On Neoconservatism

Oh, Billy. Billy, Billy, Billy. You have taken to writing an op-ed in the enemy's newspaper. Why would a self-proclaimed neoconservative, who, as such, believes that American liberalism is the source of all decay, then take part in that liberalism by expressing your opinion in a liberal paper? Irony? Propaganda for those who know not who you are? But I guess it comes as no surprise that William Kristol, neoconservative and son of founding neoconservative Irving Kristol, would take to writing a piece of character assassination on Obama. Now, don't get me wrong, Billy. I'm not a big fan of liberalism myself. You see, I have problems with the State telling me what to do. I guess the irony here, though, is that you're not just against contemporary liberals, who, unlike classical liberals (libertarians), are more like State Progressives. You're also against traditional conservatives, who want the state out of everyone's pockets and homes. As a neoconservative, you feel that the moral relativism of American liberalism leads to moral decay, chaos, and a lack of national unity. So, you want to make America great again by selling your own version of Plato's Noble Lie. It's not the Democrats' Big Government that you abhor, it's their moral relativism. You all want a Big State, one that imposes moral order, and one that furthermore claims to be over and above all other nation-states.

I guess that's what it really frightening about neoconservatism: it is that it is strikingly similar to Nazism. Rather than speaking of the great Aryan Nation, though, they talk about the great American Nation. And, rather than the Nazi's imposing their high neo-classicist culture onto the rest of the world, neoconservatives want to impose American "freedom" on the rest of the world. You see, our morality is the best morality. Our culture is the best culture, and we need to export it an the end of a gun -- just like the Nazis. Sure, we don't have concentration camps, but I'm sure you wouldn't have a problem with it, with all of those repugnant moral degenerates…right? I mean, the neocons have no problem with the use of fear, as long as it gets people to come together and see Amercia as The Good and find some chimera to play the part of Pure Evil. Does not The Good require Pure Evil for its existence? Yeeesssss, and you know that, Billy. Which is why you and your comrades have been terrorizing the American public with your distortions of "terrorist threats" (which are no greater now than they ever have been, and not because of the Iraq war). Why should you have a problem eroding civil liberties, if its those very civil liberties which provide the environment for what you see as moral decay?

What is so morally repugnant about neoconservatism is that it perverts fundamental American value of liberty (because such liberties lead to the moral relativism you so fear) and posits instead a moral order imposed by an intellectual elite in Washington. Now, don't get me wrong, I see problems with most American metanarratives. But to make American liberty part of your Noble Lie is utterly repugnant. It is YOU and your comrades that are un-American, my friend. You, Herr Wolfowitz, Herr Rumsfeld, and the rest of your fascist gang. A Big State that imposes a moral order not only on its own people but on the rest of the world? How is that anything other than fascism, or in the very least a form of veiled totalitarianism? Hmph, no wonder many neocons are ex-Leninists, who still think that they are the intellectual vanguard that will lead the people out of their own ignorance.

In a way, neoconservatism is philosophically similar to Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism wants to impose a moral order, Islam, on others by a elite group of intellectuals to protect them from what it sees as moral decay (I guess that's why they call it Islamo-fascism). Neocons also want a core group of intellectuals to impose moral order on their own people -- Americans -- to protect them from moral decay. However, it is not not only Americans they wish to impose their order, but on the world (so should we start calling neoconservatisvism Amero-fascism? Sounds about right). And they do this by using rhetoric that talks about promoting freedom in the world. I find it SO ironic that American fundamentalism calls Islamic fundamentalism tyranny without also seeing itself as tyrannical. What a farce.

Oh, Billy, I can see why your ego might like to dream of being a philosopher king. I can see why your delusions of grandeur would make you believe that you can be Jesus and lead people to salvation. Sometimes I dream of it, too, but I also consider those some of my worst moments. I guess I don't feel bad speaking like this about you, my friend, because I'm really just mirroring your own op-ed piece in the NYT. Perhaps I should be more conspicuous, though. You say,

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

I don't like Obama either, but you are a prep-school boy who went to Harvard, was a professor of political science, and are now a part of a movement of intellectual elites that are trying to impose a metanarrative qua Noble Lie on the American public, and it is being done by way of a haughty throwback form of pre-modern political theory! HA! Who's the patronizing elitist here, Bill? I don't want to psychologize, but I think you're projecting. Perhaps you should take a hint from yourself and stop participating in a group of people who attempt to terrorize the American public with nightmares of chimeras and Nazi-style propaganda.

Here, let me try:

William Kristol is an awfully talented intellectual. But could the American people, by now, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Kristol tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Hitler, the patronizing elitism of Goebbels, and the haughty fascism of Mussolini?

