Social utility of fat cats

 

Social utility of fat cats: the use and limits of wealth

 

We need to discuss the social function of rich people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, and the rare inventor, I see two functions: administration and investment.

The social cost of administration has gone up considerably since corporations changed their nature, breaking the old postwar pact between capital and labor. Here, I am going to put to one side the growth of LBOs and private equity firms that developed new forms of looting corporations in the eighties in order to concentrate on the radical elevation in compensation for the highest levels of management. This took off in the 80s. The explanation for this, from the point of view of intellectual history, is that neoclassical economists provided a model that justified it. Then, as an institutional addendum, business schools saw in this issue a chance to create an alliance with a trend in corporations that would pay great benefits: expanding its presence both on the campus and in the world of business. Harvard Business school in particular boasted a team of scholars who cheered on the insane compensations of the new class of CEO with arguments having to do with “aligning” the interests of the organization and the management: the famous principle-agent problem, the solution to which was to massively bribe the leader.  The rationale for this was paper thin – one had only to compare the compensation for Japanese upper management in the seventies to  Americans in the eighties to see that corporate productivity and return on investment did not depend on giving the CEOs carte blanche and stock options.

One must keep in mind, from a political point of view, that the lowering of the marginal tax rate as a result of bills passed in Reagan’s first two years in office was the necessary but not sufficient condition for the subsequent explosion in upper management compensation. The gesture normalized the transgression of the post war pact, which saw the worker in some relation to management. It gave boards of directors a material reason for allowing and even encouraging a practice that, at one time, would have looked like gouging or an exercise in contempt for the stakeholders in the firm. The normalization worked: in the nineties, Clinton Dems showed no inclination to take the punchbowl away from this party, thus cementing the new norm. Rich upper management types – donors! – were now consulted as oracles instead of targeted as moneybags. This, crucially, paid extra dividends once one was out of office. The shadow side of neo-liberalism was the creation of a whole new strata of well paid consultants, lobbyists, and general wheeler dealers. If corporation X could not bribe Senator Y, Senator Y’s children or spouse could perhaps be hired at excellent salaries to lobby, or perhaps to think hard at think tanks, which like business schools experienced a true boom in the eighties. These think tanks were being bankrolled by wealthy philanthropists, who, in time honored fashion, used this instrument to avoid taxes and exert power. As the CEO class became more and more entitled, there was considerable trickle down to the political class, which became abettors and scroungers at the till. Similarly, the CEO model spread to non-profits. College presidents and museum heads were soon being paid astonishing sums to do what previous college presidents and museum heads had done for considerably less. There was no visible increase in the quality of colleges or museums, but this didn’t matter: that standard was obsolete at this point.

Thomas Picketty, who studied changes in the source of wealth along with Emmanuel Saenz, targets the income derived from administration as a major driver of income and wealth inequality in his book Capital. For a quick rundown of this, I’d recommend Mike Konczal’s excellent essay in the Boston Review in 2014.

Even so, if the exorbitant sums paid to administrators had resulted in a great increase in the pay to the median worker, it might be said that, on some level, it works. But this hasn’t happened.   The very wealthy have seen their income growing by about 6 percent per year since the seventies – in fact, the starting point seems to be 1973. The middle has grown, if at all – it flatlined during most of the 00s – by one percent per year.  The workers who comprise the lower eighty percent have seen their wealth, in Piketty’s phrase, “collapse”. This reverses the trends from 1945 to 1973, when it was just the opposite, with the wealthiest having less percentage gains than the middle.

The left argues that we have no reason to pay these exorbitant costs for administration. There’s no evidence that these costs have been worth it to the average worker in developed economies. On the contrary, they’ve decisively shifted power away from workers. This power is not just reflected in flatlining wages and increased debt: it is, as well, a matter of expectations, of seeing the future of one’s society as something in which one can expect justice, exert political influence, and enjoy the fruits of our greatly increased national product: making our lives more comfortable, but allowing us, too, to take risks without facing the chance of being kicked out on the street. And so on down the generations, ad gloria mundi.

