Letter from Paris

 

This plague winter, I walk out into the streets of Paris under the semi-permanent concrete of clouds, my mask in place, my glasses steaming up from my warm breath, and I distinctly feel, under my feet, something slippery, something creaking. There’s something precarious, something about the sidewalks, the spotty traffic, the masked pedestrians that have a slightly demoralized look. The closed up windows of the restaurants, the yawning awnings of the cafes, all the sidewalk tables gone, the measured influx of customers in the shops that are open, shops sporting, as jauntily as they can, the marks of the Christmas season – reminiscent not so much of the usual commercial bacchanal as of a retirement home stirring up the ashes of nostalgia. Something. Paris reminds me right now of some scarred old dreadnought heading out into cold and enemy infested seas. This is all my illusion, but illusion with a respectable geneology – for one of the staples of modernity is the image of Paris in ruins, another capital city undone: Ninevah, Jerusalem, Rome. There’s a fine line in French literature, going back to the some of the minor writers of the Enlightenment, like Mercier and Volney, who dreamed this dream. Giovanni Macchia, the great Italian scholar, wrote a book about it, Paris en ruines, which, in the French translation, was prefaced by Italo Calvino – a connoisseur of cities, visible and invisible, and an inveterate refugee in Paris. Calvino’s essay is very much part of its time – I believe the late eighties – casting its eye over the changes wrought in Paris by the great commandatore of the seventies, Pompidou and Giscard d’Estaing, symbolized by the Beaubourg, on the one hand, and the destruction of Les Halles, on the other. Speaking of the radical writers who subjected Paris to their scrutiny, like Zola, Calvino unleashed this fine parenthetical remark: “and it is not by chance, we can add, for even in May 1968 the barricades were given birth like an evocation of the topography of the old districts, the same as for the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which confirms how much the mythological and archaeological  element is inseparable from the idea of revolution.”

The barricades haven’t risen up this year, in response to the Macron government’s massive incompetence. We have, recently, had cars burned, and policemen doing their usual job of beating random innocents. The revolt of the base level of the French population, the gilets jaunes, has been put on hold. Even when it was going at full throttle in 2019, there was not much barricade action, just a little graffiti, broken glass and some bits chiseled off the Arc de Triomphe, truly horrifying the bien-pensants: is this the way we treat the cash cows of tourism?

If we were superstitious, or sensitive readers of signs, like the medievals, we would have been more alarmed by 2019’s omens. Not just the post-modern jacquerie – for didn’t the cathedral itself, Notre Dame, burn? What was this a sign of? It seems, now, so utterly appropriate. You can walk across the Pont Saint Louis and get a hinder glance of the old thing, all its charred flying buttresses and exposed gargoyles – the passer-by’s instinctive gaze upward is greeted by what any sensible person up until 1700 would see as an indictment of the social order.

Ah, there it is again: the creaking.

Sometimes, I wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning. And I swear I hear something.

 

Moi qui tremblais, sentant geindre à cinquante lieues
Le rut des Béhémots et les Maelstroms épais,
Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,
Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets !

Kant on boredom and play - a note for the late capitalist peon

  “... men demand activities, even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, they would have done nothing but sat together and sung arcadian songs and observed the beauty of nature. Boredom would certainly have martyred them as well as it does other men in similar positions.” - Immanuel Kant's   The Metaphysics of Morals, my translation

Boredom in the Metaphysics of Morals appears as a theme and a term (Langeweile) in the context of ‘play’ – and notably, playing cards.

In a more extended consideration of the sources of playing in the lectures collected in  the Philosophical Anthropology essays, Kant  elaborates on the hookup of Eden, work, play, and boredom – for it turns out that, in circumstances where our needs are abundantly satisfied, boredom comes into play as the motive pushing us to work or to certain forms of play. It complicates an old equation that posits lack, or need, as the driver of work, or productivity – since boredom is not the same kind of lack as other lacks. What it is, however, is hard to say. “Boredom is the quintessence of unnamable pain.”

