Digressions&Impressions

Hazony on Conservatism, part I

Everything that we call a freedom of the individual, or one of the individual’s liberties, is a traditional institution whose particular form is learned by imitation, maintained through honor and self-discipline, and handed down, in a given society, from one generation to the next. Every freedom emerges through a well-structured constraint, and so it is worse than merely misleading to say that our political freedoms come to us by nature, or that reason leads easily to them, or that nothing is needed to maintain them but for government to let us be. All of this mythology diverts our eyes from the difficult road that must be traveled in order for the necessary constraints to be instilled in society, so that even the most rudimentary freedom or right can become a reality.
Where do these constraints come from?
They can come from the laws of the state and the commands of its officials, of course. And indeed, this is the most common Enlightenment-rationalist depiction of constraint. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, for example, fear of the government provides the constraint needed to bring peace and order to a society that would otherwise tear itself apart.
But constraint can also come from another source. In a free society, the principal constraining force comes not from fear of the government, but from the self-discipline of the people, who provide the necessary constraint themselves by upholding inherited relations and the obligations that attend them. This point was emphasized by the English political theorist John Fortescue in the fifteenth century, and taken up by Montesquieu, Burke, and the American founding fathers centuries later. Where nations can impose the needed constraints themselves, the government can be mild or moderate, offering them greater freedom to conduct their affairs without interference. But where a people is incapable of self-discipline, a mild government will only encourage licentiousness and division, hatred and violence, eventually forcing a choice between civil war and tyranny....

An individual who was guided by common sense enjoyed a broad range to think things through for himself. But his originality and divergences from the way others spoke and behaved were always constrained by a thick fabric of inherited relations and norms, which included the obligation to maintain and defend the place of God and religion, nation and government, family, property, and so on.
These inherited norms provided the framework (or “guardrails,” as we now say) within which reason was able to operate, yet without overthrowing every inherited institution as today’s adulation of perfectly free reasoning does. In our day, these inherited norms have been discarded in the name of the freely reasoning individual and his right to be rid of any constraint he has not himself chosen. God and religion, nation and government, marriage and children and caring for the aged—all these traditional ideas and institutions that once constrained the individual are now regarded as burdensome and difficult things, to be avoided because of the limits they impose on our freedom.
What would be required to build up this voluntary self-constraint rather than ceaselessly working to destroy it?
The propagation of such self-constraint depends on the honor that a given society is willing to award those who practice it. Indeed, the only known means of causing individuals to shoulder hardship and constraint without coercion or financial compensation is by rewarding them with honor.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, pp 164-166

When Donald Trump destroyed Jeb Bush in the (2016) South Carolina primary it inaugurated a seismic shift within the Republican party. One of the effects has been the rejection of a whole number of what we might call 'right liberal' commitments that centered on cosmopolitanism, individualism, free markets, free trade,  and a defense of the rule of law. In its wake there has been a scramble to provide a reasonably coherent intellectual program that can unify its nationalist and Christian coalition and provide a governing philosophy. This is, in brief, the political context of Yoram Hazony's increased prominence Stateside during the last half decade. 

Since 'self-constraint' and 'honor,' on one side, and 'Donald Trump,' on the other side, don't naturally go together in the same sentence, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the precise contents of Hazony's vision are at odds with Trump's persona and his style of leadership and governance. In addition, if one reads Conservatism: A Rediscovery with some care one will discern a whole number of subtle rejections of what one may call 'Trumpism' in political life not the least is a clear distancing from racism and racialized hierarchy, but also from Trumpism's zero-sum winner-takes all understanding of politics. 

Before I get to discuss the passage I quoted at the top of  this post, I don't mean to suggest that Trumpism is irrelevant to Hazony's argument even if Trump's actual views are barely mentioned. At the start of the book, Trump's 2016 victory is briefly identified as evidence for the rise of 'nationalist conservatism' and nearer to the end, the talk of 'resistance' to Trump's 2016 electoral college victory is offered as evidence that his legitimacy was denied and that Marxism has taken over the central organs of the old liberalism (pp. 327-328). There is no critical scrutiny of Republican malfeasance, and so this limits the audience of Hazony's message. 

Rather, a natural way to understand the role of Trump in Hazony's larger argument, is that he is a kind of symptom of a much wider social distress and inaugurates a period "when a major reframing of a scheme of ideas and the relations among them—a change in paradigm—becomes possible." (This echoes my own (recall) diagnosis back in December 2015.) In such periods, "we begin seeking the causes of our distress in earnest, and this search becomes the lever that pries the old paradigm loose. A period of open-mindedness is initiated, and proposed repairs that were once ridiculed are reconsidered. At this time, dissenting individuals who were once spurned and disreputable may grow quickly in importance, even as those who jealously protected the old consensus are diminished in stature and significance." (176)* 

Okay, let me turn to the passage which is from the long third chapter, "The Conservative Paradigm." This paradigm is situated in a historical narrative about the theoretical and political roots of Hazony's position in what he calls 'The English Conservative tradition" and "American nationalism," with the latter understanding itself as a continuation, even restoration (a key word for Hazony) of the former in the wake of the 1787-1789 Constitution. 