Along with administration, the wealthy play a positive social role by making investments. The argument here is, it is true, circular – we need to the wealthy to invest, and that investment makes them richer, making us need them more – but it isn’t bogus. Investment means that credit is available to the masses; the making accessible and available credit to workers, beyond the mingy terms of the company store, was one of the great capitalist victories of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union died for many reasons, but one of the unheralded ones was the persistent refusal of the Soviet planners to create an internal source of credit. This devastated the economy that recovered very well from World War II, but that, by the sixties, was in desperate need of credit to renovate and take advantage of the efficiencies offered by technological progress.

So there’s that. One can accept that the sphere of financial circulation is necessary, however, without accepting the premium that is now being paid for investment is necessary or efficient  – or accepting the massive shadow banking system that has developed according to a logic of its own. The proliferation of financial instruments whose sole purpose is a quick return – basically, the casinoization of the banking system – has only been a bad thing. Although it has been an excellent thing for the very rich.

Our tax system mirrors the priorities of the very wealthy – hence, the flat tax on capital gains. This is a scandal, and everytime it is pointed out that it is a scandal, everyone is scandalized, and the moment passes. Here, the wealthy have been very successful at telling a story that is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx told. It is perhaps the most successful propaganda ever to spread in America, if we discount the pseudo-science flogged by cigarette companies to keep regulation from happening in the fifties and sixties. The success of the cig companies can be measured in the obituary columns and the hospitals year after year. The success of the entrepreneur myth can be measured in bankruptcies, debt, and the decline in public investment is occurring not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the developed world save China.

The story made up by Schumpeter, and other conservative economists, went like this: wealth comes about because some risktaker seizes on an idea – a new invention or service, or a common one that can be done more efficiently, etc. – and founds a company. The company hires people, meaning that our risktaker is spreading the wealth. We need this person! And so the richer he is, the more he deserves our gratitude for graciously making such wealth for others.

This fairy tale is very popular on the right, and hardly disputed anymore on the left. Yet it is simply bogus. The wealth of the risktaker depends entirely on the services and commodities produced by the workers. The rightwing tale completely and neatly inverts reality. There’s no Gates, Jobs, or Bezos without the workers that embodied and carried forth the tasks that made them rich. All honor to their ideas – but they are ideas built on the labor, services and ideas of others. The indispensibility of the entrepreneur isn’t even believed by the banker class, which mouths this propaganda. As any glance at the history of the tech industry – where the myth of the wealthmaking wealthy is particularly strong – shows, when the idea of the risktaker becomes an actual company, his funders  – those VC angels – in the majority of cases replace him. The VC angels have no sentimentality about the “entrepreneur”. They know he’s a replaceable cog. Unless, of course, it is the man at the top of some Venture Capital company – then he’s an irreplaceable genius.

So, to put it in one sentence: the entrepreneur myth inverts cause and effect, for the malign purpose of justifying an unnecessary premium to the administrator.

But to return to the social function of the wealthy, it is at the convergence of administration and investment that we see the need, such as there is, for a wealthy strata. That need is not, however, for an uber-wealthy strata. We need to allow a premium for investment and for the higher administrative tasks. At least, given the present form of our economic system. But a premium can really be limited, and its limits should be defined empirically, not with an ideological elevator speech about freedom. In the fifties, the wealthiest level of Americans, the top 1 percent, owned 9 percent of the national wealth. They now own 35 percent. The bottom 80 percent own ten percent. This has happened in my lifetime. In my son’s lifetime, if global warming is seriously addressed and there is an America left, we can correct this. In my utopia, the top 1 percent would own five percent of the wealth, and the bottom 80 percent would own at least 50 to 60 percent of the wealth – leaving the next 19 percent with the spoils. That 19 percent is composed of administrators, professionals and people in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors.  These people have seen their incomes and wealth grow, but not in proportion to the freakishly wealthy upper 1 percent. That one percent – and even more the .01 percent – dominate the chart.

