After the Future

Taking Offense

This is the week when the news is filled with Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, Paula Deen's cluelessness, and the end of DOMA, and so I've had a few things on my mind about setting and crossing lines in a pluralistic society. Where is it that we come together, where we feel a sense of shared identity; where is it that we respect, even celebrate the differences? Let me also say that I am as allergic to pc prescriptions from the left as I am traditionalist prescriptions from the right. The challenge is to be guided by a sense of human decency and awareness that we're all in this together, no matter what our differences. 

I teach a class tp undergraduates about communications, and one of the exercises I require of my students is that they tell a story joke. The idea is to give them an opportunity to learn to manage their nerves, to work on a playful delivery style, and to make the point that a joke's set up is to its punchline, as in other messages, exposition is to insight. Telling a joke without a punchline is like presenting information without connecting the dots. A story joke is one of the most common experiences we have of experiencing an "insight" when we "get it". 

So at the beginning of the quarter I provide some tips and guidelines, and one of them is not to be (too) offensive. I'm ok with off-color jokes and street vernacular as long as they don't get too graphic in the description of body parts and functions. I mean, we're talking undergraduates here. Over the years, almost all students have toed that line pretty well. There have been a few jokes that crossed it, but it happens very rarely, and I let it go. I'd be more concerned if it were the rule rather than the exception. No one has complained, but my listening to my students jokes, most of which are excellent and well told, has caused me to reflect about what that line is. Is there is any way of objectively defining it?

For me there are a few subjective indicators about where that line is located. One  is a sense of irritated boredom, as when someone indulges in a cliche and somehow thinks it's brave or clever. The incessantly banal dropping of F-bombs has this effect on me. Another is a "cringe" effect when someone says something that is socially inept, like arriving at a party in a tuxedo when every one else is in shorts and t-shirts. But the worst indicator is when I feel exposed to an ugliness that makes me feel the need of a shower after it.

I've tried, for instance, to go with friends to local comedy clubs, and each time I have felt that need of a shower. I won't go anymore. I honestly don't understand why anybody would after one or two tries. But then lots of people like Quentin Tarantino movies. Does the attraction come from the gratuitousness, the pointless, witless, stimulation for the sake of stimulation? I found the battle scenes and the endless violence in the Lord of Rings  banal in this way. but not particularly offensive. Game of Thrones is a mixed bag. It is not often banal, but I found the Theon torture scenes gratuitous and offensive. I wasn't, however, offended by the 'red wedding' scene. It was shocking, but it wasn't gratuitous. Gratuitous means that it is presented as an end in itself--to shock or titillate for no other reason than to shock or titillate. 

Anyway, that gives you some sense about my sensibility, but let me get back to my students and their jokes. Several weeks ago I had an international student, a sweet Chinese woman, tell a joke that fit into the 'cringe' category. I don't remember it well enough to repeat it here, but it involved her mimicking with a thick Chinese accent an African-American hip-hoppy dialect. It had a mildly racially offensive subtext, but it was clear to me she hadn't a clue what she was saying. It was offensive, but you know, in the way that Michael in The Office is when he blunders in his well-meaning but clueless way. It wasn't ugly. 

I didn't think much of it until I got an email from one of the students in the class who told me he found the joke offensive. He was not African American, but openly gay. So I went back and forth with him on it. My argument was basically this: Come on, let's not be so pc. Clearly there was no malice intended. At worst it was just a socially awkward moment. What matters most is the intent, not the actual content. There was not an ounce of mean spiritedness in this young woman. Lighten up. 

But he was persistent, and we met to talk about it. This student is a very nice kid. Thoughtful, kind, and one of the brightest kids in the class, and I admired his persistence. He was not coming from a place I would call pc. So I sparred a little with him. I told him I'd rather err on the side of people speaking freely with a loosely defined line rather than getting too restrictive. How was what the girl said any different from Jon Stewart mimicking Italian gangsters or African Americans' hip-hop idiom? And then I said in reference to the slightly off-color joke that he had told, "Who's to say that your joke wasn't offensive to someone in the class with conservative religious sensibility? Where do you draw the line?"

His counterargument was that racial and sexual minorities were in a different category because of the history. Even when there is no malice intended, the nerves are raw, and so for these groups there are some things that are out of bounds that might be acceptable for others. His goal was to get me to rule jokes out of bounds if they are about racial and sexual minorities. 

He was right. It's one thing to make a joke about Irish drunkenness or Italian mafiosi because those groups have cultural capital that insulates them from the barb, and they can shrug it off. Groups that don't have that capital cannot shrug it off. It stings deeply and will continue to sting deeply until they have acquired the same level of capital. But what about Christian Fundamentalists? Should jokes about them be out of bounds, too? He thought that was different, perhaps because he saw them as his oppressor. Interesting. It struck me that it's the difference between a minority that is slowly losing cultural capital versus minorities that are slowly gaining it. All feel the sting, and if it's cruel for one, it's cruel for the other.

I come from a world where I expect to get teased, where friends and family are not shy about reminding me about embarrassing things I've done and mistakes I've made. But they do it in a genuinely goodnatured way; I take it and I give back. Its value lies in keeping us grounded and remembering where we come from. I enjoy being part of a culture in which that kind of banter is how you show affection. If I were not the butt of such teasing, it would be insulting.I would feel left out. It would be as if they didn't respect me enough to trust I could take it in the right way, that I hadn't enough confidence and capital to play on their level. 

I also come from a world where I hear over and over that the Irish were once a despised minority, and the Irish got over it, why can't other minorities? Why do these other minorities need special treatment? Well, I never experienced being a hated minority, and I don't know what it's like to feel socially "unequal", even if my ancestors did. But I don't have to have had that experience to understand that basic decency requires stopping when someone asks you to stop, even if what you are doing is well intended. 

I look forward to the day when people in the African-American and LGBT communities will have enough cultural capital that we who are not from those communities can tease and tell jokes about them and expect to be teased and joked about in return. I hope we don't give up on our ability to do that as a way of showing our respect and affection for one another. But we are not there now. We won't be until there is a level of trust and natural affection that can exist only between people who take for granted that they are social equals.

It's one thing to live in a society in which one possesses legal equality; it's another to live in a world where equality is an experience you take for granted in ordinary, everyday social transactions. That's what Paula Deen doesn't understand yet, and why her cliche claim that southern Whites have more affection for Blacks better than than northerners do. The affection that Southern Whites have traditionally claimed they have for Blacks is like the affection they have for their dogs and horses. It has not been an affection for their social equals.

I had a student Thursday ask me if telling a joke about transvestites would be ok. A few months ago I would have told him to go for it. This time I told him to come up with something else.

The Historical Norm

A description of Germany around 1618:

The peasantry for the most part lived in ingnrance of the events happening about them, suffered their efffects mutely, and broke into revolt only when conditions became intolerable. Among townsfolk a better diffusion of knowledge made possible the rudimentary expression of public opnion, but only the relatively wealthy and well educated consistently assimilated or made use of of political information. The great majority of people remained powerless, ignorant, and indifferent.  From The Thirty Years War, by C.V. Wedgwood, written in 1938.

Plus ca change, . . .

SCOTUS Rulings Lost in the News

From today's NYT piece on the Robert's court 'steady move to the right':

In lower-profile cases, the court’s rulings continued to be good for business interests and bad for the Obama administration.

“We shouldn’t lose sight of the court cementing its legacy as the most pro-business court in the modern era,” said Lee Epstein, who teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California and helped write a recent study of the Roberts court’s business rulings.

