Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: politics (page 7 of 15)

9 Tired and Wrong Received Ideas

30 April 2011 / / 5 Comments
Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, by Guy Davenport

Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, by Guy Davenport

These nine ideas are all wrong. (I believed many of these, whether explicitly or as an unstated assumption, at some point or another, so this post is directed at my past self as much as anyone.)

  1. The Greeks (Athens specifically) had a free direct democracy with open discussion, free of tyranny.
  2. Descartes formulated the fundamental concepts of rational subjectivity and selfhood under which we all still operate today, thus originating modernity.
  3. Enlightenment thinkers shared a rationalist, Panglossian optimism about controlling humanity and the state.
  4. The French Revolution was a seminal, epochal event that drastically and uniquely changed attitudes toward humanity, history, and politics.
  5. American religious fanaticism originates with the Puritans and associated peoples in the 17th and 18th centuries.
  6. Hegel’s dialectic is of the form “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.”
  7. Prior to the 20th century (or prior to Schleiermacher, Saussure, Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc.), language was taken to have determinate, definite meaning that directly referred to reality.
  8. Universal laws of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, hard-wired into the brain, have been discovered, which apply to all known languages.
  9. A two part slippage of political terms (note how one term appears in both lists):
    1. Capitalism = libetarianism = free markets = laissez-faire = trickle-down = globalization = free trade = neoliberalism = liberalism = supply-side = mercantilism = etc.
    2. Communism = Marxism = Leninism = socialism = regulated market = welfare state = liberalism = Keynesianism = Great Society = etc.

These are some of the ones that I think about most often, ones that are taken seriously by some people I respect. (I’m not going to list “Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States” or “Edward Said was a Muslim fundamentalist,” because I’m lucky enough not to deal with people who believe these things, and I’m trying to list these in order to change people’s minds, which would be impossible with anyone who believes those two.)

These ideas are frequently debunked or contested, but still I frequently hear them stated with blithe certainty. Even when the case is debatable, as with the French Revolution, there is such exaggeration of its singular importance that no event short of the Second Coming could fulfill the importance assigned to it.

Oversimplification is the main sin here. Two forms of it present here are origination and conflation. Origination states that a certain idea, concept, or practice began with a certain person or people at a certain time and place, and simply did not exist before that. Conflation simply packages together terms like “subjectivity” and “selfhood” and “rationalism,” so that an attack on one serves as an attack on all of them. And with both of these these goes Inflation, where the key idea/event/person is elevated to such singular importance that it becomes an excuse not to search for any lesser-known ideas/events/people that might serve to complicate matters.

While discussing Derrida’s critique of Husserl, I criticized Derrida for invoking a simplistic, received view of language, and then tarring huge swaths of the linguistic and philosophical tradition with it. I’m far from the first to make that critique, and he’s far from the first to make that move. It’s a variation on the straw man argument. Via conflation, the straw man is used against many opponents, not just one. (It’s far more efficient.) By finding the same straw man in thinker after thinker, entire traditions can be invalidated and subverted, so much the better to make the critique appear more sweeping, profound, and revolutionary. Derrida was taking after Heidegger here, who was the absolute master of this technique. (Presence is always present.)

But such straw man arguments aren’t necessarily used for critiques. The ideas above are used both positively and negatively. They are pieces of conceptual history that seem so widely accepted that in a hundred years, people may have trouble figuring out that these assumptions underlay so much contemporary writing. People often no longer bother to explain them or even to state them. As an analogy, Frederick Beiser has spent the last 20 years attempting to explain the impact of Jacobi and Lessing’s “Pantheism controversy” on the philosophy of Kant and most everyone else in that period. It was a huge imbroglio at the time, but people like me read Kant with no knowledge of it.

I’ll close with some wise words about conceptual generalization and simplification  from Albert O. Hirschman, who inspired this post. Here he is remarking on Marx’s famous “history repeats, first as tragedy, then as farce” remark:

This is the second time I find a well-known generalization or aphorism about the history of events to be more nearly correct when applied to the history of ideas. The first time was with regard to Santayana’s famous dictum that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Generalizing on the firm basis of this sample of two, I am tempted to formulate a “metalaw”: historical “laws” that are supposed to provide insights into the history of events come truly into their own in the history of ideas.