The importance of boredom in universal history has never been truly qualifed, since the topic seems to lead, by a neurotic defensive gesture, to moral shamemaking. Kant makes a good effort, though, to cast off the bourgeois shackles and examine the phenomenon coldly, beginning with a cultural universal that reaches all the way into the Canadian wilderness:

“The passion for play [zum Spielem – gambling is implied] is met with in every nation, even the Canadian savages like to play, while Chinese are given over to play to the point of mania, so that they bring their wives and children and even themselves into slavery through play. The interests [stakes] in play serve to enliven it and contain therefore such great charms that it constitutes the pastime for most of our society. The cause is that fear and hope continually change places in play…” [257]

The reasonable man, for Kant, then, plays with that alteration of fortunes in mind. Underneath this reflection, one hears the cracking and downfall of a long humanistic ideal – that of the good life as constructed in the classic tradition. It is not to mediation that the ideal subject, satisfied in all of his needs, turns – but to a flight from boredom. Play, gambling, is a way to make life adventurous again.

“A rational man, who sets down to play, can not have gain as his intent [Absicht], but he must believe, that he at least in the end must be paid for his stakes. Therefore his intention must be something else other than gain. During the play his intention is, of course, only to win, but he did not undertake participation in the game to do so. Here it is a purely a question of hope and fear, that are fundamentally vain; but one is distracted during these circumstances, and has distracted oneself from the one that one calls boredom. Such an evil, which is what boredom is, one commonly doesn’t know how to name, nor what countervailing means to apply to it. This evil of boredom springs out of the lack of activity.” [258]

The division between the game as a whole – which is played for the sake of being played – and the different moments of the game, the hands – which are played to be won – gives us, then, an activity that isn’t ‘serious’ – and yet one that fools boredom, playing its own game in the margins.

 

The boredom motif is oddly untouched by those economists looking at the hyper-financialization of late capitalism, where the incentives are all supposed to be about gain, or, for those on the left, about power. How much of a role does boredom play in the financial markets? Myself, I think boredom is the shadow side of speculation. We are prisoners of the boredom of the rich, we who are playing our games far below theirs.

 

Ressentiment

 

Every social order creates victims. Consequently, every social order has to deal with victims. And victims have to deal with the social order – if they survive.

For the victims, in the afterlife of victimage event, in the narrative trajectory of their life as victims, there is a narrow spectrum of subject positions available, from accusation to forgiveness, from resentment to forgetting. And the same this is true for those who are the great beneficiaries and managers of the social order, who move between demonizing the victim to building programs meant to bring about reconciliation and assimilation, with guilt and fear mingling together. The managers have, of course, more elbow room, and can even afford to spare some understanding for the perpetrators - since the managers are not victims. They even have the luxury, which they abundantly use, of condescending to the victims. Yet, if they are wise, they also must feel a certain fear. The ghosts may conspire, the victims may revolt. The dialectic between the masters and the slaves is, as Nietzsche pointed out, the defining structure of dialectic itself. Without victimage, there would be no dialectic. Victim-measuring is the social project that binds together the accused and the accuser,

‘Judge not that ye be not judged.”

“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.

"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.”

This is the codex of the anti-social, the kingdom of Heaven.

You have seen Hanns Chaim Maier, or his brothers and sisters, in the famous photos, “toothless skeletons that were reanimated with Angloamerican corned beef in a can” from April or May, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen. Mayer changed his name in anger to Jean Améry and fled, when he was able, to Brussels. Under a name conceived in anger that renounced his Austrian-German provenance, he waited for revenge. He waited for the people who had sustained and supported the people who tortured him and killed millions of Jews to be reduced, in their circumstances, to living in a vast “potato field.” Not for him the disgusting, “vibrating” hug of the oppressor, in forgiveness, of someone like Martin Buber. He would be Jonah, waiting for Nineveh to be destroyed. Unlike Jonah, though, he recognized, gradually, that neither destruction nor true repentance would come for Nineveh. By the nineteen-sixties, it was clear that destruction, revenge, nor any cosmic equaling of the balance was going to happen.