The U. S. Chamber of Commerce had another successful year. The court cut back on class actions, favored arbitration and made it harder to sue the makers of dangerous drugs and employers accused of workplace discrimination.

“Anyone doubting that the most important story of the Roberts court is its business rulings has not been paying enough attention,” said Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal group. “This term’s 5-4 rulings, all favoring the chamber, move the law sharply to the right and to the great detriment of consumers, employees, and other Americans trying to get their day in court.”

As American liberals rejoice about inevitable gains in the cultural sphere, they shrug about continuous losses in the economic sphere. I am amazed at how little attention Americans pay to the way power works in this country. 

John Oliver on The Daily Show in reference to the Snowden leaks remarked last week that Snowden did not reveal any illegality or wrongdoing, and that was the most disturbing part--that it's all legal now. [But is it?] In the next ten years we will be finding that all kinds of injustices are perfectly legal, and that there is no recourse. 

***

Another word about Brazil. Also in today's NYT is an article about the amazing corruption among Brazil's politicians: about a third of the Brazilian congress is currently under indictment, but even when legislators are convicted, they only very rarely go to jail:

Almost 200 legislators, or a third of Brazil’s Congress, are facing charges in trials overseen by the Supreme Federal Tribunal, according to documents compiled by Congresso em Foco, a prominent watchdog group. The charges range from siphoning off public funds to far more serious claims of employing slave labor on a cattle estate or ordering the kidnapping of three Roman Catholic priests as part of a land dispute in the Amazon.

Scholars of Brazil’s judicial system say legislators in corruption scandals often avoid jail, in part because of the special judicial standing enjoyed by about 700 senior political figures in the country, including all 594 members of Congress and senior cabinet members.

The standing allows these people to be tried only in the Supreme Federal Tribunal, producing years of delays in an institution bogged down by many other pressing matters in Brazilian society. Until 2001, politicians could not even be tried without the authorization of Congress, a function of the deference traditionally paid to elected officials in the legal system.

But here's what the recent protests have wrought:

Just as surprising to many Brazilians, Congress is now scrambling to cobble together a response. This week, legislators approved a bill to use oil royalties for education and health care. The Senate, the upper house of Congress, gave its nod to stiffer penalties for corruption, and the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, shot down an attempt to rein in corruption investigators. Senators are elected for eight-year terms, while members of the Chamber of Deputies serve four-year terms.

Also, a powerful congressional committee approved a measure to lift the veil of secrecy when lawmakers vote on whether to strip fellow members of Congress of their seats.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Federal Tribunal ordered the immediate arrest of Natan Donadon, a congressman found guilty in 2010 of embezzlement — a rare attempt to try to imprison a sitting congressman. The last time the high court made a similar move was during the military dictatorship in 1974, when justices ordered a legislator arrested for opposing a visit by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Still, the fury builds in one protest after another.

“These wolves, that trash over there, they rob the people, they feast on the meat of the people by stealing public money destined to do things for us,” said Caio Fabio de Oliveira, 45, a civil servant in the Health Ministry, who was among the demonstrators against Congress this week in the capital, Brasília. “It is shameful for the Brazilian people; I work for the government, and I’m ashamed every day.”

Only sustained public outrage gets anything done in the public interest. It's no different in the US than in Brazil. For Americans to become outraged, maybe the corruption and blatant injustice has to become as outrageous in the US as it is now in Brazil. If current trends hold, it will be there sooner than we think. The US government is already an publich embarrassment, just not yet an outrageous one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zizek and Christianity's Perverse Core

Salon has an atheist write a critique of Hitchens' critique of religion. He accuses Hitchens of intellectual dishonesty, but I guess in Salon's view, you have to be an atheist to have any credibility in pointing that out. Nevertheless, it's worth a read. Sample graf:

As critics have observed since its publication, one enormous problem with Hitchens’s book is that it reduces religion to a series of criminal anecdotes. In the process, however, virtually all of the real history of religious thought, as well as historical and textual scholarship, is simply ignored as if it never existed. Not for Hitchens the rich cross-cultural fertilization of the Levant by Helenistic, Jewish, and Manichaean thought. Not for Hitchens the transformation of a Jewish heretic into a religion that Nietzsche called “Platonism for the masses.” Not for Hitchens the fascinating theological fissures in the New Testament between Jewish, Gnostic, and Pauline doctrines. Not for Hitchens the remarkable journey of the first Christian heresy, Arianism, spiritual origin of our own thoroughly liberal Unitarianism. (Newton was an Arian and anti-Trinitarian, which made his presence at Trinity College permanently awkward.) Not for Hitchens the sublime transformation of Christian thought into the cathartic spirituality of German Idealism/ Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. And, strangely, not for Hitchens the existential Christianity of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and, most recently, the religious turn of poststructural thought in Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek. (All of these philosophers sought what Žižek calls Christianity’s “perverse core.”) And it’s certainly not that he didn’t have the opportunity to acknowledge these intellectual and spiritual traditions. At one point he calls the story of Abraham and Isaac “mad and gloomy,” a “frightful” and “vile” “delusion,” but sees no reason to mention Kierkegaard’s complex, poetic, and deeply felt philosophical retelling of the story in “Fear and Trembling”. In this way, Hitchens is often as much a textual literalist as the fundamentalists he criticizes.

"Christianity's perverse core"? I've been familiar with Zizek as a rising philosophical star, but wasn't familiar with the phrase or his quest. So to find out what he means by this peculiar phrase I, of course, googled it, and found this article at the top of the stack: "What would Zizek Do: Redeeming Christianity's Perverse Core", which reviews several of his books. It, too, is worth a read in its entirety. Sample graf:

Slavoj Žižek's subtitle - "The Perverse Core of Christianity" - seems to promise an account of all that is corrupt in the Christian faith. Readers aware of Žižek's reputation as a leading Leftist theorist but unfamiliar with the Slovenian philosopher's thinking might open The Puppet and the Dwarf expecting a neo-Nietzschean or post-Marxist critique of Christianity. But Žižek doesn't censure Christians for subscribing to a 'slave morality' or becoming addicted to an 'opiate for the masses.' Instead, it's liberals, especially Western intellectuals with disavowed spiritual tendencies, whom Žižek targets for rebuke. Their misguided ethical convictions and corresponding lack of political gumption have facilitated the spread of a global corporatism that benefits a relatively small economic elite at the expense of the world's oppressed masses. With the need to combat this exploitative New World Order informing his philosophizing, Žižek prescribes a dose of Christianity to an anemic and largely impotent Left he diagnoses as suffering from a debilitating malady - postmodern ethical relativism.

Exactly. And then this interesting paragraph:

The Left must understand that its ultimate commitment is not to liberal tolerance or "all-encompassing Compassion" (32) but to eliminating material inequality. Radical changes in the social order are needed, and a crucial starting point is to denaturalize the existing capitalist order, to make people aware that market forces are not omnipotent. But consciousness raising alone will not suffice. What's needed is a willingness to introduce a "radical imbalance into the social edifice" (95). Žižek's wager is that "Christian love" - defined as "a violent passion to introduce a Difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others" (33) - can be a catalyst that will provoke the Left to resume collectively its emancipatory struggle.

The review goes on to talk about the problem of belief:

Žižek does contribute something new to Anglo-American debates about the status of belief in postmodern societies with his account of disavowed belief, which begins with a simple premise: "today, we believe more than ever" (6). The catch is that contemporary believers are confused and fail to recognize the extent or the nature of their beliefs, particularly when it comes to "religious matters" (5). Thus, to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's oft-cited formula of cynical reason - "I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it ... " - Žižek adds a final clause: " ... because I don't know what I believe" (5).

