After the Future

Concentration of Power

Presents a greater danger to the public good than concentrations of wealth, but where there is concentration of wealth, concentration of power follows. Libertarians get upset with the idea of power concentrated in governments--and that can be a very serious problem--but the real problem in America has always been the way power concentrates in the private sector--in trusts and monopolies. 

Tom Frank explores this theme in a spirited interview with Barry Lynn about the history of anti-trust in America. This is one of the best things  on the way the political economy works in the U.S. I've read on this in a long time. It does a great job of pulling together a lot of fragments of things we all kind of know, but fuzzily.

There are so many good passages in it I don't know which to excerpt here, so I'll just pick this one from near the end. [Frank is in the bold; Lynn normal text]:

When I wrote about the Tea Party movement, I said, if Democrats are looking around for something from their own tradition that might defuse the Tea Party—actually there’s no evidence that they were looking around for a way to defuse the Tea Party movement. Had they been looking around for a way to defuse the Tea Party movement, this issue seemed like an obvious thing to me. Start talking about antitrust. Because these Tea Party guys are small business people, like you said; they’re very worried about the power of bigness—why not throw it out there? If you’re Barack Obama, why not do it? You’d stop this movement in its tracks. You might even win some of them over.

When it comes to the political economy, both parties are run by the same people.

So we’ve finally come to the biggest duopoly of them all. This is not like Procter & Gamble vs. Unilever or something.

They tell us we’re members of the blue team, or members of the red team, and that these colors really matter. But when it comes to political economy, when it comes to issues of actual distribution of power, both the blue party and the red party do pretty much exactly the same. One of the more disappointing aspects of President Obama is that, as a candidate, he was great on antitrust. One of the reasons Barack Obama is president is because he went to Iowa as a candidate and said he was going to fix antitrust, and take on the giant agro-industrial companies. That’s one of the main reasons he beat Hillary in the Iowa caucus in early ’08.

That’s great.

If you were in Iowa, it was like, “Gee, this guy is for real.”

Well, what happened?

Well, he won Iowa!

I know, but did he fix it?

Well, after he won Iowa and leveraged that into winning the presidency, he actually—I will give President Obama credit on this, he tried. For one year, he tried. In 2010, Christine Varney, who was his antitrust enforcer, and Eric Holder, who is his Attorney General, and Tom Vilsack, his Secretary of Agriculture, they held five hearings around the country, in which they gathered evidence of abuse by giant companies, and made promises to farmers that they would fix the agriculture markets in the United States.

That’s fantastic. And what happened?

Well… The powers made clear that this was not acceptable.

Come on, what do you mean by that? You mean, he didn’t follow through, he didn’t do it.

He didn’t do it. After the Democrats got clobbered in the 2010 midterms, the White House entirely abandoned the effort.

Okay but, this might have been the thing that could have saved their ass, if they had played it right, is what I’m thinking, if they had really made a big deal out of it.

Well yes, but I’m really not sure how comfortable they were with the idea of antimonopoly in the first place. In almost every other sector of the political economy, they never did a thing ever to stop concentration. If anything, as in banking, they have simply sped it along. I mean, when they walked into office, they had the perfect bad merger to reject, the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Here we had two companies that people really disliked, and yet the Obama team gave the deal an easy pass.

This is the most maddening thing about the two-party system, is now we’re in this situation where, there’s this weird dynamic for the last couple decades now where the Republicans are driving, driving, driving farther to the right, and Democrats, liberals, who are the bearers of the tradition you’re talking about, are afraid to take a stand on anything for fear that if they make any wrong step these right-wingers will get in. And you’ve basically got a two party system that everyone can see is broken. How do we ditch this monopoly?

Well, part of the reason that liberals have such a hard time is that we still share a party with real corporatists, people whose basic thinking about economics traces back to Teddy Roosevelt Progressivism rather than Brandeisian or Jeffersonian democracy. We’ve got a lot of old-fashioned “small d” democrats, “small r” republicans in our party, people who believe in community based democracy and industrial liberty. That’s probably the great bulk of us, probably 90% of the members of the Democratic party believe in a Jeffersonian, Wilsonian, Brandeisian political economics. And that’s probably true for the majority of Republicans too. But then in our party you have this overlay of the old-fashioned Progressives, of people who still really believe that the main thing we should aim at is efficiency, and these people wield real power in the party. And then in the Republican Party you’ve got a leadership controlled by a weird amalgam of straight up feudalists and insane libertarians, who live entirely in a realm of theory and myth, and who also say that the main thing we should aim at is efficiency.

"When it comes to the political economy, both parties are run by the same people." And as I've been arguing here for years, the only thing that separates Democrats from Republicans are cultural or tribal identity issues. Liberals and progressive have essentially let the Democrats give away the country to the 1% because the people they elect to serve the interests of the 1% are cosmopolitians who are politically correct on abortion, gay rights, and guns. 

I found interesting and learned from the discussion in the interview in the difference in approaches taken by two wings of the Progressive movement represented by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and which came to a head in the election of 1912. Roosevelt wanted to allow concentrations of power in a monopolies or duopolies so long as they were closely regulated by the government. Wilson, in the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian tradition, wanted to break  up all concentrations of power. The 'overlay of old-fashioned Progressives' that Lynn refers to in the excerpt are heirs of the Teddy Roosevelt approach--good government technocrats, for the most part, who were interested in efficiencies of scale. 

The problem, of course, is that in both approaches the government has to be powerful enough and to have the will to keep the private sector in check. But it has become clear that the Roosevelt approach creates the greater danger, because it requires the will and the stamina to hold the wolf by the ears. Once the will to regulate has been weakened, the wolf can and will turn the tables and as we have seen, it has been feasting on the carcase of our dysfunctional democracy for the last 30 years. Better to find some way to make sure the wolves never get to big and that they spend most of their time fighting with one another. 