In an essay entitled “Ressentiment”, he begins by contemplating the “miracle” of postwar Western Europe. The democracy! The prosperity! The liberal society! “I am not at ease in these peaceful, beautiful lands full of clever and modern people. Why, one has probably already guessed. I am one of that (happily) slowly dying species of people who are called, by an agreed upon convention, the victims of Nazism.’

Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill all agree that ressentiment is a poison, a darkness that must be avoided, even when one is beyond Good and Evil. Amery takes the devil’s side. Or, rather, his essay is about the victim’s dealing with being a victim.

As we all know from our everyday political and social experience, the political life of “modern” societies is oriented, to a massive extent, to either disparaging victims or claiming victimhood. There are no non-victims in this discussion – even those establishment figures who are most scornful of “victims” are liable to portray themselves as the victims of victims – or, since this is too reminiscent of the crimes that created the victims, victims of those who “speak for” victims, and who are false friends, not real victims at all. The real victims are, of course, dead and gone, as is right and proper. Survival is a mark that really, one is not a victim at all, but a victimizer of the happy and the prosperous, of Capital and its bosses, of supposed skin “privilege”, etc., etc.

Amery compares his situation in 1945 to that of the giant bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis:

“I was, as who I was – a surviving resistance fighter, a Jew, one of the persecuted people by a hated regime – in a mutual agreement with the world. Those who wounded me and turned me into a bedbug as dark powers had one operated on the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – they were themselves objects of horror for the winning camp. Not only National Socialism – Germany was the object of a general feeling, that before our eyes turned from hatred to contempt.”

However, just as the bug in the Metamorphosis is kicked out of the house of “normality”, so too was Amery – as an accuser. He quickly became out of synch with the “world-clock”, which had other plans than to make Germany into a potato field. And so the foundation of peace and modernity was laid on the tacit agreement to limit the amount of justice, or revenge, enacted on the perpetrators and their complicit populations.

This moment was not historically unprecedented. After the Civil War, the same thing happened to the victims of slavery. Emancipation turned into compromise, and then into second class citizenship, social death on credit, so to speak. Dubois’s “double soul”, the hyphenated accuser or assimilationist, was born out of a vast broken promise.

This is to spread the question over its largest dimension. Amery’s essay, though, takes the opposite route of asking the question about the bug he had become. How does one survive one’s survival?

2.

Tact – or Takt in German – goes back to the Latin word tangere, touch. The OED traces the “figurative” sense of “discrimination” back to touch as well, a “keen faculty of perception” given by the fingers, which in turn gives us, as well, a sense for what is fitting and proper. The OED leads us to that moment in the eighteenth century where, under the Shaftesbury-ian impulse, aesthetics is conflated with taste. Fingers, the tongue, the skin, with this we release the flavors of the world, we stroke, we feel in the dark. The blind  man in Diderot’s Letters on the Blind could read the world by its wrinkles and cracks. By this we are guided.

 

By these senses, too, the torturer is guided. Our touch, our skin, our sensual discriminations, by these things he gains access to our pain, to that loss of self and self worth that comes with the administration of pangs, of beatings, of cutting, of humiliations. The tortured find that they can’t bear it.

 Améry’s essay warns the reader, from the outset, that the question of tact and the theft of tact is going to operate as a sort of timing device here, giving the essay the rhythm of, say, the swinging of a whip, interrupting the higher flights of analysis and synthesis, with personal references to the torture of having his arms twisted high above his back, or to the Flemish SS officer Wajs beating him with a whip, or a shovel handle, or to the Auschwitz officer Bogen, who was tried in 1958 after controversially being “de-nazified”, for the murders and tortures associated with the Bogen swing: an iron bar on cables across which a person would be bent and beaten with crowbars, the force of the beating cause the bar to swing up and back, until only a human jelly remained.