I wrote a couple of posts about the problem of "believing" in 2006 that I think still hold up pretty well. Here's an excerpt from one of them that relates to the reviewer's theme:

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said.  And it starts with the acknowledgment of the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture. ‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another.  And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

Now I don’t want to equate this popular idea of believing with the deeper and more mysterious phenomenon we recognize as religious faith, but it bears a family relationship to it. The practical benefits of belief have a long heritage from St. Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, to Pascal’s “wager” to the pragmatism of William James, to the prescriptions of our current health care professionals who have noticed that people who have religious practices live happier, healthier lives. 

This is just another way of saying that the metanarrative precedes the ethical.  What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. Whatever narrative we ultimately choose opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to.  But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply long for. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. Even nihilism.  If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals.

To relate this to themes I've been writing about recently, it's one thing what I believe in isolation; it's not unimportant for me and those who interact with me, but the health of a culture depends on the narrative it embraces as a collective project. The argument here for years has been that when a culture is decadent, it has no collective sense of future possibility. In America this means that we have reverted to two basic narratives. One that embraces "fragmentation" as normative and desirable as Libertarian and much of academic postmodern secular thought do, and the other is a reversion to an old narrative that makes no sense anymore, as cultural conservatives do. (Reversion is not the same as retrieval, which is essential for living into the future.) I reject both fragmentation and nostalgic reversion.

The review also points out that Zizek's fundamental philosophic project is to reactualize (retrieve) German Idealism, a project I have deep sympathies with. I guess Zizek will be on my summer reading list.

Mud

I saw Jeff Nichols' film Mud last night, and it's one of those couple-of-times-a-year movies you wake up the next morning with on your mind. It's very, very rich. This movie asks important questions about love and truth, about the truth of youthful idealism, and its fierceness in a spirited, young soul, and also about its limits, its need to be tempered. It connects with a number of things I've been thinking about lately, so this is going to ramble a bit as I try to think out loud here about them. It won't make a lot of sense unless you've seen the movie, so see it.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious about its allusions to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, in this case two fourteen-year-old boys, Ellis and Neckbone, and then the runaway "Mud" as Jim. But it's important background information, because the "Tom "and "Huck" archetypes are central to the way the movie plays out. They are Cain and Abel, Cal and Aron, in Steinbeck's East of Eden (See my post "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves"). Neckbone is shrewd, calculating, and suspicious. Ellis is purehearted, naively idealistic, and willing to put everything on the line for a noble cause. This movie on one level is about the necessary creative tension between these types, and how anyone is lost if he it too much of one or the other. The Toms need Hucks in their lives, as the Hucks need Toms. There's the image of Juniper, who is Huckless, so to say, and the image of Tom Blankenship, taking the wounded Mud into the open water at the end of the film. Blankenship is an image of Neckbone all growed up. 

Insofar as this is a story about Ellis and Mud, it's a more about Huck than it is about Tom. I think different cultural eras tend to celebrate one or the other. The Victorian era celebrated Hucks, but we live in an era now in which Toms are the dominant prototype, so it's refreshing to see a movie where Huck gets his due. In this era where cynicism, irony, calcuated self interest are the norms, we need more of the unreserved idealism of the Huck type these days. We also need to understand his need of a Tom in his life--and Tom's need for Huck. It's never one or the other; it's both together. This movie understands that. It is about Ellis's learning the limits of his idealism without becoming cynical, and it's also about Neckbone's being won over to Ellis's idealistic cause. It is Neckbone and another Tom Sawyer figure, Tom Blankenship, who in the end are essential for getting things to work. Huck types seem to walk with their feet not quite touching the ground. Toms are very, very grounded in the real world and know how it works and how to work it. 

After the movie, I was thinking about the Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now"--particularly the verse: "I've looked at love from both sides now/from give and take, and still somehow/It's love's illusions I recall/I really don't know love at all." It's song about a romantic idealist experiencing the thud of falling into a world that does not correlate with her ideals. This movie has a lot going on in it, but at its root it's a movie about love in a fallen world. The difference between Neckbone and Ellis lies in that Neckbone, like all Sawyer types, instinctively knows and accepts the world in its fallenness and accepts it as normal. But Ellis doesn't know that yet, and the challenge for all Huck types is to learn the lesson without becoming cynical. Ellis learns that people are not how we idealize them--they are more complex than that--and yet while people disappoint us they are nevertheless worthy of our affections and of our loyalty. 

***

So first, a few thoughts about romantic idealization. When we fall in love, do we fall in love with something that we make up? Is it merely a subjective projection? Or is it based on a perception or intuiton of something real about the beloved? Is it all hormones, or is there something else going on? From the Sawyer/Neckbone perspective, it's all about hormones and nice titties and getting to second base;  from the Huck point of view, it's about touching the eternal. So for the Huck type, less than for the Sawyer type, it's an important issue: Do we see accurately or falsely when we are in the exalted state we call being "in love"? Is it an inflated delusion, or is it real? Was there nothing real about it, or was there something in it that points to a reality that we have fallen away from? Is falling in love a deluional moment, or is it a privileged one?

Or is it both? In Charles Williams's The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante he tries to answer this question:

What Dante sees is the glory of Beatrice as she is 'in heaven'--that is, as God chose her, unfallen, original; or (if better) redeemed; but at least, either way, celestial. What he sees is something real. It is not 'realer' than the actual Beatrice who, no doubt, had many serious faults, but it is as real. Both Beatrices are aspects of one Beatrice. The revealed virtues are real; so is the celestial beauty.

There is nothing new or uncommon about this experience; it is in a great many novels and films and plays and songs; our modern songs hold it as much as the lyrics of the metaphysical poets. All that is new is the seriousness with which Dante treats it and the style in which he expresses it. The lady creates in her lover the sensation of supreme content. It does not last. Why not? 

Dante, at least, had a perfectly definite answer. Everything desires its own perfection: "in this all desires are appeased and for the sake of this all is desired."  Our desires are everlasting, and to see an image of perfection is not the same thing as to be perfect ourselves, which until we are, possession, even the possession of Beatrice, must lack perfection. This is what all the talk of 'the ideal' comes to; the ideal can never satisfy us until we are [ourselves] ideal.  He who pursues any hope of satisfaction, without his own conditioning perfection is bound, sooner or later, straight for the Inferno.

"It does not last. Why not?" It's a cliche of the Romantic tradition that anyone who has fallen in love feels as though he or she is touching eternity. Well how can anything eternal not last? The fervent commitments of lovers to love forever are sincerely felt, but sooner or later the exaltation passes, and you are with an everyday human being, and sooner or later every romantic has the moment when he asks: what was I thinking?  Were the Sawyers right all along? Does that mean that one's perception of the beloved while being 'in love' was not knowing love at all?

I like Williams's answer, which is that No, it is not delusional; it's partial--it's a glimpse. It's a temporary beholding of the beloved as God created her to be, but not now as she is. And the glimpse is all that we, in our own imperfection, are capable or worthy of. It's a goad, so to say, that motivates our own moral development. A sneak peak at the communion that is our telos in the economy of salvation. It is the first wine given to guests at the Wedding of Cana; the second wine, the wine transformed or Christified, is the wine that we most deeply long for. For it is our own blood that is water turned to wine, it's a transformation we celebrate  in every mass--it's not just the transubstantiation of the bread and wine, but our own.