I’m conceding to the social function of the wealthy much that depends on the current system. That system itself has to adjust in a major way to the catastrophe it has generated and refused to confront – and who can predict just how that adjustment will be accomplished? But it should be pointed out that ecocide is not just a capitalist product – there was no country and system more devoted to ecocide than the U.S.S.R. As long as we refuse to rethink the treadmill of production, we will keep going the way of the Dead Planet. However, the acceleration in ecocide coincides, and not accidentally, with the increase in wealth inequality we have seen around the world. Economists, bizarrely, love to brag that really excessive poverty is decreasing, as if they had anything to do with it. This means, basically, that there are more families living on more than 2 dollars a day. Victory! But one can ask whether the price – a .001 percent that are living on 50 million dollars per day – is worth it. I for one say no. Inequality and the present system of industry are both factors in the same death march. One we can stop. And we can do that without rich people missing a single ten course lunch. The right will always complain it is a choice between the billionaire and the Gulag, but that is a false choice. We can choose to keep the wealthy without creating a wealth aristocracy. That’s the real choice.

wokeness - a political anthropology

I had one of those discussions last night in which the word “wokeness” wandered around like an uninvited guest at a birthday party.  “Wokeness”, at this moment in France, as a demonized thing that the Zemmourist right has decided is their ticket to ride. But for me, mostly, it is a fashionable phrase that will disappear in due course.

But then, as I was falling asleep, I had an odd thought: what if I’m… wrong?

1.

I grew up in a world in which the terms of political anthropology were clear: there was the left, and there was the right. One could draw a primitive graph showing American liberals a degree to the left and American conservatives a degree to the right, and that seemed to correspond to what we understood to be the stakes, which was about the working class and its consciousness and the owning class and its consciousness.

2.

Class has by no means disappeared, but consciousness has shifted, and with it the terms of our political anthropology.

I like to think of neoliberalism as a general term for a certain culture, and not just a certain political economic arrangement in the age of globalized capitalism. As a culture, it does work against the old solidarities by emphasizing the (false) dualism between the state and “private enterprise”. To put my cards on the table, I don’t at all buy this picture. The real question of governance is about alliances between something called the state and other entities, like multinational corporations. The upper echelon of both is on the same side, aiming for the same ends. However, putting this to one side, under neoliberalism the self is contoured more by the ecology of “private enterprise” than by the “state”. For example, Ferguson Missouri, which was subject to a massive study by the justice department, is a city where the police force, from outside, plays a massive role in controlling the mostly black population, but that population is almost completely plugged into businesses, small and large.

However, the political economy here is a culture in as much as this contouring of lives occurs in the absence of old solidarities – like an organized working class – and in the presence of a hyper-sensitive and sensational culture – a culture of affects. And this too is neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, the old successes of the civil rights movements of the late twentieth century are as important to the neo-liberal self-consciousness as “private enterprise”. Neo-liberalism is a synthesis of these two things.

Thus, when a neoliberal exults in breaking the glass ceiling (like Hillary Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg), this is not some cynical ploy, but the neoliberal culture in action. To my eye, feminism is about breaking the patriarchy, of which the corporation and the state are products – and thus, putting women in the CEO position is precisely as liberatory as replacing the guards in a prison with “screws” among the prisoners. Still a prison, my droogs and droogesses! But where I see putting a human face on an oppressive system, the neoliberal feminist sees my objection as a male reaction to female power.

3.

However, wokeness is proving to be as irritating to the neoliberal feminist as it is to the standard issue suit. Which says something about the position vacated by the decline of the left.

The shift towards individualism of a purely formal type has been followed by a shift towards living individualism. The individual lives, it turns out, and doesn’t just consume. Living involves memory. It involves the passions. It involves affect.

The “affect” effect, from the old Left point of view, is hokum. I think it isn’t, but I also think this kneejerk reaction has to do with the fraught history of affect discourse.

The old program of taking power from the capitalist and giving it to the producers has been dogged, on the right, with a long discourse about “envy”. It was fought against as not just bad for the economy, as conceived by the economist, but also as a bad feeling, akin to the sins of the pre-French Revolutionary days.

In fact, the program of the right, since the Revolution, is keenly attuned to the culture of feeling. In an ordered society, that culture produces the right feelings – in a disordered society, one for instance in which the producer somehow ends up in the governor’s seat, it produces hate and envy.