 In these juxtapositions, what surface is being torn? Perhaps that surface that lies, infinitesimally thin, between the reader and the page.

 Ressentiment is not formally connected with the destruction of tact in the construction of the former in the essay, but by association. It is by association that Améry builds his vindication of the resentful instance, leading us to a conclusion that condemns the happy forgetfulness on which the post-war liberal society has been built.

 “At bottom, the fears of Scheler and Nietzsche were not justified. Our slave morality will not triumph. Ressentiments, the emotional source of every authentic morality, which will always be a morality for the oppressed – they have little or no chance to poison the victors in their evil works.”

 In this conclusion, we spot an untruth. That untruth takes the “strong”, the victors, to be immune from their own sense of grievance. How could the man at the handle end of the whip be resentful? This, I think, is a casualty of the radical inequality that Améry establishes between the perpetrator and the victim. When Améry remarks that the German people who he encountered in his transits from camp to camp in 1945 were stony faced about the cadavers they saw and more than willing to gleefully appropriate the “Jew coats” that were stripped off the prisoners, these were the ‘strong’ in a very limited sense.  The whole consciousness of these complacent supporters of murder and torture on an industrial scale was moved by ressentiment, as well. The emotional source of every authentic morality may, as well, be the emotional source of every authentic crime. By projecting backwards into ressentiment the desire to re-establish tact – a common, a communistic touch – its power and extent are, I think, illogically limited.  

My objection stems, in fact, from Améry’s insight into the heart of ressentiment – its struggle against “natural time”.  For Améry, the struggle is about reversing time and its effects, not in order to produce some alternative past in which one assassinates Hitler or prevents the disaster of 1933, but, rather, to produce a permanent state of revulsion against the horror of the Camps, one that perfectly reproduces the first effect of the horror: permanently wounding time.  This seems to me consistent, as well, with the ideology, the emotional style, of the “victors”. They do not cynically evoke wounds that they do not feel – they, instead, feel them, according to all historical evidence.  The idea that ressentiment does not have to be the only emotional source of authentic morality – that instead revolution itself, the slave’s revolt, can be that source – is put to one side by Améry as an ultimately non-serious dream, even an insult to the tortured.

 

“But what an extravagant daydream I have let myself fall into! I Didn’t I see passengers at the train station in 1945 turn pale in anger in the face of the piled up corpses of my comrades and turn threateningly on our and their  torturers?  Didn’t I see, thanks to my ressentiment and, through the effect of its traces, thanks to the German cleansing, time turn backwards?  Wasn’t it a German man who seized the shovel, that instrument of beating, from the SS man Wajs? Didn’t a German woman come forward and and car for the wounds of those who were tortured, broken and crazed? What didn’t I see in the unrestrained past, in the past turned backwards into the future, the forever overcome past!   

Nothing of the sort happened, I know, in spite of all the honorable efforts of the German intellectuals, who really wanted in the end to be what the others held them to be: rootless. All intelligible signs indicate, that natural time will refuse the demands of our ressentiment and  will finally extinguish it. The great revolution? Germany will not make up for it, and our resentment will come up empty.“

This is a powerful indictment. And yet, it doesn’t lead to any act of further solidarity. If ressentiment were really the emotional source of the slave revolt, shouldn’t that morality recognize other victims? It is here where I would like to lack tact as a reader. For it seems that  out of the moral uniqueness of victimhood, its hell, Améry wants to preserve the uniqueness of the concentration camps, of the perpetrators. He does not want to share with colonial peoples, or the Armenians, or anybody,  the status of the ultimate victim – for this would take away the moral uniqueness of his victimhood, would force him to share the pain he has shored for himself and his comrades alone.  This would lead him out of the unique opposition between German culture and German barbarism that is one of the motifs of the new liberal order, the way in which the slogan “never again” reduced to - never the Germans again.