Maybe I should re-write your whole piece, title it It's All About the Noble Lie and send it in to the NYT. How bout it, Bill?

On America's Rise of Midlife Suicide

The New York Times recently published an article, "Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers", in which the author sites research that says,

A new five-year analysis of the nation’s death rates recently released by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the suicide rate among 45-to-54-year-olds increased nearly 20 percent from 1999 to 2004, the latest year studied, far outpacing changes in nearly every other age group. (All figures are adjusted for population.)

For women 45 to 54, the rate leapt 31 percent. “That is certainly a break from trends of the past,” said Ann Haas, the research director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

By contrast, the suicide rate for 15-to-19-year-olds increased less than 2 percent during that five-year period — and decreased among people 65 and older.

…At the moment, the prime suspect is the skyrocketing use — and abuse — of prescription drugs.

But why are people abusing Rx drugs? Let me postulate an answer: In the United States and in European nations, more and more jobs are service and executive jobs, were people "sell their 'personality'" to quote Fromm. Perhaps people are killing themselves more because they are already dead and so alienated that they cannot find a safe return. This would also account for the skyrocket in women's suicide, many of whom are now part of the service and executive economy. Fromm says,

Marx did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people, especially of the ever-increasing segment of the population which manipulates symbols and men, rather than machines. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The latter's functioning still depends on the expression of certain personal qualities like skill, reliability, etc., and he is not forced to sell his "personality," his smile, his opinions in the bargain; the symbol manipulators are hired not only for their skill, but for all those personality qualities which make them "attractive personality packages," easy to handle and manipulate. (pp. 56-7, Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, Frederick Ungar Publishing, New York, 1961).

On Legislating Progress

The 50 year anniversary of desegregation in Little Rock, AK where they were forced to integrate their schools by the armed force of the federal government, we are given reason to reflect on when it might or might not be appropriate to force states or local groups to submit to the will or a larger body of people to which the smaller group associates. Can we justify the State imposing, through military force, a legislative policy, ruled by the Federal Government, that aims to eradicate inequality and oppression? In this case, some might argue that if anarchists advocate the abolition of hierarchy, rulers, and oppression of all forms, then it seems to be a legitimate use of force to eradicate the inequality present in schools in Little Rock in 1957. We must be careful not to confuse the justification of an act of a State from the justification of the State itself. For example, and to complicate matters further: what would it mean for a freely-associated group of anarchists to use force to impose conditions that aim to eradicate archos [the Greek word for master and from which an-archy is derived]? In this case are the group of anarchists acting as masters against others?

This points to an internal contradiction in individualist accounts of anarchism: who is it that protects the culture that allows for forms of libertarianism? At some point such conditions need to be protected, if they are to remain. Do anarchists as a whole form a committee who are appointed to protect the conditions of anarchistic life? And if so, how is this done without contradiction? I suppose if the entire community agrees consensually upon the rules of a community, then there is no ruler, per se, other than the community consensus itself. But what happens if an individual refuses to obey that rule? What if one or more members cannot meet consensus? Are rules protecting the community then abandoned? Perhaps the threat does not loom large enough, and when the time comes when the community faces serious threat, consensus won't be too hard to come by. Does the community ostracize its members who fail to abide by its consensus, or does consensus need to be abandoned at the first member who fails to conform to the consensus? One might respond that individuals associate with other individuals in a multiplicity of ways, each association contingent on free agreement between members over the nature of their agreement. However, this still does not answer the question of how these very conditions are protected. Such a question requires the positing of a community of people within which the general consensus of the members is that individuals of the community must be free to associate with others. Ugh, this question will confuse me eternally.

I began this thought, however, asking about the rule of law to impose progress, i.e. when, if ever, is it appropriate to legislate change or to create change through law or rule. In the case of Little Rock and the Unites States Government, I think it is safe to say that when we surrender our morality to a class of people set aside from society -- legislators -- whose job it is to make laws for others to obey, then we surrender our morality to laws as such. What is right or wrong is determined by what is legal or illegal, and we need only look to Nazi Germany to see what legal atrocities were being had. This is not to say that the decision of the Federal Government to invade Little Rock was an equivalent state of affairs. In the Little Rock case, many of us would say that desegregation and equal opportunity for education is morally right. However, the coincidence in this case of what is morally right and what is legal does not give reason to make an identity of the two. Accepting the legislation of progress in human relations is to surrender humanity to the State.