And if nothing else a lifelong, committed relationship lives faithfully in the memory of that glimpse as revealing a proleptic truth. Fidelity is in large part about living now into the future while holding fast to a memory of intuited truths, trusting in the truth of those intuitions while letting the fire of experience temper them. And the task becomes one of loving the real person as she is now but also living in the memory of her and of oneself as temporarily gifted perceivers of the beloved not as she or I am now, but as a future possibility. It is in this sense that faith--the practice of fidelity--is a virtue, a moral work, a work that transforms water into wine, and wine into blood, which is, to use William's phrase, a conditioniong of our own perfection. With such wine coursing in our veins we will become drunk with goodness, and that's the goal of moral effort, to become effortlessly, unihibitedly good. I for one do not long to be washed by the blood of the lamb, but to be inebriated by it. 

***

Back to Mud. Ellis is the fervent, open-hearted, naive idealist whom we see falling into the real world with several thuds. His parents' marriage is breaking up; he learns that his "girlfriend", May Pearl,wasn't ever his girlfriend; he learns that his mission in the service of true love, the reunion of Mud and Juniper, is a failure because they are not the Tristan and Isolde he idealized them to be. He comes to see Mud through Juniper's and Tom's eyes, confronts Mud, screams out his disappointment in him, and runs away falling into a mucky hole full of water mocassins and gets bit. Thud in the mud. Welcome to the fallen world, Ellis--the world ruled by serpents who see a dove like you as a fool and will eat you alive. (Is his name an allusion to Ellis Island, through which poor Europeans expecting to find a world where the streets were paved with gold found instead Lower Eastside tenements? Thud.)

Mud is a wonderfuly ambivalent character wonderfully realized by Matthew McConaughey. Mud appears out of nowhere and disappears at the end. He's like a figure in our dreams, but he's not. We never know whether to believe him. He's a murderer on the lam, and who knows how much of what he says is a desperate con? I found myself half the time looking at him like Neckbone--this guy is trouble, let's get out of here--and half the time time like Ellis--there's something noble in him, and he is worthy of my loyalty and commitment--and in the end it turns out that Ellis's intuition was correct.

Mud, like Ellis, is very much a Huck Finn type. He's Ellis all growed up. They are kindred spirits. Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon, is a Tom type like Neckbone, and so is the "assassin", Tom Blankenship, played by Sam Shepherd. Both Juniper and Tom tell Ellis that Mud is a liar, but it turns out they are the liars and everything Mud said was true. But Mud was snakebit--he already had his 'thud' experience, but the wonderful thing about him was that he was faithful to the memory of Beatrice/Juniper despite her being, from the point of view of Sawyerian calculation, not worth it. That's Tom Blankenship's point of view: Mud is a fool, and his foolish love for Juniper has made him vulnerable to manipulation by her. She's eating him alive. But there's more to Juniper than that. Tom can't see it, but Mud does. 

But here's the thing about the Tom Sawyer types: they are often deeply moved by and love the Huck types who come into their lives. They represent a nobility of spirit that they find disorienting and hard to understand, but it points to something that they long for. It's why May Pearl, the girl Ellis thinks is his girlfriend, tells him to give her a call. He's just an 8th Grader, and she's much older, but he came to her rescue by recklessly punching a senior who was harrassing her in the 7-11 parking lot. Such guilelessness, such lack of calculation, such purity of heart blows Tom types away; it crashses their frame, soto say, and awakens hidden possibilities in them. It's as if they were waiting all their lives for such a one to find them. And that's why on their "date" later she kisses him. There is such a sweentess in the scene, and it is so lush with misunderstanding. Juniper is May Pearl all growed up. 

Tom types like May Pearl and Juniper are smitten by the Huck types', but cannot live for long in their idealized world, and while they love them, can never live with them--unless they come down to earth. It usually plays out with the Tom types admiring but never really being able to stick for long with the Hucks that come into their lives. They are too restless, and they see Hucks a nice guys they want as friends but not as lovers--perhaps in some cases because they feel that they can never measure up. They can never be the Beatrices Hucks see them as, and they shouldn't feel that they should measure up. It's not their job to.

I think this describes Juniper: in the end she refuses to go with Mud as a act of love; it sets him free because she knows she is not worthy of him, and that she will be the destruction of him. (The story of Cal and Abra in East of Eden points to a way that the two can get together, but it's easier, I think, when the girl is the Huck Type and the boy is the Sawyer type.)  

There's more to say, but this is enough for now. I might add other thoughts in comments later. I want to say something about the Carver family, particularly about Senior and how he represents a perversion of the Huck type that typifies many on the religious right--religious moralism, or the kind of rigid code-centered morality that we think of as Victorian is a deep form of alienation--it's what keeps nice Huck types merely nice, and not transformed into something deeply, truly drunk with goodness. But I want to talk about dreams, fantasy, and truth in a broader sense. Why is it that it's love's illusion we recall? Is it really true that we don't know love at all? 

Watching Brazil

From "The Social Awakening in Brazil" in the NYT today:

For all of Brazil’s achievements over the past few decades — a stronger economy, democratic elections, more money and attention directed toward the needs of the poor — there is still a huge gap between the promises of Brazil’s ruling leftist politicians and the harsh realities of day-to-day life outside the political and business elite.

The World Bank lists Brazil as the world’s seventh-largest economy, but puts it in the bottom 10 percent on income equality. Its 15-year-olds rank near the bottom in global rankings of reading and math skills. A succession of its top politicians have been implicated in flagrant payoff schemes and other misuse of public funds.

Brazil is interesting, because along with India, China, and Indonesia, it's among the big four emerging economies that will be changing the game in the next century. The situation in Brazil is interesting because everybody was so surprized by it. Protests were triggered by bus fare hikes in Sao Paulo, but they spread throughout the country in ways that no one, including the organizers, expected. Brazil has a center-left government, but seems just as clueless and out of touch as the center-right government in the U.S.

The U.S., too, is among the worst in income inequality. So why aren't we out in the streets? This from an article in the Washington Post in May:

Income inequality in the United States and Latin America — particularly Chile and Mexico — has tended higher than in Europe. This trend continued into 2010. The top five most unequal countries (in descending order) were Chile, Mexico, Turkey, the United States and Israel. Portugal, the European nation with the highest income inequality, was ranked sixth:

 

 Source

Interesting that Turkey is in the top five there, too. Americans aren't out in the streets becase the GDP per capita is around $48K (World Bank rank 16), while in Brazil it's around $12K (rank 56) and Turkey $10K (rank 64), so Americans still have more of a cushion. But the question that will determine whether there is future unrest in the US has more to do with the direction things are going. There are no market mechanisms that will solve growing income inequality, so the longer American elites cling to their Neoliberal ideology, the worse things will get. Something has to give sooner or later. 

Repost--Word of the Day: Endo-colonialism

From a post about Paul Virilio interview in January 2011. I thought it was interesting in the light of some of the posts lately about the NSA, etc. Virilio is clearly a dude who fears the control agenda of the technocracy:

. . . Virilio suggests that political economy cannot be subsumed under the political economy of wealth, with a comprehension of the management of the economy of the state being its general aim. Indeed, for him, the histories of socio-political institutions such as the military and artistic movements like Futurism show that war and the need for speed, rather than commerce and the urge for wealth, were the foundations of human society. . . .