As it turns out, however, when capitalism triumphs, globally, the discourse of affect is retranscribed. What results is that the old rightwing position, which relied on a monopoly of guilt, is shaken, and the woke position as it were seizes the right to make guilty.

4.

I am  not happy about the current state of our political anthropology, but I do take it as a given. My hope is that wokeness is a necessary but insufficient condition for the making of a better, juster, and even happier world. That is the world I, wee little pea that I am, think is not only possible, but necessary if we are to  survive the catastrophes we have visited upon ourselves.

 

Open and Closed

  

Among the chief ornaments of the romance of philosophy is the high place accorded to the open, or to openness. Open the understanding or the mind or the eye, openness as a state of being – these are all on the plus side of the ledger. Heidegger, of course, is the great poet of openness in this tradition, charging openness with a numinous relationship to being that you can take or leave – but he is only building on a vast previous structure.

Closing, perhaps as a consequence, is never given high marks by philosophers. Closing one’s eyes or one’s understanding is, automatically, a bad thing. Even in building an argument, to come to a conclusion – a close – is often transformed, in the text, into opening up. After the Absolute spirit has tied itself in knots and done more tricks than Houdini, he at last is in a good place at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. You would think that the absolute spirit would be able to close up shop and go fishing. But no! He has to open up once again and go, in recollection, though the whole muddle again. No closing for it!

The open is, of course, closely aligned with liberty – in the philosophical sense. As for the philosophical sense of the closed – well, this is often associated with liberty’s end. Philosopher’s have spent surprisingly little time sussing out all the meanings of the closed. There are no doors in Plato’s Dialogues, and though, of course, the Greeks masked, there is no praise of hide and seek. The closed, at best, is an occasion for the open.

The only philosopher of note that has meditated on the closed is, I think, Bachelard. In Poetics of Space, he presents a strong sense of the house as an enclosure against the outside – and in particular against the oldest of seasons, winter. In winter, the open becomes hostile, the enclosed comfortable – in fact, the image of comfort. It is a comfort that belongs to the long lost age of huts and forests filled with snow and wolves. If the open is always a Greek summer, the closed is always a German winter.

 

This rap on the open and the closed lacks, for some reason, any reference to good old Georg Simmel (good old was his official title I believe), who wrote an essay pre-dating Bachelard's great series of phenomenologies and psychoanalyses: Bridge and Door.

Simmel also generated the prototypical Weimar style - before Weimar existed - and impressed it upon the generation of Benjamin and Kracauer. It begins with simplicities, and soon develops into an intricate world of references and echoes that shadow every paragraph. It is a style of knowingness that borders mysticism.

Anyway, the Bridge and Door essay, published as a feuilleton in a newspaper, proposes a way of looking at the outside as a unity of both connections and divisions. Everything is separate, and everything functions within a system. A bridge, for Simmel, is first an imaginative act, a way of seeing a river not as one thing, but as a thing that divides one bank from another. A primal image of division.

The connection that a bridge affords is contrasted with the closure that a door affords.

.... The door decisively represents that way dividing and bind are only two sides of the same act.

The person who first constructed a hut reveals, just as the first trailmaker, the specific human potential against nature, in as much as this person, out of the continuity and endlessness of space cuts out a parcel and shapes this into a particular unity in accordance with some meaning.

...

That the door is equally a functional link between the space of the human and everything that is outside of this sets up the division between the inner and the outer.

Exactly because it can also be opened, its closing gives the feeling of a stronger exclusion against all the beyond of this space more than a simply indivisible wall.

The latter is dumb, but the door speaks."

The door speaks. This mix of the philosophical and the lyrical is unbearable to a certain kind of common sense mind - a strong tradition in England. But it is music to another kind of mind, who enjoys leaps as well as the dull utilitarian tread of the deductive-hypothetical method.

the Flour massacre in Gaza

 
The softfocus NYT coverage of the extermination of Gazans continues. Israeli soldiers murdered at least a hundred starving Palestinians, and this is the lede" "The deaths of scores of Palestinians in a desperate rush for food aid in northern Gaza..."