While self-discipline and constraints are not at odds with a liberal political worldview, a focus on honor is. Even liberal counterparts such as 'social credit' or 'recognition' or 'social approbation' all function differently than Hazony's account of honor. This is especially noticeable if one recognizes that those that (properly) perform the traditionally sanctioned role in a (traditional) hierarchy (parents, teachers, soldiers, political leaders, etc.) are to be honored. In addition, on Hazony's account obligations are the effects not primarily of consent, but rather of the existence of traditional relationships within this hierarchy (marriage, parenthood, childhood, membership in a clan, tribe, a nation, but also a corporation, a platoon, etc.). And so it is no surprise that this understanding of obligation is, in turn, repeatedly linked to loyalty, and that, as one can discern in the quoted passage, imitation is treated as praiseworthy. By contrast, there is no place in Hazony's scheme for (a celebration of) individual autonomy and authenticity. 

So, while I think his account of freedom can be accommodated by certain republican liberals, on the whole Hazony offers a genuine alternative to liberalism, but he has no interest in facilitating, in his doctrines, what we might call Confederate irredentism. Rather, he celebrates "Edmund Burke in Britain and...the Federalist Party of George Washington, John Jay, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton," who stood for a strong national government and rejected States' rights and slavery. Lincoln is treated as the great inheritor of this program, and Jefferson the exemplary misguided Enlightenment rationalist (and defender of slavery).+ And despite the emphasis on tradition and hierarchy, this Anglo-American conservatism is, thus, presented as not just as fully compatible with constitutional self-government, but as the true bearer of its tradition. I think this is, in fact, an improvement over the earlier (2017) presentation of these views (recall here) in an essay with Ofir Haivry at American Affairs. (Haivry seems to have co-authored the first two chapters of the present book.)

Since there are elements on the contemporary nationalist-Christian right, intoxicated by (natural law) Integralism and/or Schmittian decisionism and/or racialized hierarchy (the latter we might call the 'Jacksonian strain'), who seem little interested in constitutional and democratic self-government, it is actually to be wished that Hazony's position becomes the dominant element in Republican elite circles. For it would allow the possibility of the continuation of competitive elections that would permit alternative rule by different elites in the service of political coalitions and so the nourishment of hope that one can reverse a majority and policy. (Hazony claims that the cultural Marxist take-over of Liberal institutions will make that impossible.) In that respect, it's actually quite notable that at key moments in Hazony's narrative it is acknowledged that his favored tradition was a minority option. And unlike many other public facing thinkers on the nationalist conservative right, there is in Hazony no sign of rejection of scientific expertise. In a future post, I'll discuss his views on what a revived Conservative and Christian democracy would look like in greater and more critical detail. But here I want to close with an observation.

Hazony's road map from the present to the restoration of nationalist conservatism is, in fact, not centered on The Supreme Court or even electoral politics, even if the uptake of his views among Republican cadres will make him more influential. Rather, it is fundamentally ground in a "personal journey of repentance and return" and a rejection of "personal decadence." (p. 391) Not unlike his adversaries, Hazony believes the personal is political. And this means, for Hazony, in practice, building "family and congregation" dedicated to the passing on and honoring of tradition. (p. 393).  

Given this self-transformative focus, I find it odd that Hazony barely touches on the nature and causes of contemporary celebrity and attention culture and the (consequent) frivolity of what passes for spirituality today.** For even if one grants (as I do not) that the vacuity of contemporary celebrity culture is the effect of liberalism, and evidence of its moral bankruptcy, it is also a rather effective block on the revival of a honor society he wishes for. In celebrity culture nurses and teachers and all lives dedicated to service, or any activity that provides social [what Hazony often calls] "cohesion," are simply not truly honored. This we have seen in a pandemic that should have caused a major cultural shift in attitudes. And within this celebrity culture, attention and success are its own ends and engage in a (if you will, vicious) mutually reinforcing cycle with financial rewards. And while some charismatic religious leaders may develop huge followings, they will do so in virtue of their charisma and success at attracting attention (and huge bank accounts) not because they have been touched by the divine.

There are passages that hint at a willingness to control the "corrosive effect" of capitalism on "traditional institutions," (and especially the off-shoring of good jobs abroad), but since celebrity culture now infiltrates our lives 24/7 on hour handheld, algorithmic networked devices introduction of (say) a number of tariffs will make no material difference here. That is to say, even if Hazony got his way and the "separation of church and state" would be abolished Stateside (p. 345) and Christianity would be restored to the centrality he wishes for it in our midst, the odds are it would be a repackaged Christianity fundamentally unmoored from its history and its sacred texts, in which resources are pooled to give fellow congregationalists a leg up in the social battle for attention. 

 

 

Huizinga (and Adam Smith) on the Admiration of Political Thuggery

The general deterioration  of the moral principle shows itself rather more in the tendency of modern society to tolerate, to condone, and to acclaim, than in a changed standard of individual conduct. In so far as violence, deception, and cruelty, of which there is more in the world than there used to be, find expression in individual action, this can often be traced to the residue of demoralisation and exasperation left over from the [first] World War and its aftermath of hate and misery. The general deterioration  of the moral sense of values can best be observed, therefore, in those countries which have been least affected by the world-wide political and economic upheaval. This deterioration appears most clearly in the appreciation of political conduct as contrasted with the judgment of economic conduct. In respect to moral failings of an economic nature, offences against commercial good faith, abuse of property rights, etc., the popular attitude remains much as it used to be: sincere condemnation with now and then a tolerant smile. The tolerance increases and becomes coupled with a measure of admiration in proportion to the scope of the offence. The international swindler meets with more sympathy than the embezzling clerk from the suburbs. Into the attitude towards the great financial scandals creeps a certain admiration for the talent with which the gigantic machine of technical organisation and international finance is operated. On the whole, however, the moral valuation of economic crime seems to have remained essentially unchanged.