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, Virilio's cultural theory is concerned with what he calls the third, or, the transplant revolution — the almost total collapse of the distinction between the human body and technology. Intimately linked to the technological enhancement and substitution of body-parts through the miniaturisation of technological objects, the third revolution is a revolution conducted by militarized technoscience against the human body through the promotion of what the Virilio calls 'neo-eugenics'. Such developments range across Virilio's criticisms of the work of Stelarc, the Australian cybernetic performance artist, to his concerns about the eventual fate of the jet-pilots in the Kosovo war. This is because, for Virilio, both Stelarc and the jet-pilot represent much the same thing: "the last man before automation takes command".  Nevertheless, it should be stressed that Virilio's criticisms of automation are closely connected to the development of his concept of endo-colonization — what takes place when a political power like the state turns against its own people, or, as in the case of militarized technoscience, the human body.

I've had Paul Virilio's Information Bomb on my shelf for several years and finally got around to reading it. It's not a book you can enter into easily, so I started hunting around for articles to provide some context.  The best I found was the one quoted from above by Brit John Armitage.

Virilio is in that world of 'French Theory' with Baudrillard, Lyotard and other French postmodernist cultural theorists, but rejects 'postmondern' as a word that describes his work.  He's a Christian, probably with more in common with guys like Jacques Ellul and Rene Girard--or even Marshall McLuhan--than the academic postmodernists. He's all about defending the 'human' against what appears to be an inevitable mechanomorphic transformation. In an interview Virilio says,

People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God. Many people question their religious identity today, not necessarily by thinking of converting to Judaism or to Islam: it's just that technologies seriously challenge the status of the human being. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God. In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.

The machine God, to use a wobbly Star Wars analogy (since I've been rewatching those films recently), is the dark side of the force, and so it's a question whether there will be any kind of robust opposition from those who have any feel for the light side. In other words, the only stance from which human resistance to the machine God and its project to dominate the human is in some embrace of that which transcends the machine.  We will have to chose at some point--if not already--between the seductiveness of the machine God and the freedom offered by the transcendent God.

But that's an issue for another day.  I'm more interested today to discuss his idea of 'endo-colonialism', which formulates more precisely what in a more inchoate form I've been groping to articulate here in this blog, particularly when it comes to the disappointments I feel about the Obama administration. 

We're seeing in Egypt now what happens when the people revolt against an endo-colonialist regime. But that kind of revolt could never take place in the U.S. because America has already in place the technologies and legal infrastructure that would enable the state to nip any such revolt in the bud. Those kinds of revolts are still only possible where governmental control is still rather primitive. It has become abundantly clear since Obama has taken over that he has no intention of retarding America's long-term trend toward becoming a tightly sealed cage, a surveillance state in which traditional civil liberties will be easily and legally disregarded in the name of national security.

The U.S. does not have currently an intolerably repressive endo-colonialist regime--and so no one except militia types on the far right are thinking about violent resistance. But here's the point: Should such a repressive regime assume power and with it control of these sophisticated technological surveillance and control tools, there's nothing the rest of us could do about it. This is where the anti-statists on the Right have a point. The rest of us are just hoping that the power elites in control are committed to a more enlightened despotic style that won't lead in twenty or thirty years to what we're currently witnessing in Egypt.

Virilio, of course, is not concerned about what is happening in America, except insofar as it seems to be the society in which this technologically driven endo-colonialist impulse appears to be most advanced. As such it will be model to be emulated by those who can afford to do so. His concern rather is broader focused more on what is happening to us without our really being aware of it, how we are losing our grip on what the 'real' means, how we are slowly losing our grip on what 'human' means. His diagnosis of the disease is power lust rather than greed. His big picture narrative is that power-and control obsessed militarism is the real evil to be feared, and in its name--national security--the greatest evils ever committed and yet to be committed are justified.

Sorry, Wall Street, you're just the second string. Your greed is prodigious, but cannot come close to the destructive and dehumanizing impacts foisted on us by the paranoid, powermad folks over in the military-technology sector. And remember that those folks are obsessed with command and control, and the logic of their technologies is simply to increase their capacity for command and control.  And it can be used--most especially on the nano-technological level--against American citizens who resist them as well as anybody abroad who resists them. Even ways now invade and colonize our bodies.

We all, if we're sane, are repulsed by the brutality and massive destructive power of chemical warfare--wait until they start dispersing nanobots for us all to inhale. It will be so much more humane, it will be argued.  People won't even know why they've been turned into docile wetware obedient servants of the machine.

In the same  interview quoted from above  Virilio says,

Technologies first equipped the territorial body with bridges, aqueducts, railways, highways, airports, etc. Now that the most powerful technologies are becoming tiny--microtechnologies, all technologies can invade the body. These micro-machines will feed the body. Research is being conducted in order to create additional memory for instance. For the time being, technologies are colonizing our body through implants. We started with human implants, but research leads us to microtechnological implants.

The territorial body has been polluted by roads, elevators, etc. Similarly, our animal body starts being polluted. Ecology no longer deals with water, flora, wildlife and air only. It deals with the body itself as well. It is comparable with an invasion: technology is invading our body because of miniaturisation. (Referring to the interviewer's microphone: "next time you come you won't even ask - you'll just throw a bit of dust on the table!")

There is a great science-fiction short story, it's too bad I can't remember the name of its author, in which a camera has been invented which can be carried by flakes of snow. Cameras are inseminated into artificial snow which is dropped by planes, and when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.

Local vs. Central

Interesting discussion on Corey Robin's blog about the problems related to both, especially in the comments. 

There is always the problem of the particulars of any time and any place. That's why my bias toward the local is quite clear that often those tyrannized by local mafias need to have some way of appealing for outside intervention for help. That's where the principle of subsidiarity comes in. Eisenhower was right when he sent in the National Guard to Little Rock. 

But there's always a price to be paid if you can't or won't settle things on your own. If you are Milan calling in France to help you with your squabble with Naples, chances are that France isn't going to go home later, and you find yourself dealing with a worse problem. Everything depends on the motives of the big guy you call in to intervene. It's almost always better to get the job done yourself. 

The mistake to take from the Federal interventions in the 60s and 70s was to accept the interventionist role as normative. The Left in this country has failed on the local level where the Right has mostly succeeded in Red States, where they have essentially purged moderate Republicans. The local then becomes a feeder system into the federal system creating the kind of dismantlement of protections enjoyed by earlier generations.

The battle first has to be won on the local level. I also recognize that once the battle is won there, then you have the ground prepared for the restoration of federal protections taken away and the introduction of protections not yet offered.  But I want to see the initiatives coming from below. The chances, for instance, of a single-payer health care system being introduced in Washington State where I live are far more likely than ever seeing one introduced on the national level. If it succeeds locally, it will in time be adopted elsewhere, and then it will be easier to effect some kind of national policy. The Beltway is not a place to expect innovation. The best we can hope for from those who go there is a belated reactiveness. 

The will to power and corruption cannot be eliminated. The question is at what level is it easier to contain and manage. 

Big Data and Learning

The New York Times has a "Bits" section this morning devoted to "Big Data". It's quite a lot to absorb, and I, at least, come away from it with my biases confirmed: In general, it's better to have more data than less, but data is only as good as your interpretation of it. And if you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it's probably not a good thing to create more hay. And there's very little control over who makes hay with the hay.

And while it's one thing to have access to a lot of information; it's another to have good judgment. And of course, motive is everything. What do you want the data to tell you, and for what ends do you want to use it?

One article in this section in particular struck me, an interview with Lazlo Bock, the senior vice president for people operations at Google. ("People operations"?) I found this exchange particularly because it points, among other things, to an explanation why Snowden's didn't need a high school diploma to get the jobs he's had:

Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?

A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Snowden was a very smart kid with ADHD, who couldn't stand being in school, and taught himself enough on his own to persuade someone like Bock to give him a shot. Once given real-world challenges and an environment where he was assigned tasks that he could complete working fairly autonomously, he thrived. 

