the end of virtue

In the eighteenth century, certain ‘total concepts” were believed by the philosophers – for instance, that the republic as a political form depended on virtue as the glue that bound the populace together. As Catherine Puigelier has pointed out, the Enlightenment consensus was that the whole discussion of whether man was born good or bad was falsely constructed: virtue was always and everywhere a product of sociability, of the social. Although – me here, not Puigelier -  it was not just one of many products: the social cannot exist without virtue. The social contract only held, only made sense, if there was an ethos of virtue that enforced contracts – not with violence, but with reasoned agreement.  In this sense, it is what might be called an emergent property.

Voltaire in his Philosophical dictionary – and don’t we need a new translation of the whole unabridged thing? And isn’t this a case for the NYRB classics publisher? – mocks the notion of a sovereign good, of a ultimate state towards which humanity, or the individual, strives.

Le souverain bien en ce monde ne pourrait-il pas être regardé comme souverainement chimérique ? Les philosophes grecs discutèrent longuement à leur ordinaire cette question. Ne vous imaginez-vous pas, mon cher lecteur, voir des mendiants qui raisonnent sur la pierre philosophale ?

Le souverain bien ! quel mot ! autant aurait-il valu demander ce que c’est que le souverain bleu, ou le souverain ragoût, le souverain marcher, le souverain lire, etc.

[Shouldn’t we regard the sovereign good in this world as a sovereign chimera? The Greek philosophers, as was their habit, chewed on this question at length. My dear reader, can’t you see them as beggars arguing about the philosopher’s stone?

What a phrase: sovereign good! You could as well ask what is the sovereign blue, or the sovereign stew, the sovereign walk, the sovereign read, etc.]

Voltaire was a “flat” thinker – he did not ask himself whether the destruction of the hierarchical structure of the good was diagnostic of something intrinsic to the good or intrinsic to the social construction of the good – which aren’t necessarily identical. But the job of destruction did make way for the idea of a republic of individuals. These individuals form a collective not by having no sense of good, but by pursuing the good as they see fit, within the framework of public virtue. Though the abstract hierarchy of good is as absurd as an abstract hierarchy of stew, the real, instantiated good to which the state is responsible still endures, creating a hierarchy that is founded not on the good itself, but on a variety of the good – the legitimation of the social order.

Now, fast forward 275 years. We are witnessing something like the end of virtue, republican virtue. The rightwing parties – in the U.S., U.K., Netherlands, Austria, Australia, etc. – are led by an overtly anti-virtue ethos. This, I think, distinguishes them from 20^th century fascism, which was an extreme right manifestation of the republican ethos, interpreted through race and the adherence to a supreme – and supremely virtuous – ruler.

On twitter, I received a response to something I wrote by a Trump follower. Usually I just block that nonsense, but for some reason I didn’t this time, so we tweet debated, meaning we slung insults and instances at each other. I wrote, among other things, how degrading and stupid it was to have a national leader recommend injecting detergent. The response I thought was classic: “if you think Trump wasn't trolling your side when he said that, you're out to lunch. Your side actually believed he was serious when he tweeted a video of himself being President until 2040.”  

Fintan O’Toole coined the phrase LOLConservatism. This is what he meant. I can’t imagine one of Mussolini’s followers defending him by claiming he is just trolling the libs. That would be considered an insult to Mussolini. There’s been a disruption on the right that is still badly understood on the left, where you will sometimes hear the earnest question: well, what does the right propose to do about, say, pollution, or climate change, or whatever. The idea of Republican virtue, of a sense that the governing class is justified in as much as it is working for the good of society, has dissolved, here. As Margaret Thatcher said, there’s no such thing as society, thus bringing to a true dead end the dialectic between the social order and private rivalry that was once a vital conservative concern. If the state is bound by no sense of virtue, and the only demand made on it is to stop guaranteeing any benefit to the mass of the governed (under the guise of shrinking the state – which is of course a mask, as the state expands its support of Capital in ways that the “middle class prophets” of classical liberalism would never have imagined), then the state has essentially divorced itself from the old, republican ideal.

I am not a middle class prophet, and can’t imagine how the world without a republican ideal is going to work. I do know that world is here. Sad, isn’t it?