The situation is entirely different when the party forming the object of judgment belongs to and acts in the name of Government. In its attitude towards political conduct—that is, acts committed by the State or any one of its organs—the public at large shows itself increasingly indifferent to moral judgment. Except, of course, when the acting party is a foreign State or an opposition element within the State which has from the outset been branded as "enemy." Still, the tendency of the public to acclaim and admire great political actions is not limited to the acts of the State to which it owes allegiance, alone. The worship of success, which was already seen to exercise a mitigating influence on the judgment of economic misconduct, is capable of eliminating practically all moral indignation from political judgment. It is carried to such lengths that many seem prepared to value a political organisation whose fundamental doctrines they abhor, according to the degree of success with which it achieves its predetermined aim. Incapable of judging the nature of this aim, the means with which it is pursued, and the degree to which it is actually achieved, the spectator contents himself with the external signs of achievement, which are the only ones the newspaper reader or the tourist can observe. Thus a political system which first filled him with disgust and subsequently with fear and awe, will gradually obtain his acceptance and even admiration. Injustice, cruelty, restraint of conscience, oppression, falsity, dishonour, deceit, violation of law and equity?—But look how they have cleaned up the cities and what wonderful roads they have built!--Johan Huizinga In The Shadow of Tomorrow, Chapter 13. (Translated by Huizinga.)

A few weeks ago, I noted that Huizinga's (1938) Homo Ludens ends with a fierce attack on Carl Schmitt (recall this post on Huizinga's eviction of a Nazi intellectual; and this one on the criticism of Schmitt). A paper by Alexander Lambrow had alerted me to the fact that Huizinga's (1935) In De schaduwen van Morgen (In the Shadow of Tomorrow) is also explicitly critical of  Schmitt in Chapter 12. In fact, while in Homo Ludens the criticism of Schmitt can be treated as an afterthought (I wouldn't do so myself), it is pretty essential to the whole argument of In The Shadow of Tomorrow, which is Huizinga's philippic against the temptations of fascism and a lament on the death throes  of bourgeois culture. This can be seen by the allusion to Schmitt's  ideas in the quoted passage ("when the acting party is a foreign State or an opposition element within the State which has from the outset been branded as "enemy."")* 

The larger argument in Chapter 13, is a criticism of the social tendency to glorify 'existence and life,' and to prefer these over 'knowledge and judgment' (a tendency, which according to Huizinga, can also be found in Lebensphilosophie and what he calls 'existentialism'). This tendency is constitutive of what he calls the 'general deterioration  of the moral principle.' To put it in Nietzschean terms (Nietzsche is mentioned a few times in the book), what Huizinga objects to is the effects on social mores of a cult of the affirmation of life. The passage quoted at the top of this post is an illustration of such purportedly nefarious effects.

The key point for present purposes is that political success, independent of the moral quality of the ends it serves, generates admiration, what Huizinga calls, "the worship of success." Such worship is able to corrupt the moral sentiments when it comes to political matters (it "is capable of eliminating practically all moral indignation from political judgment"). 

It is somewhat surprising that Huizinga treats this as a modern phenomenon requiring special explanation. We might say that the moralists of all ages have declaimed against the worship of success. One of my favorite examples of an analysis of the worship of success can be found in a rather elitist passage of Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

Our admiration of success is founded upon the same principle with our respect for wealth and greatness, and is equally necessary for establishing the distinction of ranks and the order of society. By this admiration of success we are taught to submit more easily to those superiors, whom the course of human affairs may assign to us; to regard with reverence, and sometimes even with a sort of respectful affection, that fortunate violence which we are no longer capable of resisting; not only the violence of such splendid characters as those of a Caesar or an Alexander, but often that of the most brutal and savage barbarians, of an Attila, a Gengis, or a Tamerlane. To all such mighty conquerors the great mob of mankind are naturally disposed to look up with a wondering, though, no doubt, with a very weak and foolish admiration. By this admiration, however, they are taught to acquiesce with less reluctance under that government which an irresistible force imposes upon them, and from which no reluctance could deliver them. (TMS 6.3.3o)

According to Smith the worship of success is a natural disposition which grounds our complicity in our own subordination to social and political hierarchy. This is also so when the hierarchy is founded on violence. And while elsewhere Smith also calls this disposition a corruption of the moral sentiments, he also makes clear that it such self-subordination also has social utility: "THIS disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." (TMS 1.3.1.1)

In fact, throughout TMS, Smith returns to the corrupting dazzle that violent conquerors like Caesar and Alexander generate. As he puts it while contrasting their achievements to more genuine philanthropists:

We may believe of many men, that their talents are superior to those of Caesar and Alexander; and that in the same situations they would perform still greater actions. In the mean time, however, we do not behold them with that astonishment and admiration with which those two heroes have been regarded in all ages and nations. The calm judgments of the mind may approve of them more, but they want the splendour of great actions to dazzle and transport it. The superiority of virtues and talents has not, even upon those who acknowledge that superiority, the same effect with the superiority of achievements. (TMS 2.3.2.3)

I have to admit that, against Huizinga, I think Smith is right that the worship of brutal success even when one does not benefit from it oneself (and it may go against one's moral principles and political commitments) is not a uniquely modern post WWI phenomenon. (That's compatible, of course, with being agnostic about Smith's further claim that the disposition is itself useful because it is order preserving.)+ 

But Huizinga and Smith do help point to the way to how to respond to the worship of success. The proper response to such worship is not to criticize the ends or means that the subject of admiration engages in. This will not undermine the dazzle of achievement. No the proper response, I think, is to either undermine the dazzle by a kind of -- echoing Jason Stanley's terminology  (recall here; here)-- undermining propaganda directed at the splendor that surrounds their success, or, when that it is impossible or too costly, to undermine the very success itself. The best way to tackle, say, an aura of invincibility is to beat the villain at their own chosen path. Of course, if success means victory on the battlefield, that's easier said than done. 