“But the particularity of a highly civilized people with reliable organizations and almost scientific precision achieving the murder of millions will become regrettable, and even come to be found in no ways unique, proximate to the murdering expulsion of the Armenians by the Turks or the horrifying violence of the French colonial forces. Everything will be buried in a summary “century of Barbarism”. As we, incorrigibly refusing to learn, unreconcilable, historically hostile reactionaries in the literal sense, stand there, the victims, as survivors we will all finally seem to represent merely the cost of doing business.”

This is brilliant. Yet in the end, I, a reader who can only bow to those who were tortured at Auschwitz, or in Turkey, or Algeria, must reply in an untactful way from out of a life in which none of the pains I have ever experienced have come close to those I have read about. For the hoarding of victim status, the ressentiment that excludes the Armenian and Algerian victims, leads not to the authentic moral values of the slave morality, as Amery says, but to the use of ressentiment for all the wrong purposes. The victim comes not to prevent future victims, but to classify who and who is not the most victimized. A bureaucracy that can only lead to disaster.

I don't like where Amery's essay ends up. It reminded me of the onion chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. In this chapter, Alyosha goes to visit Grushenka, Dmitri's mistress. She tells him a story:

'Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; ‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said he, ‘and gave it to a beggar woman.’ And God answered: ‘You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’ The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. ‘Come,’ said he, ‘catch hold and I'll pull you out.’ And he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. ‘I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.’ As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day."

 

On Jean Améry's Resentment 1

 Every social order creates victims. Consequently, every social order has to deal with victims. And victims have to deal with the social order – if they survive.

For the victims, in the afterlife of victimage event, in the narrative trajectory of their life as victims, there is a narrow spectrum of subject positions, from accusation to forgiveness, from resentment to forgetting. And the same this is true for those who are the great beneficiaries and managers of the social order, who move between demonizing the victim to programs urging reconciliation and assimilation, with guilt and fear mingling together. The managers have, of course, more elbow room, and can even afford to spare some understanding for the perpetrators - since the managers are not victims. They even have the luxury, which they abundantly use, of condescending to the victims. Yet, if they are wise, they also must feel a certain fear. The ghosts may conspire, the victims may revolt. The dialectic between the masters and the slaves is, as Nietzsche pointed out, the defining structure of dialectic itself. Without victimage, there would be no dialectic. Victim-measuring is the social project that binds together the accused and the accuser,

‘Judge not that ye be not judged.”

“He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who harbor such thoughts do not still their hatred.

"He abused me, he struck me, he overpowered me, he robbed me." Those who do not harbor such thoughts still their hatred.”

This is the codex of the anti-social, the kingdom of Heaven.

You have seen Hanns Chaim Mayer, or his brothers and sisters, in the famous photos, “toothless skeletons that were reanimated with Angloamerican corned beef in a can” from April or May, 1945, at Bergen-Belsen. Mayer changed his name in anger to Jean Amery and fled, when he was able, to Brussels. Under the angry name, he waited for revenge. He waited for the people who had sustained and supported the people who tortured him and killed millions of Jews to be reduced, in their circumstances, to living in a vast “potato field.” Not for him the disgusting, “vibrating” hug of the oppressor, in forgiveness, of someone like Martin Buber. By the nineteen-sixties, though, it was clear that destruction, revenge, any cosmic equalling of the balance, was not going to happen.

In an essay entitled “Ressentiment”, he begins by contemplating the “miracle” of postwar Western Europe. The democracy! The prosperity! The liberal society! “I am not at ease in these peaceful, beautiful lands full of clever and modern people. Why, one has probably already guessed. I am one of that (happily) slowly dying species of people who are called, by an agreed upon convention, the victims of Nazism.’

Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill all agree that ressentiment is a poison, a darkness that must be avoided, even when one is beyond Good and Evil. Amery takes the devil’s side. Or, rather, his essay is about the victim’s dealing with being a victim.