But another takeaway for me from this interview was its implications for schools. When it comes to learning, it's all about motivation. School is a waste of time for kids who are not motivated. Learning is largely about acculturation--you are motivated to learn the things the people who care about you think are important. If you don't find that at home or at school, you find it on the street. That's why motivation for kids starts to plummet in Middle School.

Kids wake up to something they are interested in, maybe because a teacher introduced them to it. Maybe it was something they found online. Maybe something they saw on TV. There are any number of sources to awaken and engage kids in learning, but learning ultimately is self-driven, and it's easy now to become an autodidact in almost any subject matter if you are motivated enough to follow through. Problem is that what engages isn't necessarily healthy. In the Age of Whatever, anything goes, so long as you are passionate about it. But some things deserve our commitments, and others just don't.

So, schools, if they were to function effectively, should be places that awaken kids to things that deserve their commitments. I see schools evolving in such a way that K-8 will provide the basics in literacy, numeracy, music/art, and some basic orienting information about how the world works through basic science and social studies. (I forced my very resistant kid to take violin until he was in 8th grade, and then told him he could quit if he wanted to. But he chose to play in his high school orchestra, and had a great time using skills he would not otherwise have had.) And then there should be a broader set of programmatic learning options for kids after that, and I don't know that schools have to be the only place to get it. So if we must have a common core, limit it K-8--open things up after that.

The key for adolescents is to provide them with an environment where there are adults who care about them and who want to guide them through the learning process rather than imposing an agenda. And maybe to get some tough love when occasion calls for it. They need an environment that provides a robust alternative--or at least a supplement--to the learning that goes on in the streets or in the isolation of their room with a computer. 

 

Little Fish Fighting Big Ones

There is something admirable about the local autonomy enjoyed, for instance, by the patchwork of city states that composed the northern Italian Peninsula during the Renaissance. Not so desirable was their continuous, pointless fighting among themselves, and in the end their weakness in defending their autonomy against the centralized powers France, Spain, and Austria who moved in and took away their autonomy. Better if they were able to overcome their divisiveness, to get organized and to develop for themselves a balance between local autonomy and centralized coordination. They didn't, so they and countries like Poland who couldn't get it together, find themselves partitioned and gobbled up by the big boys.

Because little fish get eaten by the big ones, local autonomous communities need to organize/centralize themselves to defend their autonomy. This is my basic critique of movements like Occupy. They are very conscious of the will to power and the iron law of oligarchy, and identify it with any kind of centralized authority structure. I understand their concerns, but the challenge is to find an accountable, centralized structure that strikes the right balance between the need for centralized coordination and local autonomy and decision making. It's very hard to do, but getting gobbled up is what happens if you don't.

Mutually Assured Destruction prevents the great powers from going to war with one another, so I think we will see 'will to power' in American and other societies shifting from the military to the economic spheres, and we will see the primary focus of the security state moving away from concerns about external threats from hostile states to internal threats from stateless subversives waging asymmetric campaigns of sabotage. The Bush administration's response to 9/11 was absurd because it misconstrued the threat and response to it in military rather than police terms. With the revelations of the extent of the NSA surveillance program, we're seeing how far we have come in moving toward the police state.  

I'm not all that clear how this is going to play out over the next several years, but two observations. First, as the authoritarian police state in China becomes more like the US in adopting neoliberal economic policies, the U.S. will become more like China in adopting authoritarian police-state policies. China's embrace of state capitalism gives it the advantage in any kind of economic warfare with the U.S. because it has the more centralized model.The US will gradually realize that it will have to adapt.  

Second, in the meanwhile, it looks as though the US government is gradually transforming into the appendage of competing economic warlords. As such, government will function more as corporate security services in the locales in which they operate. These warlords will use regional governments and their high-tech surveillance and security infrastructure to keep the workers docile and dependent. We're not there yet, but we appear to be transitioning into something like this. 

If this is the direction in which we are headed, the NSA and other government surveillance systems are not a problem because of their potential abuse by politicians, but because of their potential abuse by the corporate powers these politicians serve. If Snowden, a man who works in the private sector, has access to the information that he does, who's to say that others haven't been using the same information for other extra-legal purposes. Why would we assume that that no one is? 

It no longer matters much what is technically legal or illegal, because these corporations are writing their own laws, and even if they break laws, who is there to hold them accountable?  If there is no power (or will) to make laws in the public interest and to enforce them, it doesn't matter what's legal or illegal regarding abuses of power. If government continues to evolve into a mere appendage of the big corporations, we should have no expectation that anyone powerful is accountable to the public. The law will be used exclusively to keep the public in line. 

O'Hehir on American Dystopia

Are we there yet?

O'Hehir has an interesting piece that complements the discussion in comments about my last post. He quotes Neil Postman echoing a comment made by Jonathan about how Huxley was perhaps a more accurate predictor of our future:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

O'Hehir then comments on this passage:

That’s wonderfully vivid writing, but almost three decades later the question doesn’t look quite so clear-cut. What I see in the paradoxical America of 2013 still looks like Huxley on the surface, with Orwell making a strong comeback underneath. Banning books has largely proven both impractical and unnecessary, as Postman says (which is not to say it doesn’t happen here and there). But as we have seen more than once recently, the government’s security forces and even more sinister pals in the private sector guard their secrets fervently, and react with fury when some of them are exposed. The truth can be kept from us and also drowned in irrelevance, and what Postman calls a trivial culture (Postman’s argument, here and elsewhere, has more than a whiff of anti-pop snobbery) can also be a captive culture.

In many respects American culture, seen from the inside, is more diverse, tolerant and interesting than ever before. Yet the American nation-state seems to be in terminal decline. It is politically ungovernable, bitterly divided by class, caste, region and ideology. The executive branch and the “military-industrial complex” have expanded exponentially since Eisenhower’s day, accumulating more and more power where it can’t be seen.

I mostly agree with O'Hehir: Yes to Huxley on the Surface and Orwell underneath, but I do not think that diverse, tolerant, and interesting means healthy. You could describe the late Roman Empire with those adjectives. And I think that Postman and Jonathan are right to describe us having become a passive, spiritually inert, bread-and-circuses culture. I'm all for diversity, but it becomes a problem when it is so divisive and fragmenting that it makes resistance to the power virus all but impossible. As I wrote in comments yesterday, it's precisely the lack of core, animating, collective cultural values that weakens us and makes American society a vulnerable host for a technologically enhanced power virus that is inflaming the whole system. 

 

Josh Marshall & Historical Vacuum Syndrome

Josh Marshall has created a firestorm among his liberal readership by coming out pretty strongly against the Manning and Snowden leaks. I think he gives a thoughtful, honest justification for his views, and the key to it is explained in these three paragraphs:

If you see the state as essentially malevolent or a bad actor then really anything you can do to put a stick in its spokes is a good thing. Same if you think the conduct of US foreign policy is fundamentally a bad thing. Then opening up its books for the world to see is a good thing simply because it exposes it or damages it. It forces change on any number of levels.

From that perspective, there’s no [sic] really no balancing to be done. All disclosure is good. Either from the perspective of transparency in principle or upending something you believe must be radically changed.

On the other hand, if you basically identify with the country and the state, then indiscriminate leaks like this are purely destructive. They’re attacks on something you fundamentally believe in, identify with, think is working on your behalf.