Notes on Mike Davis's Monster at the Door: the Global Threat of Avian Flu

the reason the doctor knows everything is because he’s been everywhere at the wrong time and has now become anonymous. - Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

So I went into this pandemic with my eyes closed. I had no real notion, save from some rare reading, what a pandemic was, what it meant, how it worked.  Since, I’ve looked up things, I keep up with the world-o-meter every day about infections and deaths, I rage against the stupidity in the U.S., and in the E.U., I think about the fact that under fucking Sarkozy France had a more rational stock of medica materia for use in epidemics than it does even now (Sarkozy! I’ve long despised Hollande, but to get nostalgic for Sarkozy you have to be driven mad by circumstances), I’m your regular horsefly caught in a jam jar. But I have only begun to understand the modern ecology of the pandemic by reading Mike Davis’ Monster at the Door: the Global threat of Avian Flu.

The first two chapters of the book should clue you in: this was a mass death foretold, and it is only going to get worse if we don’t rethink globalization globally. It is a book so full of info that is shocking and overlooked that well, it is a sadness.

Item: the mad Trump idea that Covid19 was a laboratory creation is probably wrong, but it is almost certain that H1N1, an influenza type that appeared in 1971, was the result of a lab accident in the Soviet Union or China.

Item: covering up lab accidents and epidemic threats is common. H5N1/97 is one of the deadliest Avian viruses, although it is rare, yet, that it crosses over to people. It is a virus that does things like, well, causes birds to literally bleed from their eyes and all other parts so that they “melt”.

““It reproduced much faster than ordinary flu strains, and in cells that ordinary flu strains couldn’t live in, and if you grew it in eggs, it killed them. This virus, said Lim [a Hong Kong scientist], was like an alien.” Indeed, when veterinary researchers in Athens, Georgia, infected a poultry flock with the recently isolated human strain, the entire flock died within a day. Horrified scientists, who had never seen such a rapid killer, immediately donned biohazard containment suits and dosed themselves with antivirals; this ignited a controversy about the safety protocols necessary for work with the Hong Kong virus. Influenza diagnostic labs, at least in the United States, were not equipped with the elaborate containment systems required for working with such a potent virus: federal biosafety guidelines had not anticipated an influenza that acted like the nightmare protagonist of a sci-fi thriller.”

Did you know that an avian flu epidemic was discovered in Holland in March 2003 that required the destruction of millions of chickens from a strain that caused conjunctivitis among people who had contact with it? Did you know these strains are popping up all over – for instance, H6N2, which infected  tens of millions of birds in California  in a four-month period beginning in March 2002, leading to a mass slaughter that was kept quiet, since the agribusinesses involved thought that it would scare people. Right. Or that Canada had a severe virus outbreak in 2004 in Fraser Valley, British Columbia, that the Canadian government intentionally covered up,

“Several dozen workers involved in the gassing and incineration of the 19 million chickens subsequently developed conjunctivitis and/or flu-like symptoms; two definite H7N3 cases were confirmed but the victims were infected by different strains, evidence that the virus was evolving at very high speed.¹⁵⁹ There was also considerable controversy about the disposal of infected chicken excrement after expert testimony that the virus might survive for as long as three months in manure.”

Item: all of the stuff about herd immunity is hooey. You either have deathtolls in the hundreds of thousands or you apply the 19^th century techniques of quarantine, plus 21^st century testing and tracking. This has been happening much more frequently than I know about – and I would guess most people. In Hong Kong, in South Korea, and especially in Guangzhou province in China.

Item: the global food economy has undergone a “livestock” revolution, as Davis rather clumsily labels it. That means that the amount of chicken and pigs, living in close quarters, has increased exponentially in number and in concentration.:  “pork and poultry constitute 76 percent of the developing world’s increased meat consumption, and poultry has accounted for almost all of the small net increase in rich countries’ food consumption. The viral “food supply”—poultry, swine, and humans—has been dramatically enlarged.” Deal is, you concentrate the animals in small areas, and you expand the population, and you have no global veterinary watch – one of the crucial points in the book is the minimal overlap between human health organizations and veterinary organizations – you are practically inviting in flu. Especially as you have a wild bird population that has evolved over a million years to mostly coexist with a number of virus types in their bodies. Odd thing is, the species crossover of these viruses to humans results in a change in the symptoms and attack of the viruses – from the digestive system to the lungs.

Item: the hunt for wild animal meat, in Africa and Asia, is a result of various changes in the global economic system. For instance, in Africa, those demographics that used to depend, largely, on fish can’t anymore – because European and Asian fishing fleets have sucked up their fish supply like a vacuum cleaner. At the same time, the forests are being cut down, and the cutters are hungry: so they want to eat meat. What’s on the menu is anybody’s guess.

So yes, the next flu might jump from some weasel to a chicken to a human, or from a weasel to a human directly.