So since Reagan came in an let the wolves run wild, there's been no force inside or outside government with the will or the strength to try to get them back on some kind of leash or into cages where they belong. That's our predicament right now, and it's pretty difficult to see how to get out of it. The only solution, of course, is a revival of the Jeffersonian/Wilsonian approach and the will to break up the concentrations of power, starting with the banks, that have developed since 1980. Does anybody really believe that this is high on the list of priorities for Hillary Clinton? 

 

Depair as the Refusal to Become One's Self

...the specific character of despair is this: it is precisely unaware of being despair.  --Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.” --Gordon Marino

A few weeks ago I reposted a piece that quoted extensively from Emerson's essay on "Heroism", and in the last paragraphs I say

Of course, Nietzsche blamed Christianity for promoting this slavish, weak-souled quality, and there is some merit in the accusation. But that's a theme I want to address in coming posts. Because now more than ever we need an imagination of future possibility that has religious roots and which inspires in us, and perhaps more importantly inspires in the young, an aspiration toward robust virtue. This is not a liberal project.

My post several days ago on "Honor" describing how it was a delusional recognition/ego fantasy as contrasted with the idea of 'integrity' was one attempt to develop that alternative idea of 'virtue'. In today's post, I want to address what Gordon Marino points to as the delusion of happiness. I think that the framework within which I am trying to do this is shaped first of all by the larger theme developed on this site, which is that God and the sacred are no longer available to us anywhere out there--in nature or in culture and ritual. That doesn't mean that God and the sacred don't exist and never did, but rather that they've gone into hiding, underground so to speak, when the underground is the depths of the human heart. There lies the sacred, or at least the potential for its growth and  through it the renewal of the face of the earth.

If there is anything the gospels make clear it's that the ur-Christian experience is of a new birth of a  kingdom within. (How many people who call themselves Christians have any idea what this is?) My argument on this blog over the years has been that this "kingdom" born within is a very real experience at first tentative and fragile but which grows stronger if it is nurtured and develops into the interior 'nomos' that we  recognize as conscience. Conscience is the cognitive capability that as it grows develops in us an increased capacity for discerning 'what is called for' in any given situation, and what is called for is often subversive of the existing norms, laws, and practices of the culture in which one's conscience grows.

I am averse to deontological presecriptions, but I do not consider myself a relativist. Nevertheless, I am in a certain sense an anti-nomian, if by 'nomian' we mean the existing mores and norms of any culture or society, and yet I am deeply 'nomian' in the sense that I assert vehemently the existence of the Law that is in each of us a seed planted in the depths of human heart that must germinate and grow. And so as with all things that develop and grow, there are people who have more highly developed and thus more highly cognitive consciences, and there are those who have less developed and confused consciences. We are in despair to the degree that we are oblivious of our conscience, and we live in hope to the degree that one grows within us to a point where we have learned how to submit to its interior nomos.

The basic 'heuristic' or working hypothesis that governs most of what I write on this blog is that the human future, which is coincident with the future of the earth, depends on the emergence of conscience understood in this sense of interior nomos and logos in such a way as to play a more robust role in the shaping of our cultural, political, economic life. And while I do not think that Christians have any special claim or are any more adept than non-Christians in matters of conscience, I do believe the gospels and the ur-Christian narrative (as contrasted with the historical narrative of the churches) provides a framework for understanding what this nomos/logos is and how it works in the human soul.

I say this in order to explain that my debunking of heroism, honor, or the common aspiration for human flourishing and happiness as forms of Kierkegaardian despair is not in the service of snarkery or of some attempt to be superior to all of that. It's in the service of trying to think through and to discern, for my own sake as well as for readers here who are interested to think about it with me, what is deeply real and what is delusion. I certainly make no claims to have any special insight here. I am no prodigy of conscience. My moral cognitive capacity is primitive at best. But I have enough of it to know it's real and to want to take seriously the task of developing it.  

So why is honor and heroism and the aspiration to be happy despair? They are when they are fantasies that lead to dead ends. Is it always wrong to have a 'dream' for a flourishing life? No, but it's easy for our dreams and fantasies to lead us down those dead ends rather than along the way that brings us gradually to the realization of who we were created to be. When we we are "bewitched" by the first, it's a form of despair. But how to know the difference? 

***

I came of age in an era when Freud was still taken seriously, and when it wasn't shameful to admit you found Jung intriguing. But we're in a post-Freudian era now. Something happened--in the 80s or 90s?--when it became accepted conventional wisdom that the ailments of the soul were nothing more than bad brain chemistry. I was never a Freudian, but Freud, at least, when he was taken seriously, created a space in our mainstream cultural life for considering the possibility that we have souls that are in need of our care.

For Freud the soul or psyche was mostly a cauldron of sub-rational, instinctual impulses, but while I was never a Jungian, I found him interesting for finding a quasi culturally legitimate way to talk about the super-rational and transpersonal archetypes as mixed in with all the other impulses in that cauldron. That kind of thing seems to have been pushed to the periphery now. Jung is considered a flake today in a way he wasn't thirty or forty years ago. 

Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, argues that Kierkegaard was talking about both the sub- and super-rational in a proto-postmodern idiom decades before both Freud and Jung. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are, in my opinion, the profounder and more honest psychologists in comparison to Freud and Jung, and each, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in a profounder way, was a prophet pointing to two possibilities that lay before humans in what has become the no-longer modern age. I think we're living the Nietzschean alternatives, but I'd argue that real hope lies in living a Kierkegaardian one.