This strategy -- of blocking success from those that are worshipped for their success -- raises complex questions when one simultaneously recognizes that to end, say, an existing conflict face-saving measures may well be required. For these very face-saving measures may well reinforce and entrench the dazzle and splendor that surrounds the (to use Smith's terminology) most brutal and savage barbarians.** And if we look obliquely at today's headlines this means that the temptation to end miserable suffering of innocents has to be weighed against strengthening the interests and dazzle of a violent (and nuclear armed) dictator.

Luxemberg vs Lenin and a comment on Hayek (and Wieser)

The history of the Russian labor movement suggests the doubtful value of such centralism. An all-powerful center, invested, as Lenin would have it, with the unlimited right to control and intervene, would be an absurdity if its authority applied only to technical questions, such as the administration of funds, the distribution of tasks among propagandists and agitators, the transportation and circulation of printed matter. The political purpose of an organ having such great powers only if those powers apply to the elaboration of a uniform plan of action, if the central organ assumes the initiative of a vast revolutionary act.

But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and fruitful changes in its tactical policy during the last ten years have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment. This was true during the first stage of the proletarian movement in Russia, which began with the spontaneous general strike of St. Petersburg in 1896, an event that marks the inception of an epoch of economic struggle by the Russian working people. It was no less true during the following period, introduced by the spontaneous street demonstrations of St. Petersburg students in March, 1901. The general strike of Rostov-on-Don, in 1903, marking the next great tactical turn in the Russian proletarian movement, was also a spontaneous act. “All by itself,” the strike expanded into political demonstrations, street agitation, great outdoor meetings, which the most optimistic revolutionist would not have dreamed of several years before.

Our cause made great gains in these events. However, the initiative and conscious leadership of the Social Democratic organizations played an insignificant role in this development. It is true that these organizations were not specifically prepared for such happenings. However, the unimportant part played by the revolutionists cannot be explained by this fact. Neither can it be attributed to the absence of an all-powerful central party apparatus similar to what is asked for by Lenin. The existence of such a guiding center would have probably increased the disorder of the local committees by emphasizing the difference between the eager attack of the mass and the prudent position of the Social Democracy. The same phenomenon – the insignificant part played by the initiative of central party organs in the elaboration of actual tactical policy – can be observed today in Germany and other countries. In general, the tactical policy of the Social Democracy is not something that may be “invented.” It is the product of a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward.--Rosa Luxemburg (1904) "Revolutionary Socialist Organization," part 1.

It is well known that despite their mutual admiration, and their common rejection of reformist/gradualist social democracy ('Bersteinism,') Lenin and Luxemburg also had some important disagreements. The quoted passage is from Luxemburg's response to Lenin's (1904) One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, and shows familiarity with Lenin's (1902) What is to be Done? In these works Lenin had advocated for an all powerful central party apparatus, as Luxemburg suggests. This apparatus was supposed to be secret (to avoid capture by the police) and constituted by an elite group of professional revolutionaries. (Lenin is also very critical of an exclusive, trade unionist focus on economic issues.) Lenin's argument appeals to the benefits of the division of labor among professional revolutionaries to the development of a professional cadre with different kind of specializations (agitators, propagandists, theoreticians, etc.) It is worth noting that the demand for secrecy is an effect of the Russian context (it being an autocratic police-state with few liberties of association), but the focus on professionalism seems less context sensitive for Lenin (nothing that follows hinges this, I hope). 

Luxemburg's intervention on the side of the spontaneous activity is notable not just because she risks being seen to side here, in part, with those gradualists she ordinarily condemns, but also because it appears she rejects the advantages of the division of labor to the revolution. In particular, Lenin's vanguardism solves a kind of knowledge problem for the proletariat which, while being exploited, lacks access to the intellectual tools to plan and organize a revolution. (It's short on human capital one may say.) Because I am not a Marxist, I hope the next part of this sentence is not treated as thinly-disguised-polemic, but it strikes me that Lenin is right to think that his view is well grounded in Marxist-Leninist writings (despite their criticisms of the division of labor under capitalism).* 

As an aside -- this may be more fairly construed as more polemical, but it is meant to be factual observation --, vanguardism does introduce an important tension into Marxism from a purely theoretical point of view. For, one of the key claims on behalf of Marxism, very clearly annunciated in the Communist Manifesto, is that it promises rule by the majority against the minority. And one need not be an Elite theorist to recognize how rare that it is. (The aristocratic element in liberal democracy -- elections to representative bodies -- secures (to be sure, legitimate) minority rule over a majority.) Vanguardism is a clear break with the idea of majority rule, which is why it is promised to be provisional. Of course, the non-trivial risk is that once in power the vanguard becomes a (new) species of elite rule.