Does anyone else have particular favorite received ideas they’d like to give?

Profiles in Type L: General Paul Van Riper

29 March 2011 / / 5 Comments

A few months back, in Battle Lines, I talked about the divide between the free-market technocrats and the conservative old boys in American society, dubbing them Type L and Type C respectively. To review:

  • Type L: libertarian, technocratic, meritocratic, pro-business, anti-government, laissez faire,  pro-science, positivist, secular, elitist, progress-driven, Whiggish, optimistic. “The best should have the power.”
  • Type C: tradition-oriented, pro-status quo, nationalistic, protectionist, isolationist, xenophobic, social conservative, pro-business, pro-government (at least in regards to furthering other goals), pro-religion, cronyistic, chauvinistic. “The powerful should have the power.”

(Remember, I don’t identify with either of them! They’re just all we have.)

I had no trouble coming up with big-name examples of Type C (see: nearly our entire political system and corporate overlords), but had a harder time thinking of big-name Type L’s who weren’t associated with technology or economics. Part of this is that these are probably the only relevant places in society where Type L’s can thrive without being utterly annihilated by cronyism. The space for someone like Arnheim in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities doesn’t really exist, and I’m not sure if it ever did. Musil had to contrive a situation for brilliant (but oh so wrong) thinkers to be in positions of political power, and while the voices of the time speak through his characters, I suspect his characters may be improvements on their models, no matter how much he damns them.

Perhaps some CIA wonks might qualify, along the lines of George Smiley, but somehow I doubt it.

Alec Guinness as George Smiley - Insert Star Wars Reference Here

But tonight I thought of someone in the military who fits the bill: Paul K. Van Riper.

 

Paul K. Van Riper

Van Riper first came to notice when he very publicly failed to give the military the results that they wanted in their Millennium Challenge 2002 (note corporate brand). The war game was supposed to prove the validity of Rumsfeld’s super new strategies of high-tech, low personnel forces, and Van Riper took on the “Red Force,” some unnamed Middle Eastern player.

Hellbent on showing Rumsfeld how stupid he was, Van Riper used all sorts of clever gambits to render the high-tech stuff useless. In exchange, the Army cheated, ignoring his orders, handicapping him and resurrecting US forces to ensure the US won against Red Force. Van Riper, already retired, went public:

Van Riper said this approach ran counter to his notion of how an experiment should function. “You don’t come to a conclusion beforehand and then work your way to that conclusion. You see how the thing plays out,” he said. [Type C never says this.]

Van Riper said the blame for rigging the exercise lay not with any one officer, but with the culture at Joint Forces Command. “It’s an institutional problem,” he said. “It’s embedded in the institution.” [Who is he, David Simon?]

He was highly critical of the command’s concepts, such as “effects-based operations” and “rapid, decisive operations,” which he derided as little more than “slogans.” [Type C never ever says this.]

“There’s very little intellectual activity,” Van Riper said about Joint Forces Command. “What happens is a number of people are put into a room, given some sort of a slogan and told to write to the slogan. That’s not the way to generate new ideas.”

Van Riper’s single-mindedness can sometimes rub other experiment participants the wrong way, said a retired Army officer who has played in several war games with the Marine. “What he’s done is he’s made himself an expert in playing Red, and he’s real obnoxious about it,” the retired officer said. “He will insist on being able to play Red as freely as possible and as imaginatively and creatively within the bounds of the framework of the game and the technology horizons and all that as possible.

“He can be a real pain in the ass, but that’s good. But a lot of people don’t like to sign up for that sort of agitation. But he’s a great guy, and he’s a great patriot and he’s doing all those things for the right reasons.”

Van Riper is probably about ten miles to my right on all sorts of issues, but his very visible break with the US military and civilian leadership in this exercise and again shortly after the start of the Iraq war sets him aside from the military leadership as a type. So in a Frontline interview, while he praises Colin Powell even as he trashes McNamara and Rumsfeld, he also says anti-cronyistic things like this:

I see inside the United States Army the germs of a second intellectual renaissance that’s approaching these problems. And they’re not caught up in the sloganeering that most of the Joint community’s caught up in. They really are studying; they’re having conferences. The conferences aren’t love fests, where they put out some idea and try to get people to sign up to it. It’s a real debate, real argument, trying to synthesize some new knowledge out of it.