Let's do a bloggy comparison of the two: I admire Nietzche's cultural analysis, but find his prescription for a cure regressive. I admire Kierkegaard's cultural analysis, and see him as someone who points us to our best future. Both understood the leveling cultural forces carried by late modernity and the spirit of capitalism and how they were grinding up the human soul and churning out despairing Last Men. And both offered alternatives, which I would argue are the only alternatives to being bread-and-circuses Last Men if one is serious about finding one. Kierkegaard's solution, if not the road less frequently taken (I think there are many 'anonymous' Kierkegaardians out there), is certainly a road much less celebrated in popular and high culture. W.H. Auden and Walker Percy were deeply influenced by Kierkegaard. What significant literary figure or thinker is alive today about whom the same could be said? There are many pop-Nietscheans--Ayn Rand comes to mind--but are there any pop Kierkegaardians? [One example comes to mind: I saw the Tao of Steve a few months ago, which was an entertaining attempt to make some Kierkegaardian themes more available. Any others?]

Nietzsche and, more obviously, Darwin define the cultural narrative that dominates mainstream secular thinking in our time. Darwin’s influence is better understood, but Nietzsche is no less important in terms of his significance in shaping the postmodern stream of secularist thought. When talk of Nietzsche comes up, it’s usually associated with a discussion of his idea of the uebermensch “Superman” or, and the way the Nazis appropriated it in to their bizarre ideas about the Aryan master race, or the Leopold and Loeb affair. While the German word uebermensch is usually translated into English as superman, it's meaning is closer to "overcoming man." And for Nietzsche 'overcoming' meant self-transcending.

And we could point to many of the toxic ways in which Nietzsche’s philosophy, fairly or unfairly, has been adapted to justify excessively pathological behaviors. Just as there are vulgar Christians, there are vulgar Nietzscheans, and it's unfair to attribute to the eponymous founder the limitations of those who claim him as their inspiration. (Nietzsche understood that as well as anyone as in his famous quote: "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.") Nietzsche was an honest and very serious thinker, and he was confronting a very real problem head on. He was struggling for a way to embrace transcendence in a world in which grace was an impossibility.

Not possible, I'm afraid. There was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum. But he deserves credit for seeing more clearly than almost anyone the nature of the problem and the importance at the 'end of an age' to find a new model of open-ended human future possibility to which late moderns could aspire that contrasted with the homogenized lumpen mass of Last Men into which he thought his contemporaries were being transformed. 

The conflict between Superman and Last Man has had a tremendous impact on our popular culture in the way we have come to understand heroism or what the well-lived life is. It is seen, for instance, in almost every film that comes out of Hollywood since the 1960s. The protagonist, whether he’s an action hero, or the free-spirited type that for instance Jack Nicholson portrays in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, or even Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (just to take three films that randomly come to mind) is a variation of Nietzsche’s uebermensch.

Whether Nietzsche would approve of these heroes is another matter, but we understand our heroism these days in a Nietzschean idiom. He is formulaically depicted as a larger-than-life, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along Superman who always fights a villain who represents the repressive, conformist law of the Last Man--aka, "The System". Every plot that pits the alienated, risk-taking, bold individual against the soul-crushing ”system” is a variation on this Nietzschean theme. 

The American adaptation of Nietzsche’s Superman is hardly perceived as pathological. Rather in one variation or another, he is the charismatic, passionate man. He’s in touch with his instincts, he knows what he wants, and he thinks that rules are for lesser beings, namely the Last-Man wimps who lack his boldness and initiative. In Hollywood terms you’re either a Superman or a conformist, ground down, bread-and-circuses Last Man, and if you’re a Last Man, your story is only interesting if it’s about how you find the courage to become a Superman. 

The uebermensch is antinomian and subversive, but in the service of what? Usually mostly the service of his ego or in some vague idea of 'freedom' for its own sake. As if the assertion of freedom for its own sake over against the system equates with 'then they live happily ever after'. The real question is what does one do with one's freedom beyond simply fighting against those who would suppress it? Does it matter if we use our freedom in the service of a delusion or in the service of the Real? Of course it does, but first you have to believe that there is a Real. Otherwise everyone is living in a dream of his own choosing, and every dream is equal, if perhaps not aesthetically, ontologically. But serious people cannot be satisfied with to substitute the aesthetic for the ontological. The Nazi aesthetic then becomes equal to a Zen aesthetic, merely a matter of preference. That, of course, is Kierkegaard's point in his discussion of the movement from the aesthetic to the ethical. What is it that awakens when one makes that movement? It's the germination of the aforementioned conscience, which is the birth of the Self.

The Nietzschean heroes tend to be transgressive "libertarian" types who seek to overcome the restrictions of traditional morality when they appear in popular cinema, but in real life, particularly in the American political sphere, the Nietzschean hero is embraced more readily and dangerously by the political right. Right wingers like Dick Cheney see themselves as uebermenschen, and see Liberals as the contemptible promoters of a society that produces lumpen Last Men: Rule of law?  That's for Last Men, not for me. I am a superman who creates his own reality. Ironies, of course abound, when it comes to the ways in which the lockstep, conformist, law-and-order movement conservative comes to support leaders like Cheney, who sees himself fancies himself above the law and beyond good and evil. These movement conservatives are, alas, Last Men, and they submit to the strong man, the Big Daddy, who promises them bread and circuses and to keep them safe.

But movement conservatives don't see themselves as Last Men. Rather they see themselves as players in a grandiose heroic fantasy. They see themselves as homorable defenders of freedom, and they see Liberals as destroyers of it. Movement Conservatives, with the exception of the demagogues who cynically manipulate them, are Last Men through and through, but they project their Last Manhood onto their ideological polar opposites. One thing about Freud and Jung: they understood how projection works. And if there is one essential element of collective right-wing psychology, it's their projection of dissociated negative parts of themselves to demonize those whom they perceive to be their enemies, whether they are Communists, Muslims, or Democrats. Obama is a trifecta in this respect. 

***

So what alternative does Kierkegaard offer to either the Last Man or the Superman?  Here's Marino in the NYT piece:

Though it will make the Bill Mahers of the world wince, despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to be someone else. 