The double talk, where Hamas terrorists mass murder Israelis and Palestinians mysteriously die in desperate rushes for food administered by a kindly Israeli government should make even the most hardened NYT subscriber question what is going on.
I am sure that there must be a way to place the blame where it belongs: on those Palestinians. Surely the Israeli soldiers were just playfully shooting bullets to entertain the scum – er, the Palestinians who might even someday earn the right to be human beings – but the ignorant and silly Palestinians kept trying to catch the bullets! Meanwhile, a settler group began building a colony in Northern Gaza. They were removed by Israeli soldiers who did not, for some reason, lay down a covering fire while doing so. Those with memories that reach back, oh, to last week will recognize the West Bank pattern. First, the settlers are sternly warned that this is not legal, then they are told don’t make too much noise, and then they are noisily defended by the Likud government – while the U.S. watches approvingly.  
Recently, Vox published a bullet pointed list of all the things Trump did for Netanyahu’s government – in order to assure us that Biden is a much better choice than Trump. Then folks on blue sky noticed that every bullet point was continued by the Biden government – except one, where the policy was changed last month. Here’s what Trump did, according to Zach Beauchamp at Vox:
 
Recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, disputed territory with Syria taken during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Shutting off funding for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (which Biden almost immediately restored and then temporarily suspended again amid a scandal about its employees participating in October 7).
Abandoning the decades-old US position that West Bank settlements are a key barrier to a peace agreement and eliminating longstanding restrictions on spending US taxpayer dollars in them.
Moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while closing the US mission to Palestine in the same city.
 
So, did Biden revoke recognition of the Golan Heights seizure, or punish Israel for its West Bank policy, or move the American Embassy back to Tel Aviv? No, he did not.
There is such a thing as a micro authoritarian regime. For instance, the regime that controls discourse about Israel in most of the West. The point is to produce a moral fatigue – to make the critics defend themselves from anti-semitism, even as the leader of Israel gladly pals up with real antisemites, from the neo-Nazi Bolsanaro to Orban to the Saudi royals to Trump. Moral fatigue is a great cushion for these mini authoritarian regimes, but when the bubble bursts it is not pretty – the constant conflating of Jews and Israel by the ultra-right in Israel and elsewhere is given to us as a problem in gaslighting, but is ultimately leveraging antisemitism in a horrific way.
The flour massacre yesterday was a crime that will soon go down the stream – to paraphrase a Rolling Stone song – who wants yesterday’s victims? Nobody in the world.

Gaza. Eight points

 

A few comments about the Mass murder in the Gaza and its apologists.

1.       1. Gaza is about 3/4ths the size of the Dallas metro area. Israel's apologists keep harping on how Hamas is making Gazans "human shields". This is like saying America makes Americans "human shields" by planting post offices and military bases in metro areas.

2.     2. Every Hamas member is not a soldier. And every hospital with Hamas personnel is not a "shield" for Hamas. In Tel Aviv, the largest hospital, Sheba Medical Center, has a military wing, RAM2. If Hamas bombed the SMC, I am perfectly sure the media would be disinterested in RAM2.

3.       3. Hamas was sustained by the Likud government for one reason: to divide Palestinians and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. The evil fruit of that policy is there for us to see: a discredited Palestinian authority on the West Bank, and a paramilitary in Gaza.

4.       4. Hamas is now a wildly popular party with Palestinians, since Hamas is the sole response to Israel's exterminationist policy. The West has abetted Israel's illegal occupation of the West bank and its long imposition of siegelike conditions on Gaza. Western leaders think they'll get a pass on this.

5.       5. This is not going to be a good year for the "center liberal". It is almost certain that, given Israel's policy, another 30 thou at a minimum will die in Gaza. Will be murdered in Gaza. Unlike the West's last fun starve em to death frolic in Yemen, which was to please a huge force in international petroleum, Saudi Arabia, Israel is a small unimportant economic nation, but a vastly important symbolic nation. Its support in the West goes back, pretty clearly, to the German-European mass murder of the Jews between 1939-1945. But by a cruel irony, the state founded to “make up” for this mass murder, Israel, encoded the same noxious ethnic nationalism in its constitution and actions. This was not unforeseeable – Martin Buber warned about this all the way back in the 1920s. Alas, in the shadow of the massive crime committed by the Nazis, a an uncriticizable nation took on the appearances and spirit of the worst European models. Or, for that matter, American models – the Wilsonian dream of the U.S. as a white Christian republic is a mirror image of the Likud ideal.