Marshall unapologetically associates himself with those in the third paragraph. He defends it by claiming that it is more "balanced". But what does balance mean in a world where power is so asymmetrically distributed? In any event, Marshall's allegiances lead him to write paragraphs like these:

Let me put my cards on the table. At the end of the day, for all its faults, the US military is the armed force of a political community I identify with and a government I support. I’m not a bystander to it. I’m implicated in what it does and I feel I have a responsibility and a right to a say, albeit just a minuscule one, in what it does. I think a military force requires a substantial amount of secrecy to operate in any reasonable way. So when someone on the inside breaks those rules, I need to see a really, really good reason. And even then I’m not sure that means you get off scott free. It may just mean you did the right thing.

So do I see someone who takes an oath and puts on the uniform and then betrays that oath for no really good reason as a hero? No.

The Snowden case is less clear to me. . . . [But] Snowden is doing more than triggering a debate. I think it’s clear he’s trying to upend, damage - choose your verb - the US intelligence apparatus and policies he opposes. The fact that what he’s doing is against the law speaks for itself. I don’t think anyone doubts that narrow point. But he’s not just opening the thing up for debate. He’s taking it upon himself to make certain things no longer possible, or much harder to do. To me that’s a betrayal. I think it’s easy to exaggerate how much damage these disclosures cause. But I don’t buy that there are no consequences. And it goes to the point I was making in an earlier post. Who gets to decide? The totality of the officeholders who’ve been elected democratically - for better or worse - to make these decisions? Or Edward Snowden, some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with and is now seeking refuge abroad for breaking the law?

I don’t have a lot of problem answering that question.

I've always believed that Marshall, like most other mainstream journalists, suffers from what I would describe as Historical Vacuum Syndrome. He is a liberal critic of a system whose rules he basically approves of. He knows they are flawed, but show him a society in which they are not. So, he's right that identifying or not identifying with the government is certainly a factor that will shape your perception of these leaks, but I would add another factor, which is to ask: In which direction do you think our country is moving? Journalists with Historical Vacuum Syndrome don't ask that question. 

If I thought that history was static or that things were headed mostly in the right direction, my position would be similar to Marshall's. I don't think that. I believe American history is trending in a bad direction. I was ready to hop on a more optimistic bus when Obama was elected--I really wanted to; I don't like being cynical--but it became clear fairly quickly that the system is running Obama rather than he running the system. For me, at least, it has become clear that the system has a mind and will of its own, and it's not taking us anywhere good. If you don't believe that, if you believe instead that there is nothing new under the sun, that we're in this static pattern of same old, same old, nothing new here, just business as usual, then you can, like Marshall does, adopt the kind of journalistic attitude that he articulates in his post. Me? Count me among those who favor putting a stick in the spokes. 

Journalists like Marshall would argue that Historical Vacuum Syndrome is a virtue, that they are not in the business of making judgments about historical trajectories. So this leads them to accept the world as it is and play by the rules as they have been developed, no matter how rigged the game has become. "Are they any more rigged now than they have ever been?" they would retort. This is how I see Brooks, Friedman, and almost all the people who have chosen to make a career in American establishment journalism. How could it be otherwise for them? But as such, I'd argue, that they have become coopted defenders of a system that is out of control. The more embedded you are in the system, the harder it is to have any real perspective on it.

That's the difference in the end between Marshall and Snowden. Snowden understands better what's in control and what forces are driving it. He understands the enormity and the asymmetry, and his gesture, while ultimately futile, was an attempt to simply to say NO. 

 

 

The Puritan Mind

Several years ago I did a series of posts on the Puritan Mind trying to understand both its dark and light sides. The positive side I called Whiggery. Whiggery, I argued, was the spirit of the abolitionist movement and the settlement house movement, but also the Yankee spirit of innovation and love of money, growth, expansion. The New Deal compromise was essential negotiated by factiions within Whiggery that tended one way or the other. Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life" always interested me because he was torn between them. But in the Capra mythos Pottersville was the hypostasized version of the Dark Side of the Whig spirit, and he was right. We see it realized now in Wall Street, Enron, and the NSA. 

I wrote this back in 2006:

The dark side of the Whig Puritan spirit was its love of wealth and its compulsion to control. Think Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life." The movie is a fairy tale about the Whig spirit by contrasting two different styles of banker, an emblematic Whig occupation. And the battle for the American soul became a battle between these two factions of Whiggery, the Potters vs. the Baileys with the Baileys winning out in the New Deal, a compromise worked out between the next greatest American Whig after Lincoln--FDR.  

So the point I was trying to make in my "Last Laugh" post yesterday was that while the Potter wing of the Whig impulse was brought under control during the New Deal. The big corporation, the invention of the factions that defeated the south, has now been adopted by the southerners who have no interest in the compromise effected by the Yankees in the 1930s. The corporation for them is the new plantation adapted to new historical circumstances. Think Wal Mart. And they are using it and its power to destroy the great Whig compromise we came to take for granted as the New Deal.

It's the ambivalence in the American soul between the progressive side of evangelical Christianity with its dark side that drives the poltical debate even now. And my post the other day about the obsession with eliminating any threat of terrorism reminded me of what I wrote then about the Ahab-like self-destructive obsession to destroy Moby Dick. And in another post about how violence always seems to be at the heart of it:

These struggles have always been framed by the Anglo-American Calvinist mentality as a struggle for democracy and freedom over autocracy and tyranny. Now obviously there is no argument about whether democracy and freedom is superior to autocracy and tyranny, but there should be an argument about the means by which the former asserts itself. The Puritan way is by violence, and this violence is justified by a demonization of the premodern whether it be the Jacobite subversives, Catholics in Ireland, witches in Salem, King George on his throne, the slaveholders in the South, communists in Moscow, or now the Islamic fundamentalists throughout the Middle East.  
    
Puritans don’t work things out with enemies like these because there is no negotiating with the irrational. The Puritan mind reasons: “Well of course the witch doesn’t want to be saved from her own evil. That’s why we must save her from herself by burning her at the stake.”  Sounds absurd, but we heard it again from that American major who said after the destruction of the village of Ben Tre in Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." A true Puritan there. And now look what we're doing in Iraq.  Think Fallujah. We're burning the country at the stake. It's a form of mental illness, but it's a sickness we all accept as normal.

So these posts from the murky past were brought to mind when I read David Brooks's column this morning, which link them to themes I've been thinking about more recently. He's talking about competing hierarchies, the one we tend to accept as normative in which wealth, power, and a trophy wife are the markers of a successful life, and in which feminism is all about getting some of that. And then he points out that the Jewish and Christian traditions, which embrace an inverse hierarchy as Brooks calls it--I call it upside downness--is something that has virtually disappeared from the broad American cultural ethos. The Capra mythos is mocked as naive and nostalgic, but I honestly don't think so. He's pointing to something archetypal, but we have become incapable of recognizing it anymore. Brooks writes--

In Corinthians, Jesus tells the crowds, “Not many of you were wise by worldly standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

Under this rubric, your place is not determined by worldly accomplishments, but simply through an acceptance of God’s grace. As Paul Tillich put it in a passage recently quoted on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, “Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.”

Not exactly a Horatio Alger/Norman Vincent Peale formula for success in the world. But Brooks's point is that while the cruder success model was always a strong one in American society it competed with this other inverse narrative, and it no longer does. I think he's right about that. 

This inverse hierarchy took secular form. Proletarian novels and movies made the working class the moral bedrock of the nation. In Frank Capra movies like “Meet John Doe,” the common man is the salt of the earth, while the rich are suspect. It wasn’t as if Americans renounced worldly success (this is America!), but there were rival status hierarchies: the biblical hierarchy, the working man’s hierarchy, the artist’s hierarchy, the intellectual’s hierarchy, all of which questioned success and denounced those who climbed and sold out.

