil adds to the diversity of terror birds and raises new questions as to why they went extinct two and a half million years ago.

Since the species varied in size and weight, terror birds maynot have died out because of an inability to compete with placental mammals, assome researchers have suggested, Dr. Degrange said.

Dr. Degrange has my respect for rejecting the colorless explanation that would have satisfied the NYT mindset, which is all about competition being good for everything, the very vehicle of progress.

That sentence did make me think that it might be nice to see how competition crept into the worlds of natural history and moral philosophy (economics division). I am going to write a bit more about this.

Spitting out the Bittner taste in my mouth

During his lifetime, Gunter Grass opposed the Vietnam war, the emplacement of Cruise Missiles on German soil, the two Gulf Wars and the triumphalist mood after the fall of the Wall. Naturally, this is the type of character that the NYT editorial board collectively takes dumps upon. Now that he is dead and the obituaries pour in, it is a wonderful time for “contrarianism”, so they publish an incredibly boobish op ed piece by a German they’ve been favoring lately with deadtree space, a cat named Jochen Bittner,  an editor for Die Zeit who was last seen in the NYT pontificating like Charles Krauthammer that the West has to seize the Moral Leadership of blah blah blah.
So he’s the NYT gunman on the spot. Here’s a couple of unintentionally hilarious grafs about his Grass problem:

"I was able to pinpoint my frustration only when I met Mr. Grass in person. A couple of months ago he came from his home in Lübeck, on the Baltic coast, to visit my newspaper’s office in nearby Hamburg. The conference room was packed: Everyone — editors, assistants, interns — all crowded in to see this living legend. Although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one with mixed emotions about the man, the atmosphere was one of near complete adoration. It was the kind of secular worship that I expect no younger author will ever experience, even if he or she wins a Nobel.
Your generation has had it pretty easy, I wanted to blurt out. You grew big in times when strong ideology and determined judgment counted more than the hard work of examining what is actually going on around us. The way you saw the world counted more than the way it actually was. And there was always a lot of self in your righteousness….
...
I wanted to say all of this, in front of my enraptured colleagues. But I didn’t dare.”

So, we have Bittner, deciding that he represents his generation in Germany (although I’m pretty confident most of his generation has never heard of him) touting the old conservative rap about the “left wingers” but not daring to even speak up before his colleagues.
Luckily, though, he has a lot of that dissident courage in retrospect. So, the man who couldn’t disturb a confab with a famous author is more than willing to use the confession of that famous author that when he was 17, he was conscripted into the Waffen SS to say na na boo boo– and that is supposed to pop Grass’s moral bubble.
So what is the contrast here? It is a contrast of confessions, of Grass's and Bittner's. It is a contrast of unconsciousnesses. Are we supposed to think Bittner, under a regime that would put you in a concentration camp for writing anti-nazi grafitti in a bathroom, would have calmly told the Nazis to fuck off when they came for his counterfactual teen self in 1944? Well, of course he would. Like Mighty Mouse, he would give them the old one two and they'd fall back astonished. Then he'd leap over a few recently bombed buildings.

. Grass was a thoroughly Nazified teen, no doubt, and to my mind, this is one of the sources of his authenticity – he could see, unlike a rightwing critic like Joachim Fest that what was attractive about Naziism was also what was wrong with it - the whole ideology of strength, of toughness, of leadership, decisionmaking, contempt for relativism, absolute faith in what the established power thinks is right or wrong.. Fest  of course began the rant about Grass’s hypocrisy that is echoed in the Bittner piece, even though Fest himself had volunteered for the Wehrmacht, which he claimed was not responsible for any atrocities against Jews - at best, a delusive belief. At the time of Grass's confession, much was made about his  condemnation of Reagan's visit to Waffen S.S. graves. Pat Buchanan, for instance, had his word about it. The weaselish echo wends its way into Bittner's prose.

Bittner does represent one part of his generation – the upper class twits. When Fest wrote his bio of Hitler in 1973, what he was imagining was how nice it would have been if the Weimar leftists had been swept out with a little less anti-semitism - that is, if only Hitler had been Pinochet! It has long been a popular position among the twit set. Bittner is an opportunist of the first water, and I imagine a counterfactual 40 year old Bittner in 1944 he would have elbowed his way into some Deutsche think tank using the same networking methods he's so successfully employed in Merkel's Germany.   He’s a big product of the neo-con network,  EU section, with his positions with the German Marshall fund and his special relationship to Merkel’s Foreign Affairs office.  His embedness has been the subject of some fun in Germany, getting prominent play on the satirical show, Die Anstalt, which published his and his editoreit (Joffe)’s links with various think tank groups - and in Joffe's case, lobbyists. Of course, these two are prominent supporters of the American foreign policy line vis a vis Ukraine.   Bittner and Joffe sued, and lost the case – although the court gave two points to Bittner for one line in the broadcast. Anstalt seems to have been inspired by the wonderful French documentary, Les Nouveaux chiens de garde, which chopped up the purveyors of conventional wisdom in the media and showed their connection to various plutocrats and corporations.

Although the NYT considers itself an avenging God when it comes to those terrible left wing intellectuals in Europe, the Bittner piece seems to me to redound to Grass’s credit. If he repulsed such repulsive critters as Bittner, he must have been doing something right.