Delusion, therefore, is wanting to be someone other than who you are. But who are you? Well, the Christian answer is that you are the being in whose image God created you to live in communion with him and the rest of creation. I explore this problem of Selfhood in my posts "From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen I and II", But here's the bottom line: The difference between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is that the latter was open to the super-rational, the realm of grace and freedom. Nietzsche's world, for all his longing for liberation, was a closed system, a jail, the overcoming Self come to a dead end, locked in on itself, an eternity of drawn-out Groundhog Days, endless cycles of eternal return. You can argue that Nietzsche is the braver for accepting the hard truth, but to do so requires a willful rejection of so much evidence for the existence of grace.

You don't have to believe in the Christian mythos; unpacking that is graduate level work that isn't all that important in the final analysis. Just acknowledging the existence of grace is all that's required. It's Ariadne's thread, lying there right in front of us, discernible by conscience, for conscience is our cognitive capacity recognize the working of grace. And if one uses it as a guide, it will bring him wherever he needs to go, whether with the correct intellectual understanding or not. And for some pulling on that thread might lead them to Kierkegaard who might help them make some sense of what they've got hold of, because his work is nothing if it is not primarily a phenomenology of grace.

That's the only thing that explains his description of the movement out of the aesthetic, into the ethical, and ultimately into the religious. It's at the heart of his antinomian ideas about the teleological suspension of the ethical. It's why he points to  Abraham as the paradigmatic man of grace. But the reverse is true as well: you're not going to get anywhere with Kierkegaard unless you have some basic apprehension of the basic logic of grace. His stuff will seem only to be convoluted nonsense without it.

And if the world is in fact devoid of grace, and if the great tradition that bears witness to it is delusional, then Nietzsche's intuition about the logic of eternal return is quite correct. But once you accept the possibility that he is not correct, the world is turned upside down and we learn that the thread of conscience leads us down a path designed to subvert the system from within its belly, not in the style of the Nietzschean hero, but in the style the Logos bearer--those who have Selves reconstituted in the image and likeness. Frodo Baggins is more the heroic prototype here, but for more on this, see my posts Christian Liberty and  Disembedding and Theosis.

For despair is the condition of not-Self, when by Self we mean the 'image and likeness' we were created us to become, the Self that is destined to live in communion with other realized Selves in the communion of saints. To be in despair is to be on a path of delusion that leads to the retardation of the Self's development or to its destruction. To live in hope is to be on the path that cultivates the Self's growth, and that is always a moral path, mostly walked in darkness, but lit a few feet in front of us by the flame of conscience.  And this path often enough leads us to places we would rather not go. But it's easier to go there if we accept that happiness and human flourishing are not the only criteria to measure a life well lived.

[This is a revison of a 2009 post entitled "Kierkegaard on the Couch".]

 

Honor as a Destructive Recognition Fantasy

The word 'honor' has mostly positive connotations for us--it's a good thing to be a man of honor, or to give one's word of honor. But I've always thought there was something fishy about honor and the honor culture from which it originates--it seemed to be too concerned with reputation and public perception rather than with virtue; too concerned about being well thought of and "honored" and not concerned enough about living a life of interior integrity, as if one's standing in society mattered more than one's standing before God--or that both were the same thing. When we indulge in fantasies that relate to wealth and security, recognition and fame, or power and control, these all seem 'natural' enough, and often they can be harmless, but they never lead anywhere that is 'true' and 'good'. They are, spiritually speaking, a waste of time at best, but often enough they are destructive to oneself and the lives of those around us. "Honor", I'd argue,is a recognition fantasy that has played a more destructive role in the lives of people throughout history than a hamless one. 

The more you learn about honor's origins, the fouler the smell. They lie in a primitive warrior ethic, which in turn is a part of the master/slave complex. Honor is accorded to both parties in conflict so long as neither backs down. It's is better to fight and die than to refuse the fight and submit to the other. Submission is always dishonorable and slavish. The logic of the duel, a practice that lasted well into the nineteenth century in America in the South and West, and the the blood feud follow this basic honor logic. In an honor culture, if one has been dishonored in any of a number of complex ways, it's as if someone took away your existence, and the only way you can get it back is by killing the one who took it from you.

Duels and feuds point to the real meaning of honor, which is that the humiliation of losing face must be saved by annihilating the one who caused you to lose it or dying in the effort. Better to die saving face than to live with the humiliation of losing face because in an honor culture, the individual human being is completely identified with his reputation--he has no existence apart from it. Honor has hardly anything to do with courage; it has almost everything to do with the fear of humiliation and the social consequences that follow from it.

James Bowman's book, Honor: A History, does a very effective job of laying out the contours of the honor culture as it played out in the West. There are several layers of influence that led to its destruction, not the least of which is its fundamental tension with Christianity. There are reasons why the poor and powerless, those with the least honor, are given a kind of preferential treatment in the Christian tradition, and why the wise, the rich, and the powerful are often deconstructed, so to say, by the spirit of the gospels. These people who think they know who they are as defined by their place in the honor framework, don't really have a clue, and their sense of honor makes them invulnerable to the kind of grace that might give them that clue. Pharisees and Sadducees in the Gospels, had the highest status and the most honor, but they were incapable of recognizing transcendent truth when it walked among them because it was in the form of a no-account from the hinterlands.

But apart from the fundamentally subversive relationship Christianity has with the honor culture, other forces came to bear in the modern period which eventually led to its dissolution. The honor complex in the West was severely weakened during the nineteenth century, despite the Victorians' attempt to maintain it against this larger corrosive current, and it toppled after World War I. The Great War was widely perceived among the younger members of the European elite to have been fought for no reason other than to preserve the 'honor' of the ruling class, which continued the carnage for fear of the disgrace that suing for peace would bring. It's not cricket to quit no matter how much pointless carnage ensues. Charge of the Light Brigade, and all that. Those Lost Generation survivors of that carnage saw the folly of the honor system, and bitterly rejected it in the twenties. Hemingway, Remarque, Sassoon, Fitzgerald, and so many others. But the question arose:  What would fill the vacuum created by its rejection?