As we all know from our everyday political and social experience, the political life of “modern” societies is oriented, to a massive extent, to either disparaging victims or claiming victimhood. There are no non-victims in this discussion – even those establishment figures who are most scornful of “victims” are liable to portray themselves as the victims of victims – or, since this is too reminiscent of the crimes that created the victims, victims of those who “speak for” victims, and who are false friends, not real victims at all. The real victims are, of course, dead and gone, as is right and proper. Survival is a mark that really, one is not a victim at all, but a victimizer of the happy and the prosperous, of Capital and its bosses, of supposed skin “privilege”, etc., etc.

Amery compares his situation in 1945 to that of the giant bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis:

“I was, as who I was – a surviving resistance fighter, a Jew, one of the persecuted people by a hated regime – in a mutual agreement with the world. Those who wounded me and turned me into a bedbug as dark powers had one operated on the protagonist of Kafka’s Metamorphosis – they were themselves the horror of the winning camp. Not only National Socialism – Germany was the object of a general feeling, that before our eyes turned from hatred to contempt.”

However, just as the bug in the Metamorphosis is kicked out of the house of “normality”, so too was Amery – as an accuser. He quickly became out of synch with the “world-clock”, which had other plans than to make Germany into a potato field. And so the foundation of peace and modernity was laid on the tacit agreement to limit the amount of justice, or revenge, enacted on the perpetrators and their complicit populations.

This moment was not historically unprecedented. After the Civil War, the same thing happened to the victims of slavery. Emancipation turned into compromise, and then into second class citizenship, social death on credit, so to speak. Dubois’s “double soul”, the hyphenated accuser or assimilationist, was born out of a vast broken promise.

This is to spread the question over its largest dimension. Amery’s essay, though, takes the opposite route of asking the question about the bug he had become. How does one survive one’s survival?

Second Wind: a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

First wind came out of the womb

Guzzling atmosphere like champagne

Bawling the certainty of self.

Second wind came out of recess

- a whistle, the line of girls

-the pecking order had my heart in its hands.

At midcourse I saw behind me

My blundering enemy Jane, flushed

With her evil weight and ways.

‘Where the foxe is earthed blow for the terriers

After the maner.” Birth of second wind

Out of the death of the fox

The wolf, and the deer.

I was by the tenth grade mistress

Of the breathing art, took my enemies three two one.

I was Coach's girl, until I discovered pot and cigs.

My second wind, my second wind

Another ghost howls in my wrack and wreck.

controversial opinions: if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty, they are heroes

 

John Quiggins at Crooked Timber published a post last week about controversial opinions. He describes tweeting two of his controversial opinions, to see what response he would get. The two opinions are: there should have been more nuclear power plants built over the last 50 years, and less coal used; and two, world war 1 was a useless waste of life. 

Although I disagree with one, as Quiggins presents it, and agree with two, both of these opinions do not seem that far off the track. 

I have an opinion that is further off the track, I think. I think that if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg really did steal the "secret" of the atom bomb for the Soviets, then the world should name a holiday for them. That was one of the most humanitarian acts of the twentieth century.

I'd backup my argument by saying: the U.S. showed an incredible moral blindness, or perhaps immorality, with its turn from the thirties - when the official American position decried bombing civilians as a war crime - to the forties - when it made bombing civilians a pillar of its military strategy, up to and including the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Further, as the Korean war shows, unlimited targeting of civilians through airpower was the standard operating procedure for the American military. 

Given that mindset, if the U.S. had the monopoly of the atom bomb for another decade, it is probable they would have used it, perhaps extensively, against the Soviets, China, and perhaps in Korea. We would be living in a pretty awful world right now. 

So, god bless Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Or Julius - even the crank right that has howled about how Julius was guilty throws in a crumb that yeah, frying Ethel was a little overthetop, seeing as she was innocent. But you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette. And now, onto condeming moral relativism!

Cultural relativism, mon amour

 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 years  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.