I’m itemizing – the information load in this book is amazingly dense, and one feels like scrawling down items on a piece of paper in order to remember them. But it is also amazingly well written, moving like a thriller in which you find out, on the end page, that you are the victim. And unlike other books about epidemics, the concentration is not just on the U.S. or even Europe. Like “The Victorian Holocaust” – Davis’s superb book on famine in the late nineteenth century – there is an attention paid to India, Latin America, and Africa that is unusual. The Spanish Influenza (which might really have been called the Kansas Influenza, since it probably popped there) is usually written about only in terms of the states – but the scythe was much much heavier in India, where, under British rule, with the food and supplies taken away for the war and British imperial matters, 10-14 million people died. Never watch a movie glorifying the Raj without remembering – it was an empire built on millions and millions of skulls. The British rule in India is one of the great human disgraces.

America the defective

Reading the comfortable neo-liberal comments that overflow the NYT opinion page and twitter, that are obviously pronounced at dinner tables and in emails that contain (attached) the latest "marvelous column by Tom Friedman, who nails it" - all of which are about Trump the barbarian and none of which are about America the defective - I am reminded of a sentence of Montesquieu's: "When Sylla wished to give liberty to Rome, Rome could no longer receive it, having only a feeble remnant of virtue left. And as it had always even less, instead of waking up after Caesar, Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, Nero, Domitian, it was ever more the slave; all blows were directed against the tyrant, none against the tyranny."

New England, 1886

Her little life lay on the bed
Concentrate as that sword
Intent, edged, unsheathed
Prophesized by the Lord

Not to bring peace but more life
Than any outside her closed door
And she interred like a knife
In the kitchen’s silverware drawer.

She awaited her chance for the attack
To be bloodied under his touch
From which there’d be no going back
- but it never came to much.

Her papers were put away
Her dresses were folded up
Her brother was heard to say
She was strange even as a pup.
- Karen Chamisso

the poet

“… the fact that the film presents extreme closeups

Of the genitals in function” made

All the stags grin monomaniacal. One became

a poet and taught the trade. In the flicker

Of his stag film eyes

what was I and I

- genitals in function in extreme closeup

underneath my underneath.

“But I guess they’re really young, and they always look beautiful”

Somebody said to somebody as I carried the party

Home on my back, like Aeneas carrying his daddy.

- Karen Chamisso

The "we" of stupidity

Robert Musil once gave a famous talke entitled “On stupidity” [Ueber Dummheit]. The title is doublesided, at once about a topic and a citation of a previous talk entitle On stupidity given given by a Dr. Johan E. Erdmann, a Hegelian philosopher, in 1866. Erdmann developed a theory of stupidity in this talk that is articulated around the metaphor of the keyhole. The stupid person, in this metaphor, sees things through a keyhole, and from this vision generalizes without limit. Thus, the stupid person sees something about sickness – or reads it in a newspaper – and immediately generalizes what he has seen. Stupidity, in Erdmann’s view, is a curious amalgam of narrowness and absolutism.

“… one’s own I would be the only keyhole, through which he looks into the stocked hall that we name the world. Stupidity is thus to be defined as the spiritual circumstance in which the particular itself and its relationship to itself figures as the single mesure of truth and value, in short: everything is judged according to its own particularity.”

Erdmann appeals to his intuition: surely one could statistically pick out the stupid person through an enumeration of the times certain expressions (always instead of often, all instead of many, and “we” [Man] instead of I) crop up in this person’s speech. Paradoxically, the egotism – the self assertion without self-consciousness – is expressed not by the “I”, which indicates partiality, but the “we”, which indicates absoluteness.

Musil’s talk was given in 1937 – an ominous year in Austria. Already, Austria was ruled by a quasi-Fascist government. The strong labor movement of the 20s had been bloodily quashed. Those who could feel how things were going were searching for tickets out. Musil places his talk in a curious non-genre – it is neither scientific nor artistic. It is speculative, and not generalizable. In short, it is essayistic, a bounding and rebounding between opposites.

In 1937, it was not “clever” to call up, by name, the stupid or the powers of the stupid. This plays a role in Musil’s essay:

“… it can be dumb, to praise oneself as clever, but it is not always clever, as well, to maintain a reputation as stupid. Nothing here allows us to generalize; or rather, the single generalization that seems to apply, must be, that it is cleverest to allow oneself to be remarked in this world as little as possible! And really, this line under all wisdom has been drawn often. Yet more often is half-use or symbolic-representative use made of this misanthropic conclusion, and then it leads our observation into the circle of the commandments against pride and yet more expansive commandments, without letting us leave the realm of dumbness and cleverness completely.”

In 1937, the wisest were becoming aware that there are moments when exiting history turns out to be impossible, and being unremarked does not matter when being remarked is not the question: only being on the list is the question.