6.       6. When the U.S. occupied Iraq, no space whatsoever was givin in the "discourse" to the obvious: that the occupying force was going to face an "insurgency." Total surprise there - if you were a Bushite airhead. This obvious is similarly hidden now - except Bidenite aireheads play the gimp role. The Middle East of the dictatorships, with their investments in the West, are not going to hold out as a bulwark against the people who watch the Palestinians be hunted, starved and eliminated in short order, to a barrage of apologies that wouldn’t fool a halfwit.

7.       7. The nature of the apologetic for Israel hasn’t changed in fifty years. It is that Israel is uniquely picked on – look at all the resolutions against it at the U.N.! That proves precisely the opposite point. If the son of the mayor of a town got a number of tickets for speeding and illegal parking and simply tore them up, it would not be evidence that he was picked on, but that he was privileged. Similarly, the number of resolutions against Israel stands in stark contrast to the refusal to punish Israel for actions other countries are embargoed for, or even face armed suppression to arrest. Iraq had a much better claim to Kuwait than Israel has to either the West Bank or East Jerusalem, but in the latter case, that of Israel, the Western alliance has not fought for the Palestinians, nor enforced an economic blockade on Israel, nor demanded arms inspections. Imagine if the UN demanded Israel allow arms inspection of their nuclear capability. It wouldn’t happen.  Similarly, Russia has a much better case for "owning" Ukraine than Israel has for occupying East Jerusalem. Israeli fans always bring up the U.N., and always miss the point. From the p.o.v. of International Law, Israel is an outlaw nation. A nation, like North Korea and Pakistan, that illegally acquired nuclear capability. But the Israeli stans don't really care. For all the hokem about international law, we are still in the 1910s, and the South is still a colonial possession with no right to, well, any voice in things whatsoever.

witnesses

 

Historians in search of a method in the early twentieth century adopted a motto first: Cicero’s “Ne quid falsi audeat, ne quid veri non audeat historia”- which has been translate in various ways, like "Let him dare to say nothing false, nor fail to say anything true.” Unlike the study of, say, horses, the human historian is dealing mostly with humans who are always saying false things, and always believe, in one or another circumstance, false things, and who often have reasonable suspicions about saying true things, either because they are inconvenient and endangering, or because they invoke causes that are either utterly opaque or utterly incredible.

Yesterday I, an inhabitant of Paris since 2010, went for the very first time to visit Versailles. I went, I should say, in my first year in Paris to Fontainebleau, and I have gone back many times. Similarly, I have visited many of the famous Chateaux along the Loire. Versailles, however, spooked me. The King it celebrates, Louis XIV, is on my list of evil rulers. I am, by nature, a Fronde-ist, and that autocratic, bewigged harem keeper arouses an interior howl of protest that touches all things Quatorzieme.

Nevertheless, visiting it with Adam and A., I was suitably bowled over. After a while, though, the magnificence becomes rather sad. It is a palace that few people, few kings and queens, could inhabit with any comfort. It seems so utterly stripped of intimacy. Unlike Fontainebleau, there is no Renaissance behind this profusion of painting and sculpture; the nymphs have departed, replaced by grand effigies of nymphs.

Which is very unfair.

However, the melancholy of the place really hit me in the “war” room, which, with its paintings of Napoleon’s battles, of General Rochambeau at Yorktown, etc., didn’t exist in the Roi Soleil’s time, or at least with these paintings. What paintings! This vast wing is hung with paintings of battles that are on canvases taller than I am and wider than a big sofa. All are of battles won by the French. Hence, I believe, no Waterloo, no Sedan, no flight from Paris as the Nazis advanced.