Bowman is good in laying out the how this played out in the 20th Century, and how the unofficial culture of honor skepticism supplanted the official honor culture and how the consumer culture that emerged filled that vacuum with a muddle of inadequate or pernicious substitutes--celebrity, for instance, and pop-psychological therapeutic ideas about self-esteem and authenticity. I enjoyed very much his discussion about how the old honor culture and the new therapeutic culture meet comically in The Sopranos. In one episode, Johnny Sack wants to have another mafioso executed because he made a joke about his wife's weight problem: 

Then [when the honor culture flourished] the mortal insult, the insult to a woman's honor, would have been against her chastity or fidelity.  Now, having assimilated the therapeutic language of "sensitivity" and "appropriateness" rather than honor, he [Uncle Junior, who alone takes Johnny's side on this] and Johnny Sack both find it natural to assume that an insult against her self-image or self-esteem, even the mention of so obvious a fact as that she is considerably overweight, is as bad or worse. Like Tony himself on occasion, Johnny and Junior find it easy to confuse honor--that old-fashioned thing they have been brought up to respect without entirely knowing what it is--with the self esteem which is its therapeutic equivalent.

"Who does he think he is, Sir Walter Raleigh," says one of the incredulous mafiosi upon learning that Johnny wants one of his colleagues whacked for something so trivial. For Johnny it's a matter of perverse principle--it's a question of honor--but the bottom line is that honor is just a cover up for the rage he felt in losing face, and he would kill a man to expiate that humiliation. That's what honor demands. 

The whole substructure upon which the honor complex is built is absurdly primitive, and yet Bowman is right to worry about the vacuum its loss has created and the silliness that has come in to substitute for it. But he's wrong to argue for honor's revival, as he does in his last chapters. His argument, to me at least, seemed oddly out of joint with the entire thrust of his exposition until he tacked in on near the end. It is basically rooted in neocon cant that we are in mortal danger from primitive enemies who seek to destroy us, and because they operate within the honor complex, so must we if we are to prevail in this struggle to the death. It's as if 9/11 was Osama's way of slapping the U.S. with his glove, and we have no honor if we didn't respond to the challenge. 

I'm not particularly interested to refute his argument in detail, because I find it silly. While terrorism is a real problem, it doesn't threaten our survival, and our response to the terrorist threat should have little or nothing to do with any idea of national honor. Terrorism is a criminal act, and it should be treated as such. It doesn't need to get any more complicated than that. And any argument that assumes that at this point in our confrontation with terrorism that our survival requires that we descend to the level of terrorists is just classic wingnuttery. It's steeped in a quasi-hysterical fearfulness that I've described time and again here that makes us stupid. We need courage and poise in the response to any threat. But we need to be intelligent, and we don't need some primitive honor code to dictate our policies.  Prudent defensive measures, aggressive police work, and a commitment to realistically, intelligently come to grips with the fact that there are legitimate reasons for resentment toward the U.S. are sufficient to deal with threats posed by primitive mindset of terrorists. 

***

But while it's good riddance to honor, I would like to suggest an alternative solution to what should replace it and its already in place whether we're consciously aware of it or not--it's the concept of "integrity." Integrity is an interior capacity that embraces virtues such a courage, compassion, principle, and so much more, but it does not depend on one's standing in the world--either for us as individuals or as a nation.  A man or woman of integrity may or may not be honored; it's irrelevant to what integrity requires. It's primarily interior; it's a quality of soul, or more accurately it's an achievement of soul. And governments simply have to be clear about what they stand for and what they will not tolerate, and the honor code has nothing to do with it.

But let me address this issue of interiority and its relationship to integrity. I accept, to use Charles Taylor's terminology in A Secular Age, that there has been a fundamental movement in history away from the embeddedness characteristic of outward-directed, premodern societies and toward disembeddedness characteristic of modern and postmodern societies, and with this development the emergence of what Taylor calls the interior-focused, disconnected "buffered self". [Quick summary if you're unfamiliar with the book: Extreme embeddedness--animistic/totemic societies; intermediate embeddedness--medieval Christianity; intermediate buffered self--Renaissance through Enlightenment individualists and rationalists; extreme buffered self--Camus's Mersault comes to mind as a literary depiction of the buffered self's condition of soul, but Camus himself is perhaps a better exemplar.]

I don't look at the emergence of the lonely, alienated, meaning-starved, inner-directed, buffered self as a negative, but rather as a culmination, or as the maturation of seeds that germinated with the Greeks and the Jews, which is the central gift that the West has given to the world. The Jews' refusal of the embeddedness of the fertility cults of their neighbors on the one hand, and on the other, the leading Greeks' easy dismissal of traditional embedded ideas for almost any imagined possibility were the beginning of a process that has reached its maturity in the last century. Socrates was executed for his efforts to disembed the youth of Athens from their pious embeddedness in traditional ideas about the gods. 

We are all buffered selves to the degree that we have left the womb of premodern embeddedness and inhabit a world where it is no longer possible to live according to the wisdom of the tradition as a "given", but to live instead in a world where one has to think things out for himself and choose, and choosing is the activity that lies at the heart of the work that leads to integrity. The Buffered Self is free in an unprecedented way, and with that freedom comes an enormous burden of responsibility, and the future of the earth and mankind depend on what humans do with this freedom. And it's understandable that many people are not interested in accepting the burden and will seek any means to avoid it. The conservative avoidance strategy has been to reject the emergence of the buffered self as a mistake that must be corrected by restoring premodern, transpersonal traditionalist social codes--like the honor complex. 