So, Luxemburg's attack on the Leninist counterfactual ("The existence of such a guiding center would have probably increased the disorder of the local committees") is not merely an invention over a tactical debate, but also addresses a principled issue for Marxism. And here I want to call attention to two epistemic features of her position that are meant to respond to Lenin's solution to the knowledge problem for a revolutionary proletariat. First, she argues that central coordination does not increase unity and effectiveness, but is likely to cause disorder. And she attributes this to difference of positional or situated perspective which results inevitably in different stances (prudence vs enthusiasm), which itself undermines common agency. Of course, this is not a very convincing response to Lenin because the very enthusiasm of the masses is not sufficient to make a revolution (and often is directed at only local improvement without wider political regard). This is why Luxemburg's second point, the rejection of top-down policy, is significant.

Second, I read her as suggesting that many local struggles are each occasions of learning, trials that may in their very spontaneity and so novelty lead to new discoveries: where conflict induced necessity  generates "great creative acts." Each local trial of strength between the proletariat and the authorities and/or capital provides a feedback mechanism from which to learn in which (the revolutionary consciousness of) the working class is trained. And, in particular, over time this will create a critical mass of "the existence of a large contingent of workers educated in the class struggle" (presumably capable of revolutionary politics). So, from her perspective the temptation of vanguardism is understandable, but with patience (and class struggle) avoidable. 

By contrast, Lenin is quite clear that he thinks this is bunk--that a central clearinghouse is needed to integrate lessons learned and to provide the necessary expertise, to coordinate, and to educate. So, I am not suggesting Luxemburg wins this argument. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that he was right that vanguardism could achieve real power. But at the same time, Luxemburg was prescient in discerning that such vanguardism would inevitably lead to rule of a minority over a majority (as she notes "the self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee.")

Now, what I want to note, in conclusion, is that Luxemburg's position on the spontaneous, bottom up education by the proletariat through local struggle is structurally analogous to (recall)the view that Michael Polanyi and then, more famously, Hayek develop in the 1930s on the way learning occurs in markets and the generation of spontaneous order. To be sure, knowledge about the spontaneous order generating features of markets pre-date Luxemburg, so I am not suggesting she influenced their development of the concept, which was already familiar. (And Polanyi is surely influenced by the way 'spontaneous' is used in chemistry and physics of the nineteenth century.) But anyone familiar with debates among Marxists at the start of the twentieth century, will be quickly struck by how important and intense the debate over revolutionary spontaneity is. This debate died circa 1920.

Hayek (1899 – 1992) and Michael Polanyi  (1891 – 1976) came to maturity in the aftermath of this debate. While Polanyi never seems to have flirted with social democracy (and was not especially educated in economics), Hayek was clearly (and un-controversially) influenced by Wieser and charmed by Wieser's 'Fabian socialist' tendencies as a student. The Fabians were the standard-bearers of social democratic gradualism (which is at times compatible, of course, with left liberalism). So, it's worth exploring to what degree Wieser and the young Hayek were themselves enmeshed in, or at least aware of, the debates over the epistemic merits of spontaneous proletarian action. 

 

 

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 3.: Utopia without Satire (on Le Guin and Borges)

Bedap’s eyes had got very small, like steel beads. “Brother,” he said, “you are self-righteous. You always were. Look outside your own damned pure conscience for once! I come to you and whisper because I know I can trust you, damn you! Who else can I talk to? Do I want to end up like Tirin?”

“Like Tirin?” Shevek was startled into raising his voice. Bedap hushed him with a gesture towards the wall. “What’s wrong with Tirin? Where is he?”

“In the Asylum on Segvina Island.”

“In the Asylum?”

Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He spoke quietly now, with reluctance.

“Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you left. It was funny—crazy—you know his kind of thing.” Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosening it from its queue. “It could seem anti-Odonian, if you were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss. He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang foreman or manager down to size. Now they only use it to tell an individual to stop thinking for himself. It was bad. Tirin couldn’t take it. I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he’d talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one. To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he went.”

“Tir never worked outdoors the whole time I knew him,” Shevek interrupted. “Since he was ten. He always wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair.”

Bedap paid no attention. “I don’t really know what happened down there. He wrote to me several times, and each time he’d been reposted. Always to physical labor, in little outpost communities. He wrote that he was quitting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see me. He didn’t come. He stopped writing. I traced him through the Abbenay Labor Files, finally. They sent me a copy of his card, and the last entry was just, ‘Therapy. Segvina Island.’ Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody? Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the Asylum for, beside that?”

“You don’t get sent to the Asylum at all. You request posting to it.”

“Don’t feed me that crap,” Bedap said with sudden rage. “He never asked to be sent there! They drove him crazy and then sent him there. It’s Tirin I’m talking about, Tirin, do you remember him?”

“I knew him before you did. What do you think the Asylum is—a prison? It’s a refuge. If there are murderers and chronic work-quitters there, it’s because they asked to go there, where they’re not under pressure, and safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep talking about—‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us—the social organism?”

“If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a work-quitter, I don’t think I have anything else to say to you,” Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair. There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that Shevek’s righteous wrath was stopped short.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, Chapter 6, pp. 141-143 (in the British edition). 

This post is the third in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.). Annares is an anarchist society without public laws, property, nor guilt. Relatively minor violations of local norms and practices are generally sanctioned by social criticism and ostracism. The exchange between Bedap and Shevek, the initially foolish hero of the story, reveals that some major violations of norms are medicalized; one is viewed as psychologically diseased if one murders, rapes, or systematically refuses to contribute work to society (a society -- it should be noted, in fairness -- that teeters on the edge of subsistence and otherwise is quite generous). Presumably the Asylum aims at rehabilitation. (In chapter 10, we hear the Asylum understands itself as a "refuge.") Bedap's suggestion is that those who show too much independence of  thought are also nudged to the Asylum.