I often wonder if, like our invasion of Iraq, where we attempt to promote democracy at the end of a gun to only make matters worse, the legislation of progress in human relations within our own country carries the same irony. Can we make better people through the force of law just as the current administration assumes it can make a better country through the force of military? This seems to be the fundamental assumption of Big State advocates - liberals and conservatives alike. On the effectiveness of legislating change, I heard recently on NPR that the southern states are much more desegregated in now than the northern states. Whereas the south had Jim Crow laws (separate but equal) that were soon found unconstitutional, the north had residential segregation, and it still strongly remains. On one hand, it seems that legislation -- specifically finding Crow laws unconstitutional -- lead to greater desegregation than those who already legislated equality but also had rules of community that were not articulated in law -- the residential segregation of the north. Two broadly construed communities were legislated to desegregate -- the North and the South. The one that resisted the most has found itself most ahead. Does this tell us anything of the effectiveness of legislating progress in human relations, or is it just a fancy coincidence, with innumerable dimensions of complexity that would make what seems pretty simple a much, much more complicated matter (I would opt for the latter. For example, no where does this seem to account for rates of racist, neo-Nazi, or other hate group activity, to say the least)?

As libertarian socialists, are we to merely advocate for the repeal of government as a permanent institution and class of people? If so, can we reasonably expect every member of a community to decide on every social issue that comes to bear on the community, and who would protect the conditions that make the community possible, i.e., how is the positive freedom of the community protected? It would seem that in some cases representatives would have to be elected to do research and make decisions. Perhaps all of these decisions would need to them be sent to referendum for a vote -- but a vote that wins 100% approval, of course. For anything less is a tyranny of the majority.

Erich Fromm's Exposition of Marx

I was recently reading Eric Fromm's Marx's Concept of Man, in which he discusses Marx's concept of alienation. I thought it was particularly relevant to my recent rant against Cox and Alm regarding their idea of measuring consumption as a more accurate reflection of wealth. Fromm quotes Marx:

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theater or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither will moth nor rust will corrupt -- your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have … everything which the economist takes away from you in life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth … the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

Fromm warns that we "must not confuse the aim of overcoming the abysmal poverty which interferes with dignified life, with the aim of an ever-increasing consumption, which has been the supreme value for both Capitalism and Krushchevism. Marx's position was quite clearly on the side of the conquest of poverty, and equally against consumption as a supreme end." It is not the consumption of things which makes one wealthy, but the ability of one to be one's own master and to participate in the creative work that, as such, makes one human. Again, Fromm:

Independence and freedom, for Marx, are based on the act of self-creation. 'A being does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live completely by another person's favor when I owe to him not only the continuance of my life, but also its creation; when he is its source. My life has necessarily such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation'…For Marx the aim of socialism was the emancipation of man, and the emancipation of man was the same as his self-realization in the process of productive relatedness and oneness with man and nature. The aim of socialism was the development of the individual personality.

According to Fromm, Marx would have criticized Communist Russia as "crude communism." Because Communist Russia was more concerned about universalizing consumption and in doing so maintained the division of labor, it was merely another form of capitalism. Fromm says that in crude communism

[T]he role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men. The relation of private property [which Fromm interprets as capital as opposed to merely objects of use] remains the relation of the community to the world of things…. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.

Finally, Fromm states that Marx claimed that the revolution would begin with the emancipation of workers, because working class was the most alienated. However, now, what we see is that many in middle-management are more alienated from their labor than those who work in factories. For the middle-management worker must also "sell his 'personality,'" whereas the skilled laborer at least retains possession of this. The alienation that occurs is one in which the "what" of production means more than the producer. The producer worships the products of his labor instead of his own humanity. This is the fundamental problem of consumption of a measure of wealth -- it perverts the nature of man into something whose highest aim is to have rather than to be. Our own existence is defined by the objects of our production; we live for them and their acquisition.

From concludes his exposition of alienation brilliantly:

To what extent things and circumstance of our own making have become our masters, Marx could hardly have foreseen; yet nothing could prove his prophecy more drastically than the fact that the whole human race is today the prisoner of the nuclear weapons it has created, and of the political institutions which are equally of its own making. A frightened mankind waits anxiously to see whether it will be saved from the power of the things it has created, from the blind action of the bureaucracies it has appointed.

On the Rule of Reason

It might seem clear that allowing reason to be the sole arbiter of things to also be the way to freedom. For, if any law or institution, through the course of reasoning is found to be arbitrary or unnecessary by those over whom the laws or institutions rule, then why should they not be abolished? I agree entirely with this statement. However, if we examine reasoning closer, we find that reason is not an appeal to some Platonic logos through which we might find harmony in the perfected freedom of the mechanical order of reason. Unless one reduces all conversation to propositional logic (and even then), the elusiveness of meaning foils us. This implies that the possible paths of reasoning are laid out by the totality of the language within which reasoning takes place.