This cannot work. It leads to what I call "Lot's Wife Syndrome" and "Zombie Traditionalism", a  calcification of human life into dead forms. The liberal avoidance strategy, even though it is far more comfortable with the idea of disembedded freedom than most conservatives are, lies in a rejection of the fundamental tension that defines us as human and that pulls us in two opposite directions.  I refer you to Ernest Becker's  treatment of this fundamental tension in his The Denial of Death, but the key idea is that we are both angels and beasts, and that a central integrating task is to live in this tension without denying one side or the other.

Modern Liberalism is rooted in a rationalist scientism that denies the spiritual side of human nature and in thinking of humans as talking animals and in rejecting the spiritual side as delusional and the principal cause of modern/postmodern alienation. For these, alienation is a problem caused by our loss of connection to nature, so we must become more like the animals and celebrate our instinctual life. That's what it means to be authentic--to be natural and spontaneous. Authenticity is the only virtue, and the authentic man or woman is not alienated. I'm simplifying here, and this subject could use more nuance, but you know what I mean.

Authenticity is not the same thing as integrity. Integrity is a soul-shaping work; it's something that must be achieved. Authenticity is simply doing what comes naturally. Authenticity has devolved into different ways of running around naked, and if there's any work involved it's getting rid of the inhibitions that restrain us from doing so. The banal private lives of Hollywood celebrities are monuments to this quest for authenticity, i.e., sterile self-absorption, and its tedium in recent decades has been raised to the apogee of self-conscious banality in Woody Allen's so-called serious films, which I find unwatchable.

We celebrate authenticity because it presents itself as organic and natural rather than synthetic or contrived, but the truth is everything is contrived. The real question is not whether something is natural or contrived, organic or synthetic, but whether it is synthesized from materials that are real, i.e., true and good, or materials that are delusional, I.e., dream stuff when the dreams are wish fulfillments for safety, recognition, or power. The honor system I critique above was built from a recognition need fantasy.  

The challenge posed to the buffered self is the use of his freedom to become more deeply real, i.e., true and good. This is a work, and as such a synthesizing or integrating project.  Everything depends on humans figuring out what this means for him or herself, and eventually in the developing some collective wisdom about it, becuase right now there is precious little of it.

The challenge of freedom has been at the center of any serious anthropology from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through Sartre and the contemporary postmodernists. I think of thee people as first wave if by that we mean the people who first accepted that the new reality was that little or nothing is given to us from a culture that has become come disembedded, disenchanted, and deeply secular except the opportunity for the exercise of freedom. First wavers were struggling to define what kind of meaning and purpose are left for human beings in a world where the framework of "given" meanings handed down from the tradition has collapsed, and where the default was disconnectedness and disembeddedness.

They didn't cause its collapse; they simply accepted it as their contemporary condition and as the context for the discovery and exercise of levels of human freedom that were not possible earlier. But while freedom is something to be celebrated, it comes with a cost, and a part of that cost is how free humans have become cut off from one another. There are no given connections--even in families anymore. Connections have to be worked for, developed, achieved; they can never be taken for granted.

So liberation from repressive social constraints has little to do with freedom correctly understood. The constraints have fallen, and the challenge is no longer to break down what no longer constrains, but to choose to develop new constraints, new disciplines, that will function to help grow and give shape to a soul life and community life that without constraints sprawls wildly. The challenge is to find forms help individuals to work together to help one another to develop an integrated soul life. Some of those forms are to be retrieved from the tradition, but there's a difference between retrieval and wanting to go premodern-native, which is the conservative mistake, but also the liberal mistake when going native means joining an ashram, or returning, hippie-like, to nature, or moving to the Third World where one can still lose oneself in not-yet disembedded cultures where the buffered self and disconnection is less common.

Retrieval requires first the acceptance of one's alienation as a kind of wandering in the wilderness. It requires the acceptance of having become a disconnected or buffered self and accepts the discomfort that comes with that as transitional, perhaps a purgative precondition, a dark night of senses and soul,  for moving on to whatever's next. It then requires accepting the fundamental task to choose to connect in a world where connections are no longer given or easy, where connections must be worked for with people who very often have little natural capability for real connection. It requires seeking a connection with people who in fact we might perceive as our enemies. Integration is the strategy; retrieval is one of many tactics such a strategy draws upon. 

There's very little established wisdom about how to effect this work, but I'm convinced that's what we're supposed to be doing now. I think the 20th Century was the period during which the last remnants of the old thing--the customary traditional thing in which the honor systme played a prominent role--where torn down, and the 21st Century marks the beginning of the work to build something new. 

[This is a slightly revised encore post of Honor, first posted in July 2009.]

The Contradictions of Market Conservatism

Tom Frank puts his finger on something here:

The movement’s greatest idealists often turn out to be its greatest scoundrels—think of Jack Abramoff, or of Oliver North, or (as Rick Perlstein has pointed out) the gang of hard-right purists who signed up to do dirty tricks for Richard Nixon. In truth, there seems to be no real contradiction between conservative morality and following the money; to be a capitalist true-believer is to sell yourself.

Free-market idealism, after all, is about applying market forces to the state. This is what everything from Citizens United to toll-road privatization is all about. To be true to such a principle means respecting incentives, answering the call of money. And it ain’t small business who has the money in Washington these days.

A number of years ago I wrote about the market-minded men of the Bush era who did the bidding of lobbyists and who filled the federal agencies with hacks and fools, and I think my verdict on them still applies: “They did not do these awful things because they were bad conservatives; they did them because they were good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds followed naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.”

So the cycle goes on, uprising after uprising, an eternal populist revolt against leaders who never produce and problems that never get solved. Somehow, the free-market utopia that all the primary voters believe in never arrives, no matter how many privatizations and tax cuts the Republicans try. And so they seek out someone even purer, someone even more fanatical. They drag the country into another debt-ceiling fight, and this time, they say,they really mean it! But what never occurs to them is that maybe it’s their ideals themselves that are the problem.