There has been a number of literary studies about the emergence of “betise” as a modernistic theme – Roberto Calasso has noticed a lineage between Flaubert, Leon Bloy, and Karl Kraus on the subject. 

Certainly, Erdmann’s essay seems to echo traits in the paper media world, as seen by Kraus: a narrowing “we” that promotes received ideas as eternal truths. Flaubert and Bloy both associated stupidity with the bourgeoisie, the privileged audience of the press. There is another story about the rise of the paper press that is just the opposite – about the broadening of the “information flow”, the globalization that comes with the newspaper. The newspaper embodied a whole new temporal dominant: that of simultaneity. Its very layout made, say, the marriage of a princess and the sex murders of an insane criminal coexist on the front page, which gives us a very different sense of time than the traditional chronicle, where the social hierarchy is reflected in the flow of the narrative.

I would speculate that the history of stupidity in the modern era – from the nineteenth century until now, the era of capitalism – is marked by the separation of the fool from the stupid. The fool – that figure in Erasmus and Shakespeare – is, supremely, a trickster. Being a fool is a vast joke, as well as a form of what you might call transgressive simplicity: it is represented by the fool in King Lear. One of the marks of Lear’s fallen state is that he can be effected by what his fool says – as the fool shrewdly remarks.
That trickster function continues on into the era of mass circulation papers, but is very much on the margin. From the margin, what the fool sees is the power of stupidity, in which the media is complicit. Or perhaps one might say, in which the media is caught up. For Kraus, that meant that all times were end-times – because all times were filled in by stories and comments by the press, by “Zeit-ung”, which was a debasement of Zeit [“time”] itself. 

In the kind of logical paradox that Musil knotted over, this state of perpetual alarm disarmed him before the rise of Hitler, about whom he had “nothing to say.” There are dead-ends everywhere: even in calling out stupidity.

Measuring Progress by refusing to cry

Tränengruss – the greeting by tears – is a ritual that fascinated a number of anthropologists in the early 20th century, especially Georg Friederici, who wrote a monograph entitled Tränengruss der Indianer. Friederici gathered material from the oldest European – Indigenous encounters. The colonialist and exotic fascination was a factor in his descriptions, but clearly the weeping greeting was not a myth:

[Among the Tupi] The women of the family performed the chief role in this ceremony. When a foreigner or even a native of the same tribe neared one of their huts as a visitor, he was allowed to enter and take his place on one of the hammocks. The naked women placed themselves strategically around him, laid both their hands before their faces and began to vigorously weep and lament, pitying the overcome fatigue and dangers of the way of the guest, and making him compliments. The rule demanded that the guest also cry, or, if he, as a European, had no stock of tears on hand, that at least he acted as though he did.”

The naked women and the dry eyed Europeans – it is a powerful colonialist image, no? Marcel Mauss, whose essay, L'expression obligatoire des sentiments, written in 1921, concerned not only about the ritual of tears described by ethnologists but also, as was pointed out by Chris Garce and Alexander Jones (2009), the mass mourning and numbness that was felt across the world after World War I – the European lack of tears – pointed out that the weeping greeting was also known in Australia. Garce and Jones speculate that Mauss was thinking hard about how to mourn the unknown soldier, the unknown flu victim, the unknown civilian casualty, the massacred and the massacre-ers. This was both the obvious question, post-war, and the buried question. Buried, repressed, and returning like the repressed on a national scale with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. As Garce and Jones put it:

“Mourning for those who never returned from the battlefields--i.e. those masses of individuals whose deaths could not be assimilated within the logic of national sacrifice--quickly assumed a spectral quality of unresolved political significance. "The obligatory expression of feelings" thus symptomatically draws attention to "our much missed Robert Hertz and Emile Durkheim" and to these fallen compatriots' studies of Australian funerary rituals. In re-reading his colleagues' ethnological works, Mauss would rediscover Hertz's and Durkheim's arguments that aboriginal women, more than other segments of so-called "archaic societies," occupied a mediating role between the living and the dead. He also noticed the prevalence of "greeting by tears" not just in Australia, but sheer across the ethnological record.”

We’ve seen a return of the idea that women mediate between the living and the dead in the notion that the female leaders of states have been much more competent in dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the neo-liberal ban on tears – except when shed by men, who are, de facto, brave men, preferably with military service – has still been the norm, and has had its effects in the settler countries – the U.S., for instance – as well as elsewhere. Such is the rule that forbids the stock of tears that when the lockdown comes to an end, the story will all be about “rebuilding” the economy, and the dead will have to bury their dead.

It poses a question, doesn’t it? When did the Europeans and all those societies upon which they put their heavy hand lose their stock of tears?