In the case of foreign languages, Hans-Georg Gadamer says,

when there is understanding, there is not translation but speech. To understand a foreign language means that we do not need to translate it into our own. When we really master a language, then no translation is necessary – in fact, any translation seems impossible… For you understand a language by living in it (TM, 386).

One might know this experience if one has ever begun to think in a foreign language or attempted to translate a term that has no corollary in one’s mother tongue. Although one might have a command of both languages, one finds oneself speechless. When we understand a language, i.e., when we live in it, we can switch into speaking in the foreign tongue without needing to think about the grammar or vocabulary – we do not first think in our mother tongue and then methodically translate it into the foreign tongue. The foreign tongue becomes like the mother tongue to us. As such, the world of that language – the ideas and existences that compose it – opens up to us as it does for another whose mother tongue is the foreign language.

There are concepts that at the more abstract levels in a language become untranslatable. Take the Greek word arate. It has been translated as "excellence" and "virtue", among other things. After 2,000 years, we're still not entirely sure what arate means, because no one lives in ancient Greek language anymore. Although we can roughly translate it, we are constantly brought up against contradictions in its definitions when we try to enter it into other translated statements in the same language. Ancient Greek hung together as an entire language; no one word, especially as a concept removed from the material world (like freedom or justice or anarchism) can live in a foreign language as comfortable as it does in its own.

So what does this aside have to do with reason? Abstract concepts exist within language, and the meanings they employ (when we try to define freedom, we employ other terms, and when we want to define them, we employ even others) open up only the possibilities that exist in that language. If I have no metaphorical concept of heart as we do in many Western cultures, i.e., - he has a big heart meaning he is generous, loving, etc., then I cannot speak of anyone or anything having a big heart, and this limits what I can express.

Certainly, we Euro-Caucasians have a rich historical discourse of freedom and anarchy that found most prominently its beginnings in the Renaissance (of Greek culture). But if we look to Japan, for example, we might find something different. One of my professors had said that while he was in Japan teaching teachers of English he had them read Emerson's Self-reliance. They found it practically unintelligible in spirit, because, they said, what was primary to them was not one's individual freedom, but harmony of the group. I think this has purchase, as we find find traces of this idea in the strongly influential philosophical thinking of Taoism and Confucianism (circularity, interconnectedness and harmony).

The danger with reason is that we might universalize it an impose our own linguistic world onto another, asserting that our reason is the correct reason, and that, ultimately, if one only heard correctly, truth will be shown. However, as I hopefully made clear above, each language has limits placed in its reasoning by the very thing which gives the power to reason -- language. This mistake primary for the horrors of Western colonization. We believed other cultures as "backwards," and it was the "white man's burden" to free these people from their shackles of ritualistic pre-modernity, not recognizing that our own anti-tradition antics were a tradition in themselves (yes, anarchism is a tradition; why else would many of us read Marx, Spooner, Bookchin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, et. al, or even refer to them with authority? From where do we get the ideas that rule and regulate our thinking?).

Lastly, the appeal to reason also misses the psycho-historical nature of human existence. Arguing over ideas, we find our identities tied up in them and we have a hard time letting go. Ernest Becker quotes Otto Rank:

And so [Otto] Rank could say, 'Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over … immortality.' If anyone doubts this, let him try to explain away the life and death viciousness of all ideological disputes. Each person nourishes his immortality in the ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder men go into a fit of rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible.

So, to close this thought, I think reasoning is a powerful and necessary means of acquiring and maintaining our freedom, but it is limited to the particularity of language and it cannot be made independent of our own individual historicity or that of our culture.

On the Coercion of Symbolic Violence

To help with the conversation on defining a "real" anybody (anarchist, socialist, etc.) or claiming them to be otherwise, I thought I would add the following (which is from an essay I wrote on violence):

According to Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence is the exercise of recognized constraint – that is, to move the indicative to the imperative by moving from the individual to the collective and making claims on one that they must attend to an action if they are really part of that group. Bourdieu gives the following example: “If I am an incarnate [a delegate or such] of the collective of the group, and if this is the group to which you belong, which defines you, which gives you an identity, which means you really are a teacher, really a Protestant, really a Catholic, etc., you really have no choice but to obey.” It is coercion that is not physical but that takes as its object of manipulation the identity of the individual. In other words, symbolic violence is the violence carried out by what Bourdieu calls symbolic power – “a power which presupposes recognition, that is, the misrecognition of the violence that is exercised through it.”

Quotes are taken from Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 209 & 212.