Is there anything in the current Defense Department that would lead you to believe those ideas will flourish?

I see nothing from the highest levels of the Pentagon that would lead to this. What I see is a support of the Joint Forces command by edict being told to be innovative. You cannot demand innovation. You can’t simply say to an organization, as Mr. Rumsfeld apparently did to the Army: “Be more innovative. You’re not innovative enough. Service Chief, you’re out of here.” That’s not the way to do it.

This is, of course, exactly what so many non-technical executives say to their R+D people, and this is exactly the response that the R+D people always have, right down to the ridicule of love fests. Type C’s have love fests because they are celebrating all being rich white guys; how can they not have love fests when they get together? They certainly would not let ideas get in the way. They say stuff like this:

Gen. William “Buck” Kernan, head of Joint Forces Command, told Pentagon reporters July 18 that Millennium Challenge was nothing less than “the key to military transformation.”

Van Riper would not use the phrase “the key to military transformation,” and I bet he never had a nickname like “Buck.” (He’s clearly more Sterling Hayden than George C. Scott in the Buck/Rip(p)er dichotomy.) And I bet he hates William “Buck” Kernan. We have an apparently near-perfect recreation of that sort of love fest Type C in David Rasche’s Rumsfeld/Bolton character from Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop:

These sorts do not like to lose wargames, ever. Reality must shift to accommodate them.

[This may be why I am more sympathetic to the analytic philosophy community than a lot of bloggers out there. The only thing worse than a room of people fighting over abstract issues and shutting each other down is a room of people all agreeing with the most powerful one there, be it Rumsfeld or Derrida. This is an oversimplification, obviously, but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark.]

Van Riper, who has been retired for many years, was last heard from in 2006 calling for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. What took him so long? Though I share some of Gary Brecher’s respect for his cleverness in U Sank My Carrier, my intention is not to praise Van Riper. I suspect he adheres to a form of realpolitik that I would find morally repugnant. I suspect he has his own sort of obsessive myopia indicated by tidbits like this: “General Van Riper would spend his chow break by issuing speeding tickets all across MCB Quantico.” I suspect I would find him rather scary. But if you are looking for the counterweight to the current ruling class of CEOs and politicians, people like Van Riper are probably the best you can do.

Note on Corporate and Academic Institutions

28 March 2011 / / 0 Comments

Ray wrote:

Cholly on Software : The Signifying Code Monkey

There are benefits — non-financial, obviously — to working for an institution of higher education. But in a 27-year career I remember only four people with whom I couldn’t establish some sort of working relationship, and I met three of them after leaving what’s oddly called “private industry.” Similarly, two of the three pieces I’ve regretted publishing were written within the context of a (mostly) academic website. Maybe it’s true that there’s something peculiarly toxic about this environment? Or maybe this particular pachyderm happens to find my own blend of tones and pheromones peculiarly noxious? For whatever reason, I’ve spent a painful number of turns playing the wrong side of Whac-a-Mole.

I responded:

Academia tolerates and even fosters antisocial behavior in various forms, while the private sector is much more strict in its codes of behavior hewing to some practical norm. Coders who work in academic nonprofits tend to be those who were “too weird” for industry, by their own account. Much of this may have to do with the ultimate bottom line of the holy dollar asserting itself far more incessantly in the private sector. (The exceptions were research-focused places like Bell Labs, which also attracted the types of pig-headed people you simply could not deal with. They have gone under precisely because their employees would rather spend their time perfecting an IETF RFC than writing server monitoring scripts in Python or, god forbid, Perl.) So given an insufferable, ambitious, and/or dogmatic person, that person will either have the rare good fortune to rise to a management position in the private sector that he (occasionally she, mostly he) will then use to attempt to realize his treasured, pure vision of paradise, and fail repeatedly while inflicting untold suffering on his peons; OR, that person will be thrown aside by the capitalist machinery and will seek refuge in locations where the almighty dollar holds less immediate sway. There, in academia or a like-minded non-profit, their high rhetoric and uncompromising passion will convince prestige-hungry administrators that here is a person with the vision to save the university from the capitalist chopping block, money and reasonableness be damned! Lather, rinse, repeat. See Albert O. Hirschmann’s The Passions and the Interests for what I genuinely believe is the dynamic at work.