What makes Tirin's situation so interesting is that his free-thinking is expressed in terms of a satire. And it becomes clear through the narrative that Annares is unfamiliar with such comedy. In this respect Annares, a community devoted to sympathetic mutual aid, is not unalike to how Socrates legislates Kallipolis and, perhaps more pertinent, how J.L. Borges imagines (recall) Ibn Rushd's Muslim Spain (which also lacks satirical comedy). That Le Guin was very familiar with Borges' thought, and took it rather seriously, is suggested by her (1988) introduction to Borges' co-edited volume The Book of Fantasy, which focuses exclusively on Borges (without paying much attention to the two other editors) and the "honours" she thinks he is due, and scattered remarks in her non-fiction writing. Among the noteworthy claims of that introduction is that she treats fantasy and science fiction as a joint genre, each (to convey her thought rather reductively) devoted to making visible the moral questions of our age.

The arts are key to social life to the relatively isolated communities of Annares. And, in particular, the theatre is very important, "the Art." (Chapter 6; p. 131) But the syndics who put up art-works also have rather restrictive interpretations of what art should be shown. So, comedies do exist on Annares, but are not as central: ‘They performed tragedies, semi-improvised comedies, mimes. … Rising out of and embodying the isolation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama had attained extraordinary power and brilliance.’ (p. 131) So, satire is unknown.

My students and I had some initial difficulty in understanding why Tirin's play created such trouble for him in Annares. It looks rather innocent. Here is a brief, post-facto summary by an eye-witness (in chapter 10):

“Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”

“At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ‘I must not! It is not moral! It is not good business!’ Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”

“He played the Urrasti?”

“Yes. He was marvelous.--chapter 10, p. 269

At first sight, Tirin is merely making fun of the money-obsessed Urrasti, drawing on the shared prejudices or ideology of the anarchists of Annares. These views are taught on Annares from a young age. In addition, Urrasti are not allowed to visit Annares. (Annares and Urras are each other's moons.) This is, in fact, part of the founding "Settlement" that governs the isolationist anarchist society (which is developed out of the refugees of the members of a failed revolution on Urrasti). They keep outside influences and people, which are seen as dangerously corrupting, out of Annares. This is achieved by limiting planetary entry to a few commodities that are exchanges with mining commodities that are useful to the much wealthier Urrasti societies. 

So, Tirin's play is a fantasy about the troubles an Urrasti might find in adjusting to life on or trying to subvert life on Annares. And since the Urrasti is not presented in attractive fashion and is, in fact, held up to ridicule, it is at first odd that Tirin is sanctioned so badly for staging the play (and his life haunted by it), and that Shevek eventually decides he has to publish it independently despite social disapproval. 

Now, eventually, we are informed that Shevek learns to understand Tirin as an "inventor-destroyer, the kind who's got turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage." (Chapter 10, p. 270.) This goes very much against the purpose of drama on Annares, which really frowns on (i) individuality in all the arts and tends to praise works that (ii) promote (without being shallow) uplifting harmony. (This is also seen in the treatment of choral music on Annares.) 

So, let's take stock: in virtue of (i) and (ii) and (iii) representing immorality in satirical fashion Tirin's play is called "immoral" by some (270). Even in the narrative of The Dispossessed, it is recognized that calling an author immoral in virtue of (i-iii) is not an especially sophisticated response to the play.  But despite the Urrasti being the but of the joke, there is an important feature of the play that is highly critical of Annares. While the satire seems to be primarily directed against the traditional capitalist or properterian enemy it also expresses a criticism of the isolation of Annares. As Shevek puts it, this satire also teaches, "what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners." Annaeres is simultaneously a great social project, and a prison.

Now, for us as readers with only partial and second hand access to the play, it's not entirely clear how this interpretation follows from what we have been shown. But it is not entirely unclear either: the local Annares women does not get satisfaction, and the interaction between the man and women is governed by mutual misunderstanding. And all of this is due to the fact that the Settlement has built a theoretical and empirical wall around Annares. To keep capitalism out, the locals also deliberately keep themselves uninformed and to avoid nearly all mutual exchange.* The outside world is a source of contamination--and needs to be quarantined out. (This point is actually made on the very first page of the book.) 

And taken like this, Tirin's satire is not misunderstood at all by those who criticized and socially ostracized him. And while they may seem initially outlandishly vindictive and dangerously totalitarian to us, Tirin's audience accurately perceives that his ridiculous satire is taking aim at the foundational commitments of their society of mutual aid.+ (Notice that in the play, the Annares basically leave the Urrasti to his own devices.)

To close: one of the main questions that The Dispossessed makes us ask -- this is played out in a number of set-piece debates in chapter 12  -- is whether a society founded on the noble ideals of mutual aid and solidarity, can tolerate individual, intellectual commerce with the rest of the world (especially if that commerce is not governed by social utility) without risking its own survival by it. The question is, of course, not limited to such admirable societies. Le Guin's book offers no platitudes of reassurance or an answer to the question; each of us have to think it for ourselves with our communities.**

 

A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt

"You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. "I was on Yeowe," he said, "you know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

“The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

“But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

“They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

“Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."--Ursula K Le Guin (1994) "Forgiveness Day" in The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 287.