A battle is an ontologically difficult thing – named usually for a place where it iconically happens, even if it happens in reality in many places at once. From the Bhagavad-Gita to The Charterhouse of Parma, the combatant and the combat have formed an uneasy duo, a witness to the mystery of events.

Moving across the room, overshadowed by these towering scenes of decorous slaughter and horseback glory, one longs for peace, for a much less bloody kind of pastoral. To traverse that room is to become, briefly perhaps, a pacifist.

In 1929, a book was published by a French-American historian, Jean-Norton Cru: Temoins – Witnesses. It provoked a scandal in France as intense as Remarque’s novel provoked in Germany. It asked about the combatant’s experience in histories that spoke about war from the point of view, exclusively, of the commanders and politicians, of those outside the charnel circle of combat. For Cru, the « Stendhal » paradox has been cruelly misunderstood.

When Fabrice del Dongo, a 17 year old idealist, “wanders through” the battle of Waterloo without finding it, so to speak, the paradox has been interpreted to mean that the combatant, the skin and bones and senses on the field, is disqualified as a witness to the battle as a whole – we must leave that to the commanders. Cru believed that Fabrice’s experience was, on the contrary, with its fragmentation, gaps in information, and zigzags exactly the battlefield experience history was failing to transmit:

“These questions, I asked them, like many another soldier without a doubt, from the day when, in 1914, the contact, the brutal shock of formidable realities of the the war reduced into bits my bookish conception of the acts and sentiments of the soldier in combat, a historical conception that, naively, I believed scientific. I then understood that I did not know war with a total ignorance of its foundation, its truth, all that which is applicable to every war, and that this ignorance brought in its train the ruin of all the opinions from whence it was derived.”

In this moment, Cru believed – and in this he was, perhaps unwittingly, a cousin to the modernist artists of his generation – that the problem was in imposing a totality on the mass of voices and consciousnesses, rather than letting that totality emerge from the mass of voices and consciousnesses. Just as Dublin on June 14, 1904, was the emergent structure of its dreaming and interior monologuing inhabitants, so too was World War 1 an emergent structure that command and the state claimed and defined by inverting the order of reality.

Cru’s equivalent to Fabrice del Dongo’s 18 June 1815 experience was Verdun, where he was posted on Jan. 17, 1917. He was part of a squadron relieving another squadron, which had been ordered to dig a trench. The trench, the new squadron found, was undug.

“The poor guys had tried, but even though they have finished other work in easier terrain, they couldn’t begin to penetrate this conglomerate of stones and dirt, all frozen together, as compact as concrete. Remember the rigors of that winter. On our arrival, the virtual trench was assigned to us and we were told that the whatever it takes of the corps had been so energetic that the work had been dubbed finished – in counting on warmer temperatures to permit digging the trench. But the freeze persisted. »

Thus, on the maps used by the generals, a trench existed because the trench had been ordered. Against this was the reality of the territory facing the men in Cru’s squadron, where the trench did not exist, and could not exist, in spite of the squad’s efforts, due to temperature and terrain.

Who, here, was lost? The grunt or the commanders?

“Our division inherited firstly the miseries of those poor soldiers : in the course of six days on the line, I lost my entire squadron, a quarter of the men were killed or wounded, three quarters were evacuated due to frostbite.”

Cru operationalizes a recognizably Cartesian dualism between the spirit and the body, but turns the cognitive hierarchy upside down: it is the body that knows, while the spirit loses itself in abstraction.

Cru was not a Marxist. But he wrote a book that significantly altered historiography, introduced the ways and means to write a history from the bottom up. A modernist history, if you will, and one that will never be plastered on the walls of wings of palaces.

 

Nemesis and the ultimate game

 

“Come on pretty boy
Can't you show me nothing but surrender”

Economists call it the Ultimate Game. James Surowiecki gives a good description of it:

“Take two people. Give them a hundred dollars to split. One person (the proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (fifty-fifty, seventy-thirty, or whatever) and makes the other person a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If he accepts the deal, both players get their share of the money. If he rejects it, both players walk away empty-handed.