 

The Pushcart War – Jean Merrill

18 March 2011 / / 2 Comments

Growing up in the ARPAnet days, I only had access to the books in the local library and small B. Dalton’s. I believe I found Merrill’s economics tutorial The Toothpaste Millionaire at a book fair and liked it enough to track down her magnum opus The Pushcart War in the library. The book has more or less stayed in print, though, and it certainly sells better than most of the books I talk about here.

The majority of the books I read in primary school haven’t stayed with me except for a detail or two, but three authors stand out as having imprinted themselves far more deeply on my young brain: Daniel Pinkwater, Ellen Raskin, and Jean Merrill. (I’m leaving aside obvious classics like The Phantom Tollbooth.) They are all fundamentally urban authors, though beyond that they don’t have a lot in common beyond being very strange. (Raskin’s profound Figgs and Phantoms was simply incomprehensible to me at the time, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have known what to make of Pinkwater’s brilliant Young Adult Novel had I stumbled on it.)

Merrill’s work is not as crafted or sheerly inspired as that of the other two, but The Pushcart War stood out for its epic scope and comparatively large cast, as well as its political intrigue, which was beyond anything else I’d read. Looking back at it now, though, the book is far more bizarre, because the allegorical content is so strong, certainly as great as in C.S. Lewis or Philip Pullman. Except that this is a secular book and it’s allegorizing political and social struggles, and doing saw awfully specifically. Some appropriate subtitles would be:

  • Saul Alinsky for Beginners
  • A Young Person’s Guide to the Battle of Algiers
  • Ho Chi Minh Jr.

The subject of the book is, for the most part, guerilla warfare and insurgency. Three big trucking firms seek to have pushcarts banned from New York to clear the streets for more trucks, making way for (it is later revealed) banning cars and even small trucks as well. They work with the corrupt mayor, but the pushcart owners wage war by shooting tacks into tires, causing the trucks to break down and annoy the public/civilians, turning them against the trucks.

This seems like a pretty blatant allegory for Vietnam in particular, since the failure of the US’s huge forces against asymmetrical guerrilla warfare resulted from absurd civilian deaths causing the Vietnamese to increasingly side with the Vietcong. But the book was published in 1964. Vietnam did not have the overwhelming presence in American life then that it would have a few years later, but I get the sense Merrill was pretty well-informed and politically interested. Still, the book could also be drawing from French experiences in Algeria, or perhaps France’s own futile war in Vietnam against the Viet Minh.

There are also echoes of the civil rights movement in the nonviolent protests that occur toward the end of the book, but honestly, they are much weaker, as there is no analogue for segregation or discrimination. And the nonviolent protest is less entertaining than the tales of taking out trucks with pea-shooters. I remember being disappointed as a kid that the guerrilla war ended (though it is picked up briefly by kids imitating the cool guerrillas) in favor of more abstract dealings.

Those more abstract dealings are also allegorical. “The Three,” the leaders of the trucking firms, are two big thuggish guys named Moe Mammoth and Walter Tiger, as well as the slick mastermind Louie Livergreen. (Livergreen, like a majority of the characters, is clearly of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, though unlike Pushcart King Maxie Hammerman and elderly but stubborn pushcart owner Mr. Jerusalem, he does not speak in a Yiddish-derived idiolect. There is no mention of religion in the whole book, though.) When they are first shown riling up their truckers to cause more trouble for the pushcarts, there is this bizarre footnote (the whole book is fashioned as an academic documentary account):

“The Three” were originally known as “The Big Three,” but this caused some confusion as the leaders of three important nations of the time were also called The Big Three, and after a city newspaper ran a headline announcing BIG THREE CARVE UP CHINA (over a story about Mammoth, LEMA, and Tiger Trucking buying out the China Carting & Storage Co.), there was some international trouble in the course of which Moscow was bombed by an Indo-Chinese pilot. After that the city papers referred to the three big trucking firms simply as The Three.

Capitalists/imperialists that they are, “The Three” pretty much own New York Mayor Emmett Cudd, at least until public opinion turns so decisively against the trucks that the mayor drops them without a second thought. Cudd’s schemes are somewhat limited by the unnamed Police Commissioner (all police officials go unnamed, in fact), who enforces law and order but does refuse to go on witch hunts. He comes off more affably than the others despite going unnamed, and I have to wonder why Merrill chose to leave him anonymous. It almost seems to enforce a conservative dictum that entrenched civil servants will remain less corrupt than elected officials.