Because I am about to teach The Dispossessed (recall) again, I am trying to read all the books in the so-called Hainish cycle. "Forgiveness Day" is part of a series of interlocking stories (also collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness) about two planets, Werel and Yeowe. As the quoted passage suggests, Werel is a slave-owning society that treated Yeowe as a colony. In fact, Werel is an extremely patriarchical society, too, which treats its women in the way Athens treats theirs. 

The nameless 'he' is Rega Teyeo, a scion of a rural soldiering elite; conservative and stoic in his ways. He discovers that after the lost war on Yeowe his own people, who are modernizing and shifting toward commerce, have little use for him. So, he ends up a bodyguard to Solly, the alien (female) ambassador to his planet. In many ways it's a humiliating end to his public service. 

The quoted exchange takes place in the turning point in the relationship between Rega and Solly, which itself occurs when they think they are in mortal danger. I am not a big fan of "Forgiveness Day" because the writing is relatively clunky and the characters are relatively stereotypical. Because it's Le Guin, there is still plenty of food for thought about the nature of patriarchy and the interlocking forms of oppression and resistance it generates.

The quoted passage illustrates my complaint about the writing in the novella; that Teyeo respects the people he fought is already abundantly clear before Le Guin makes it explicit ("I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."). 

Having said that, the passage did remind me (no surprise we are in the ambit of Hegel's master-slave dialectic) of a kind of symmetrical point in the famous first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that in the Manichean world colonialism, "At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence." (p. 51)

Le Guin invites us into thinking that when you have been defeated on the battle-field it is difficult to deny the fundamental equality of your victor. She published "Forgiveness Day" when the Vietnam war was living memory. As Le Guin's novella shows, that individual experience on the battle-field need not transform wider social attitudes toward those thought inferior if that society can insulate itself, to some respect, from the military defeat. As a cursory glance at history shows, for every Rega Teyeo whose attitudes are transformed, there may be a lance corporal who prefers a dagger-stab legend. And in her story Le Guin, who is not naïve about such matters, suggests that individual character matters a lot to when a potentially existential experience becomes transformative.

Earlier in the story, after Rega has requested a discharge from his duty to protect Solly, his request is declined by his (and her) employer as follows:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don't like the situation. There's nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?"

What's striking about the response is that it is couched in terms familiar from Schmitt (with its friend-enemy distinction) [recall here and here mediated via Popper]. This is interesting because the employer I have just quoted represents in Le Guin's story, and in the wider Hainish cycle, the Kantian federative ideal of the aspiration toward perpetual peace founded in human equality. And what Le Guin recognizes is that one can accept that in some circumstances the friend-enemy distinction is empirically adequate of people's ('childish') behavior even though one is oneself committed to a different ideal that is supposed to abolish or overcome it.

Now, in light of "Forgiveness Day" it is tempting to suggest that the friend-enemy distinction itself rests, if not conceptually then at least on the battle-field, in a kind of symmetry between the two foes. And this symmetry is itself ground in a kind of equality or mutual recognition. And so, one may be tempted to see in this observation a refutation of Schmitt.

As an aside, this is why 'wars' on cancer, drugs, and on poverty are such strange ways of speaking. (This is extended to the "courageous battle" one wages against a fatal disease.) They do not have the latent possibility of such mutual recognition. Norman MacDonald (who died of cancer) makes the point in a sketch here. His punchline is that, if you die, the cancer dies at exactly the same time in your body. “That, to me, is not a loss. That’s a draw.”

Be that as it may, of course, Schmitt anticipates the point and suggests that the political distinction is orthogonal to any moral interpretation of such mutual symmetry.  It is entirely compatible with his view that one can find one's enemies moral, even beautiful. (I doubt he would grant that they are superior, but it seems logically consistent.)

Now, it is important to Schmitt's analysis that these judgments involve collectivities not individuals (as it is in Le Guin and Fanon). And so there is an important sense that Schmitt can accommodate the point about symmetry or the transformative experience of the battle-field, as long as (and I find this ironic) it is understood in, and limited to, individual terms. 

And, in fact, one of the psychological, perhaps, social conditions for Rega's judgment, or maybe it's an effect of it, is his disenchantment with his own society. And while this turns out to be a pre-condition for his political understanding (he starts to see through slogans) it also leads him to withdraw from it emotionally, politically, and eventually physically. Part of the closing line of the story with him going into a kind of exile is (also) explicit about this: "he had lost his world." And so, while one can read the Hainish cycle as resting on a kind of faith that Schmittianism can be overcome, Le Guin recognizes that there are circumstances in which its logic is impeccable. 

 

 

 