Over the years, religion has played a less dominant role in public culture. Meanwhile, the rival status hierarchies have fallen away. The meritocratic hierarchy of professional success is pretty much the only one left standing.

I've often argued here for the recovery of a gritty Capraesque sense of who the really important people are. It's the argument I make all the time in my education writing--it's famlies and teachers that matter, not principals and downtown administrators. The latter are useful only insofar as they do things to make it easier for the former, including just getting out of the way. And by the same logic, what happens locally rather than what's happens in the Beltway or the national media matters far more.

I look forward to the day when what happens in Washington will be as interesting to us as what happens at the U.N. What an inversion that would be.

 

Data Mining

David Simon, the creator of HBO's "The Wire" says this about the Snowden leaks:

The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. And it forever will, to a greater and greater extent. And therefore, the present-day question can’t seriously be this: Should law enforcement in the legitimate pursuit of criminal activity pretend that such data does not exist. The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised.

And to that, the Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse. No known illegal wiretaps, no indications of FISA-court approved intercepts of innocent Americans that occurred because weak probable cause was acceptable. Mark you, that stuff may be happening. As happens the case with all law enforcement capability, it will certainly happen at some point, if it hasn’t already. Any data asset that can be properly and legally invoked, can also be misused — particularly without careful oversight. But that of course has always been the case with electronic surveillance of any kind.

Simon's point is that the problem isn't with the program itself, but with its potential for abuse, and that's my problem with it, too. And it's because I think the potential and likelihood for those abuses is more damaging than whatever benefit we receive from this program, the program needs to be severely curtailed. I know it won't be, but that's my position for what it's worth. 

For all the time, money, and manpower that is going into the development of this massive data mining operation, does it pay off? Did it prevent the Boston Marathon Bombing? Could it have? Did it stop Adam Lanza? Could it have? 

For me there's an analogy here to the way we Americans deal with healthcare issues. We have this enormously expensive, highly technologized system that produces mediocre outcomes. The WHO ranks the U.S. #38 despite our spending more than any other country. We do all this expensive, sophisticated stuff, but we still don't get the job done as well as others do. Because getting the job done--whether it's producing better healthcare outcomes or catching criminals--requires another approach, a more human approach, a more realistic approach than the one American technocrats instinctively are inclined to take.

Any government has legitimate police powers. Bad guys, whether crazies like Adam Lanza, predators like Bernie Madoff, or criminal warlords like those shown in "The Wire" will always be with us, and they have to be checked. But the idea that we have to do everything in our power and use any means necessary to exterminate them is as absurd as thinking that we can exterminate death and disease. We need to contain and mitigate, not eliminate. And the same goes for terrorism. We need a containment policy, not an extermination policy.

The whole NSA apparatus is born of and justified to the public from an obsession to eliminate the possibility of another 9/11. But we never ask why 9/11 happened in the first place. We never seek to understand the causes that create that kind of blowback, and we never accept that our own stupidity and bullying abroad abets the cycle of violence that comes back to bite us. The challenge is to break the cycle of violence, but it's easier to create this massive, expensive, technologically sophisticated but rather clumsy and easy to abuse surveillance infrastructure and then to vilify those who point to its folly.  

Verax: Loners Telling Truths

My two cents on the Snowden leak: Of course, I'm among those who admire his courage, and I am temperamentally inclined to side with whoever takes it upon himself to subvert the technocracy. But it seems a quixotic gesture, and one that is not likely to change anything.

It's too bad that the Tea Party can't get as worked up about violations of the Fourth Amendment as they do the Second Amendment. Then (maybe) we'd see some change. But I guess it's hard to get worked up about something that is so abstract. We don't feel violated by telecommunications searches as we would if the police broke down our doors and ransacked our homes. We are now a surveillance state and that's not going to change. The ship has long ago left the dock when any kind of resistance to that could have been meaningful. Americans don't care that they've become that, and there is no power faction to push back against it. There will be no debate--nobody really wants to have it. We will go back to sleep in a few days, and be stirred awake again if Snowden is caught or brought to trial. But it won't be OJ or whoever people were all obsessed with down in Arizona a couple of weeks ago. We won't care.

***

I was reading Jeff Toobin's piece in the New Yorker, and then David Brook's piece in the NYT this morning, both of which are critical of Snowden. I don't know why, because I should be used to it, but it still surprises me when people like Brooks and Toobin instinctively react negatively to what Snowden did. I guess the difference lies in that they are embedded in a system that they see as flawed but basically good, and I see the same system as in a process of degradation toward deeper levels of corruption and unfreedom. I am not a utopian, I don't expect to live in a social system without flaws and corruption, but it's the direction that bothers me, and our direction is not on a positive track. And anyone who recognizes that and wants to do something about it deserves our respect, not the kind of treatment he received from both.

Toobin, writes that Snowden is  "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison", and he seems to think that he should have been a boy scout and used legal channels to make his concerns public. A blog post perhaps? An op ed? "What, one wonders, did Snowden think the N.S.A. did?" writes Toobin. "Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications." Why, in other words, did he choose to work for a spy agency if he's against what spies do?

But of course this is not the issue. The NSA surveillance activities might be legal, but there is good reason to believe these activities are in violation of the Fourth Amendment. But no one can ever challenge it in court, because any one who might undertake such a challenge does not have access to the evidence because it is classified.

The issue is the degree to which the government can invade our lives, a government that after the Military Commissions Act can call us a terrorist (even if we're not), arrest us, never bring us to trial, put us in prison, and throw away the key. And you don't raise concerns about a government that can do that by going through channels. It would be like working for the mafia and raising questions about the legality of what it is doing. Unfair analogy? The NSA is legal and the Mafia isn't. But surely you see that there is a mafia or rather there are several mafias who own enough lawmakers who make the laws that legalize their violations. And while in theory we can vote those corrupt pols out of office, in practice we tend not to. 

And then there's David Brooks's take. I've always kind of liked David Brooks's nerdy decency. I accept him as a sincere advocate for a kind of conservatism that I sympathize with in theory, but for which I see precious few places to apply it in the world in which we live. Brooks's approach is not to put Snowden on the shrink's couch as Toobin wants to do, but to put on his sociologist's mortar board. His argument, nevertheless, is basically the same as Toobin's, i.e., Snowden is an isolated (disembedded) loner who doesn't understand the concept loyalty or care about the common good and rule of law:

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme. You’re more likely to donate to the Ron Paul for president campaign, as Snowden did.

This is consistent with Brooks's longstanding Burkean view about how societies ought to work, and I'm sympathetic to it--in the abstract. I'm a conservative regarding things in our lived social life that are worth fighting to conserve, but the surveillance state and the plutocracy it protects are not among them. 

I agree with Brooks to this extent. Loners like Snowden tilt at windmills and don't accomplish much. Nothing changes until "mediating institutions" (like political movements) start demanding significant changes. I think these will emerge in time, but they simply don't exist now in any way that is commensurate to the need. And that's why Toobin and Brooks otherwise seems so clueless. So meanwhile we have alienated Millennials like Snowden and Manning, who in their acts of conscience are lonely voices crying in the wilderness. Let us hope their sacrifices are not in vain, and that they a preparing a way for more potent political and cultural movements to come.

P.S. Here is Corey Robin's take on Brooks's piece. Yes and No. Yes, he's right about the bromides deployed to delegitimize Snowden; No to the aspersions he casts on communitarianism.