Still, the message is pretty clearly “hearts and minds.” Ultimately, popular opinion rules, and there’s no way to get traction if the public hates you. Ah, if only life were so simple. Still, this is one of the best social realist kid books ever written, and far more fun than Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done?

One loose end. While Moe and Tiger give up and Louie Livergreen goes into hiding and (it is hinted) is killed, Cudd gets reelected mayor without suffering any ill consequences. This bugged me as a kid. It still bugs me now.

Other Thoughts on Levinas

10 March 2011 / / 0 Comments

Erica Weitzman’s article “Necessary Interruption: Traces of the Political in Levinas” draws a convincing comparison between Levinas’s ontological alterity ethics and the political theory of Carl Schmitt:

In the well-known interview with Schlomo Malka and Alain Finkielkraut on Radio Communauté given in response to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982, Levinas is asked about the possibility of the Palestinian as the political “other” in relation to the Israeli, and the ethical and political consequences this might entail. Levinas’s altogether surprising and by now infamous response seems to dismiss entirely his own notion of infinite responsibility, and, instead, delivers an analysis that startlingly recalls the friend/enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt:

My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbour. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.

How is one to reconcile this — if reconciliation is possible — with the infinite demand of the other, with Levinas’s idea of the self only brought to consciousness in the first place through its utter submission to and absolute responsibility for the other? For Levinas, evidently, some others are more due responsibility than other others. Levinas is not wrong in stating that Malka has fundamentally misinterpreted his philosophical writings. Indeed, his response makes clear that the other with whom the ethical relation is possible is subject to certain criteria. Or at least, these criteria come to emerge in the interruption of the ethical by the political.

Weitzman concludes that Levinas’s seeming contradiction here is not really a contradiction at all, but something that falls out of his ethics, which do not produce tolerance or pluralism, but in fact something much closer to Carl Schmitt’s polarized friend/enemy politics:

In this way, Levinas’s ethics of radical alterity in fact circle right back to the very sameness, totality, and totalitarianism which he himself finds so pernicious. The problem with Levinas’s ethics is not that it results in a passively suffering, masochistic, incapable subject, constantly at the mercy of the command of the other. The problem is that his ethics, in conceiving of alterity as something wholly beyond the borders of being and phenomenality, in fact cannibalizes alterity within the same. In this cannibalization of the other, the self takes on a psychotic hyperresponsibility that — in its transcendence and lack of necessity to correspond to any concrete situation or make any factical decision — becomes absolute irresponsibility, a sovereign will no longer even human but actually divine. “Justice,” according to this model, is a logical absurdity. For either the consensus Levinas’s thought seems to assume holds true — in which case there are no decisions or judgments to be made — or else the intrusion of the enemy puts all notions of justice and responsibility in suspension. Either there is no politics, the end of politics, utopia — or there is total war. The entrance of the third, which for Levinas is at once the necessary condition for the beginning of the political and the political a priori of the ethical relation itself, in fact only transforms the dyadic solipsism of the ethical relation into the plural solipsism of nationalism and fraternity.

Political theory is not my forte, so I will only comment on the philosophical side of things. When you have the sort of radical alterity that you find in Levinas, it really does become empty of content. Since the other is defined only in the sense of being wholly other, “alterity takes on another character” in wholly arbitrary ways. No criteria is possible besides that of total Otherness. It can be filled with the enemy just as easily as it can be filled with infinite ethical demand. Everything true becomes false. Black is white, friend is enemy, good is evil.

I think this is one of the points Hegel is making in the infamously obscure Inverted World section of the Phenomenology, which also seems to end in some kind of recognition of solipsism. If so, it’s a good point!

_____________

Note: for an indisputably indefensible Levinas passage, consider his comment on the Soviet-Chinese conflict in 1960, during which he adopted a pro-Soviet position:

The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past.

Emmanuel Levinas, “The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic” (1960)

Zizek ties Levinas’s attitude here back to Heidegger.

« Older posts Newer posts »

David Auerbach

About the author

Send me an E-mail

Feeds

© 2024 Waggish

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