The rational thing for the second person to do is to accept the offer, whatever it is, since even one dollar is better than nothing. But in practice this rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers are almost always rejected. Apparently, people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too much. Other experiments illustrate the same idea. Essentially, people are willing to pay to punish those they think are free-riding or acting unfairly, even when doing so brings them no material benefits.”

The Ultimate Game has been known since the beginning of civilization. Among other things, the Iliad might be considered to be a poem about the Ultimate Game. Naturally, it is presided over by a divinity, in this case, the goddess Nemesis.

It is curiously stirring that Herder turned to Nemesis-Adrastea in 1787, two years before the French Revolution (of which he was, at the beginning, an ardent supporter – and continued, even after the Terror, to feel was a necessary and ultimately good thing), at the very peak of the culture of enlightened hedonism.

Classicists today still find Nemesis a puzzling figure. She was a double goddess, or a goddess with two aspects. Herder’s essay on Nemesis is an attempt to understand this mystery – and to understand it on behalf of bright Nemesis, the fair goddess, mother of Helen.

The psycho-social heart of his essay is about happiness and indifference. He tries to understand how one deals with another’s happiness and unhappiness. In particular, why is it that “we sympathize more immediately and strongly with the unhappy than the happy”?

“And so the lightest kind of Nemesis was born, that is actually not envy, not jealousy, but a kind of indifference, that allows us no pleasing fusion with another. By raw spirits this breaks out in cold repulsion [Unwillen]; and the more the other shows off his happiness, the less he understands how to put a pleasing disguise over his advantages, the more he arouses, when not envy, yet repulsion against himself. For even those who would grant him his happiness, become indignant over the fact that he doesn’t enjoy it more wisely and know how to be measured in his enjoyment. This Nemesis lies in all hearts; it was even, as the Greek idioms show, the first that the language and mythology observed. It is, when it wildly breaks out, a daughter of the night, the companion of quarrels, hatred and schadenfreude; in brief, the Nemesis, who Hesiod describes in his Theogony as an evil Goddess. In noble spirits on the other hand, just this cold observation of the ethos of others in their happier hours preserves its pure essnce, and since it mixes neither with pain [Leide] or with pity [Mitleiden], it thus becomes the sharpest point in their scale of judgment. This is the good Nemesis, that looks on, cold and indifferent; but it also must be assuaged or reconciled, then it is an incorruptible judge of virtue and truth.

And how does one most honorable reconcile it? No otherwise than that one makes oneself the observer of one’s happiness and ethos; look there, the goddess with the measuring rod and bridle, who drives away black envy. She drives it away since she hats all passionate presumption and binds the presumptions of men with her bridle; and in this way alone does the good Nemesis defeat the evil one.” [141]

His biographer, Haym, writing in the 1880s, calls this essay an “archaeology of antiquity”. As LI has already pointed out, the appearance of an essay on Nemesis in the time period that saw the first fine extension of happiness from a mere passing feeling to both a norm concerning one’s total life and a norm concerning the political and economic arrangements of the social life already signals a certain dissent. This is Haym’s judgment:

“There is nothing so distinctive as the fact that just at this time, in the 80s, Herder was mightily grasped by this symbol. It is the symbol for the beautiful equilibrium into which with his being he committed his activity and art as a writer. This symbol could not have been predicted by the writing of his earlier period. After the thrusting and enthusiasm, the numerous incidents that lacked measure and that stepped over the line, in which his views, his appearance, his ambitious striving, his unbridled hate and love itself, his style, the whole way of being and art in which he moved, he was now at the point of recognizing the mean, adherence to noble forms, submission to necessity, to decorum, like Goethe, and expressed this with the appropriate words, as Goethe did with other words. He had to pay homage to Nemesis after his Sturm und Drang period had passed as Goethe had already, after traveling through Switzerland in 1779, wanted to erect an altar to Fortuna, Genius and Terminus.” (329)

 

The realistic narratives of the great novelists of the 19^th century are all written under the sign of Nemesis, which is a mark of their insight into the myth of realism – which floats within our uncertain emotional vocabularies.

 

Nemesis, I feel sure, will outlast us.