From the planted acorn grows the oak tree, but then the insane compulsion of those who planted it to chop it down beause it didn't grow into a flowering dogwood. 

World War I and the End of the West

As the centennial of Guns of August approaches, I should imagine we'll be reading quite a bit about World War I and its implications, as we should. It was an absurd catastrophe, and it marked the death of the spirit of Enlightenment Modernity in Western and Central Europe. By the spirit of modernity I mean the collective, culture-wide optimistic consensus among the culture's progressive elite that utopia could be engineered by human rationality. A disaster like World War I destroyed any possibility for continued belief in such a possibility, except in Russia, where its Revolution gave it hope for such an engineered future, and in the U.S., whose elites thought such a future was largely already realized. But by 1969 in the U.S.--after the deaths of MLK and RFK and the Nixon presidential victory--and 1989 in the Russian sphere, such optimism was all but dead. The habits of modernity linger, but much like the chicken running around without its head. 

So to begin my thoughts about WWI, I thought I'd quote from this post at TAC by the very conservative William Lind (is he a quasi-monarchist?) entitled "The Lessons of 1814". His larger argument is that had the spirit of 1814 reigned in 1914 and the Christian monarchs maintained the Holy Alliance they formed after the defeat of Napoleon, World War I could have been avoided and Christian civilization preserved: 

The greatest and most worrying parallel is that today as in 1914 key policy-making elites are thinking and acting within an outdated paradigm. Then, the obsolete paradigm was dynastic competition, especially that between the Houses of Hapsburg and Romanov; the new paradigm was set by the mortal threat posed to all Christian, conservative monarchies by the notion of popular sovereignty and Jacobinical definitions of human rights. By fighting each other instead of uniting against the left, three dynasties doomed themselves and possibly us as well. Western culture’s last chance of survival may have been a victory by the Central Powers in World War I.

I love reading TAC because I always come across somebody saying something there  that in my world I hadn't heard before. In this case the idea that the victory in the World War I by the central European Christian monarchies would have preserved Western culture. Now I don't think this for a minute, and I'm amazed, quite frankly, that anybody could think it, but it's interesting because it has made me think a little more about WWI counterfactuals. What would have happened if the massive conflagration that we came to know as the Great War could have been short and limited or have been avoided altogether? 

I wonder if Lind believes that the Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Hapsburgs would have become, had they survived as sovreigns, anything other than symbolic monarchies like the royal families of Britain, Denmark, Belgium, or Sweden. Can he really think that the monarchies of the continental great powers could have had a significant impact on preserving their nations' cultures from the secularizing and economic forces that were already making the existence of monarchy, except for reactionaries and nostalgists, irrelevant? Until reading this article it never occurred to me that anyone, especially any American, could look at WWI as a disaster, even in part, because it destroyed the houses of Hohenzollern and Habsburg. It would seem to me that would be one of its few benefits. 

The more interesting counterfactual question for me is what would have happened in Russia, Germany, and the U.S. if there hadn't been WWI. Had WWI not occurred, it's less likely that there would have been a successful Bolshevik Revolution and more likely that Russia, without "party discipline", would have developed along lines similar to Brazil or Mexico. If there hadn't been WWI, there would have been no Versailles, no stabs in the back, no hyperinflation, no German resentment for Nazis to exploit. No Nazis or Bolsheviks, no Hitler, no WWII, no Stalin, no holocaust, no famine in the Ukraine--and no Cold War. Maybe even no nuclear bomb. 

Germany would have continued as an economic superpower, and it's likely that its commercial class would gradually supplant in influence its military class. So Europe arrives pretty much where it is today, maybe a few decades sooner, and without as much bloodshed. 

***

How would these counterfactuals have had an impact on the U.S.? It's interesting to me that progressives were split on whether or not to support U.S. entry into WWI. One faction, led by John Dewey, favored entry into WWI because he saw it as an opportunity for greater centralization of the state in Washington, which he thought necessary to deal more effectively with social problems that were intractable so long as solutions for them were left to actors on the local level. Dewey was opposed by other progressives like Randolph Bourne who understood that 'war is the health of the state' and feared that US involvement in WWI would accelerate the destruction of the old republican localism and the new rule of technocrats.

But had the U.S. not entered WWI, the process that Bourne feared would have been slowed but not stopped. There was too much already in the works in the private sector that was leading to the destruction of the republican ideal. Industrial proletariatization, massive immigration, Taylorism, Fordism, the influence of social control freaks like E.A. Ross, and the manufactured consent of Walter Lippmann didn't need WWI for them to transform the U.S. into something the founders never dreamed of. And the Great Depression and the war with Japan was going to happen no matter what, and both required aggressive interventions from a strong centralized state. Centralization and secularization were inevitable in the U.S.

Because Japan's aggression would likely have continued according to its own internal drivers, conflict with the U.S., its main competitor for hegemony in the western Pacific, would have been inevitable. The U.S., the sleeping commercial giant once aroused, would have had an easier job defeating the Japanese fighting it only on the one front. The U.S. focus would likely have shifted more toward Asia and away from Europe, and if there had been no successful Russian Revolution, it's likely that Mao would be just another warlord rather than a Marxist ideologue, and without the ideological impediment would welcome a partnership  the conqueror of his Japanese enemy. No Great Famine, no Gang of Four, no Cultural Revolution. China goes the way of Deng a couple of decades earlier and develops a relationship to the U.S. and the West much like the one Japan developed. 

 ***

My argument with conservatives like Lind is that they give to much attention to developments in the political sphere and tend to see it as central in effecting changes in the social or cultural sphere. It just doesn't work that way. The Christian monarchs could not have "saved" Western culture because they could not have been at all effective in pushing back against the economic and cultural forces promoting secularism. The monarchs might have delayed things by partnering with a military autocrat as the Bourbons did in Spain, but it was only a matter of time before any such attempt to hold back the tide would collapse, as it did in Spain in the 1970s. 

So bottom line, had WWI been avoided, the twentieth century would have been a lot less bloody, but we would have wound up pretty much where we are now. But I'm open to be persuaded otherwise.

Making Meaning vs. Making Money

Must there be an inverse correlation?

In this Sunday's Tom Frank piece at Salon, he interviews David Graeber, one of the "organizers" [those are ironic air quotes] of Occupy Wall street, author of Debt: The First 5000 Years and a  piece last summer entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs." I think the interview raises more question than it answers, but I thought this particular exchange was woth excerpting and discussing if anyone is inclined:

[Frank] I wonder about the political ramifications of this. You’re talking about a situation that obviously requires labor unions, but it could also go the other way. I am reminded of a passage in your book, “The Democracy Project,” where you attribute the well-known working-class enmity against the “liberal elite” to the fact that the liberal elite have good jobs, rewarding jobs, jobs that by definition lots of average people will never be able to get. I wonder if you could expand on that.

[Graeber] Well, here we go back to the question of unpaid internships again. Some years ago I wrote a piece for Harpers called “Army of Altruists” where I tried to grapple with the power of right-wing populism, especially with the way that “we hate the liberal elite” and “support the troops” seemed to have a very similar, deep resonance, even to be a way of saying the same thing. What I ended up concluding is that working class people hate the cultural elite more than they do the economic elite—and mind you, they don’t like the economic elite very much. But they hate the cultural elite because they see them as a group of people who have grabbed all the jobs where one gets paid to do good in the world. If you want a career pursuing any form of value other than monetary value—if you want to work in journalism, and pursue truth, or in the arts, and pursue beauty, or in some charity or international NGO or the UN, and pursue social justice—well, even assuming you can acquire the requisite degrees, for the first few years they won’t even pay you. So you’re supposed to live in New York or some other expensive city on no money for a few years after graduation. Who else can do that except children of the elite? So if you’re a fork-lift operator or even a florist, you know your kid is unlikely to ever become a CEO, but you also know there’s no way in a million years they’ll ever become drama critic for the New Yorker or an international human rights lawyer. The only way they could get paid a decent salary to do something noble, something that’s not just for the money, is to join the army. So saying “support the troops” is a way of saying “fuck you” to the cultural elite who think you’re a bunch of knuckle-dragging cavemen, but who also make sure your kid would never be able to join their club of rich do-gooders even if he or she was twice as smart as any of them.

So the right wing manipulates the resentment of the bulk of the working class from being able to dedicate their lives to anything purely noble or altruistic. But at the same time—and here’s the real evil genius of right-wing populism—they also manipulate the resentment of that portion of the middle classes trapped in bullshit jobs against the bulk of the working classes, who at least get to do productive work of obvious social benefit. Think about all the popular uproar about school teachers. There’s this endless campaign of vilification against teachers, who they say are overpaid, coddled, and are blamed for everything wrong with our education system. In fact, grade school teachers undergo really grueling conditions for much less money than they’d be paid if they’d gone into almost any other profession requiring the same level of education, and almost all the problems the right-wingers are referring to aren’t created by the teachers or teachers’ unions at all but by school administrators—the ones who are paid much more, and mostly have classic bullshit jobs that seem to multiply endlessly even as the teachers themselves are squeezed and downsized. So why does no one complain about those guys? Actually I saw something telling written by a right-wing activist on some blog—he said, well the funny thing is, when we first started our school reform campaigns, we tried to focus on the administrators. But it didn’t take. Then we shifted to the teachers and suddenly the whole thing exploded. It’s hard to explain that in any other way than to say: a lot of people resent the teachers for having genuine, meaningful jobs. You get to shape young lives. You get to make a real difference for other people. And the logic seems to be: shouldn’t that be enough for them? They want that, and middle-class salaries, and job security, and vacations, and benefits, too? You even see that with auto workers. “But you get to make cars! That’s a real job! And you also want $30 an hour?”

It’s an imperfect strategy. The anti-intellectualism for instance works on many sections of the white working class, but it doesn’t work nearly so well on immigrants or African-Americans. The resentment against those who get to do meaningful labor exists alongside a resentment for having to do meaningless labor to begin with. It’s an unstable mix. But we have to recognize that in countries like the US, it’s been pretty effective.

[Frank] What can be done about all this?

[Graeber] Right after my original bullshit jobs piece came out, I used to think that if I wanted, I could start a whole career in job counseling – because so many people were writing to me saying “I realize my job is pointless, but how can I support a family doing something that’s actually worthwhile?” A lot of people who worked the information desk at Zuccotti Park, and other occupations, told me the same thing: young Wall Street types would come up to them and say “I mean, I know you’re right, we’re not doing the world any good doing what we’re doing. But I don’t know how to live on less than a six figure income. I’d have to learn everything over. Could you teach me?”

But I don’t think we can solve the problem by mass individual defection. Or some kind of spiritual awakening. That’s what a lot of people tried in the ‘60s and the result was a savage counter-offensive which made the situation even worse. I think we need to attack the core of the problem, which is that we have an economic system that, by its very nature, will always reward people who make other people’s lives worse and punish those who make them better.

I'm not sure if this holds up under closer scrutiny. It seems hyperbolic, but perhaps in the service of an unnoticed truth. I think Graeber is pointing to something real, but I'm not sure if his explanation of it makes sense. But I don't have a ready alternative explanation.

This aspect of right-wing populism he ponts to makes sense, but how do you account for the phenomenon of 'bullshit jobs'? Bullshit jobs don't make economic sense--why pay people big salaries to do nothing? So what kind of sense do they make? Is it all about cooptation--nobody's a worker anymore--everybody's a manager--in the service of social control?  Maybe, but I find it hard to believe because the bottom line is too important for these big corporations to care much about being in the social control business.