On Pynchon on 1984 (pt II): On Jews and Religiosity

Religious fanaticism is in fact strangely absent from Oceania, except in the form of devotion to the party. Big Brother's regime exhibits all the elements of fascism - the single charismatic dictator, the total control of behaviour, the absolute subordination of the individual to the collective - except for racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism, which was such a prominent feature of fascism as Orwell knew it. This is bound to strike the modern reader as puzzling. The only Jewish character in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein, and maybe only because his original, Leon Trotsky, was Jewish too. And he remains an offstage presence whose real function in 1984 is to provide an expository voice, as the author of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
Much has been made recently of Orwell's own attitude towards Jews, some commentators even going so far as to call it anti-Semitic. If one looks in his writing of the time for overt references to the topic, one finds relatively little - Jewish matters did not seem to command much of his attention. What published evidence there is indicates either a sort of numbness before the enormity of what had happened in the camps or a failure at some level to appreciate its full significance. There is some felt reticence, as if, with so many other deep issues to worry about, Orwell would have preferred that the world not be presented with the added inconvenience of having to think much about the Holocaust. The novel may even have been his way of redefining a world in which the Holocaust did not happen.
As close as 1984 gets to an anti-Semitic moment is in the ritual practice of Two Minutes Hate, presented quite early, almost as a plot device for introducing the characters Julia and O'Brien. But the exhibition of anti-Goldsteinism described here with such toxic immediacy is never generalised into anything racial. "Nor is there any racial discrimination," as Emmanuel Goldstein himself confirms, in the book - "Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party . .." As nearly as one can tell, Orwell considered anti-Semitism "one variant of the great modern disease of nationalism", and British anti-Semitism in particular as another form of British stupidity. He may have believed that by the time of the tripartite coalescence of the world he imagined for 1984 , the European nationalisms he was used to would somehow no longer exist, perhaps because nations, and hence nationalities, would have been abolished and absorbed into more collective identities. Amid the novel's general pessimism, this might strike us, knowing what we know today, as an unwarrantedly chirpy analysis. The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily.--Thomas Pynchon  (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

The other day (recall) I used Pynchon's "Introduction" as a foil to reflect on the the nature of Newspeak in 1984. And since I will be critical of it today, again, I will note, first, that I find his, "The hatreds Orwell never found much worse than ridiculous have determined too much history since 1945 to be dismissed quite so easily," a sublime observation. The claim is not just true of Orwell, but of much of the intelligentsia since 1945. Pynchon does not pause to explain why Orwell, who is just about as astute a commentator on his own age as one can imagine, would fall victim to this mistake. A mistake, I hasten to add, that can be easily avoided if one reflects a bit on, say, Lucian and the admiration More, Hume,  and Adam Smith had for him. I suspect that even in magnanimous Orwell the costly mistake is due to an abiding, progressive view of history in which certain stages are overcome and beyond us.

Be that as it may, Pynchon's claims about the absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four is rather strange. He misses entirely, and, as I have noted before, he is not alone in this, that the first thing Winston Smith writes about in his diary is his experience of going to the movies and watching war films which, upon reflection, turn out to be occasions for the audience to cheer on war crimes against (recall) "a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean."* And, included in it, is a gruesome scene involving a "middle-aged woman [who] might have been a Jewess." And so while I agree with Pynchon that there is a reticence in Orwell about describing the camps -- vaporization occurs off-stage in 1984 --, the allusion to the Holocaust is right there in the opening pages of the book. The whole first diary entry supports, in fact, Pynchon's contention that 1984 is misread if one only sees in it anti-communist, cold-war propaganda, and overlooks the book's major focus, which is on the diagnosis of enduring fascism.

I used 'war crimes' in the previous paragraph. Because one of the notable features of Oceania is that it is constantly hanging enemy soldiers for war crimes. And yet its own entertainment depicts war crimes of one's own as mere spectacle, and a further instance of building social cohesion within it. And put this abstractly, 1984 is as timely as ever. 

When I wrote that Pynchon's claims about absence of "Jewish matters" in Nineteen Eighty-Four are rather strange, I had in mind the fact Pynchon ignores a crucial feature of the Appendix to 1984, despite the fact that Pynchon's own "introduction" is structured on the significance of this "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak" (and so devotes relatively outsized attention to it).  For in it the nameless implied author, who is (as Pynchon notes) writing a considerable time after the events described in 1984, claims the following:

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible.*

So, rather than being absent, key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. Now, if I were in a polemical mood (which I am not) I would note there is a flirt with anti-Semitism here; a trope one could imagine existing among disillusioned intellectual Christian Socialists (a "near Communist" in Orwell's terms) who trace the origin of fascism to the fanatical particularism of the Hebrew Bible in the manner, say, in which (in my life-time) Jabotinsky's and Begin's Zionism were depicted as sharing roots with fascism. But I am not interested in polemics today.

That the Hebrew Bible is a source of political craft, even the elements of a political science, is a central feature of Machiavellian republicanism--this is hinted in The Prince, and fully developed in both the Theological-Political Treatise and, perhaps more important for the purposes of reflection on Orwell, Harrington's Oceana. And as it happens Orwell engaged seriously with the most able Machiavellian of his time, James Burnham, in his (1946) essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," which discusses critically Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians: defenders of Freedom. I am surely not the first to note that plenty of themes of the former -- especially the power-hungry technocrats and intelligentsia who would develop a new kind of oligarchy -- discussed by Orwell found their way into 1984. In fact, one of Pynchon's key themes, viz. that 1984 is concerned with the international division of the world into three gigantic spheres of influence, is central to Orwell's treatment of Burnham. But while in the latter he has some interest in exploring the roots of fanaticism, Burnham does not, I think, trace some of the roots of fascist technique to the Hebrews.

One peculiarity of the claim about the ancient Hebrew by the implied author of the Appendix is that while it is, indeed, central to the whole spirit of Oceania that "the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible," in virtue of the fact that Oceania lacks written laws. The reader learns this in the opening scene when the thing that Winston "was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws)." But this is the exact opposite of the law-saturated life of the ancient Hebrew! And, while the Hebrew Bible is not an instruction manual into a life of service to the false gods, Baal and his priests are mentioned surprisingly frequently in it, and is (for example) central to the narrative about Jezebel in the Book of Kings.

In fact, in Orwell's posthumously published, autobiographical essay, "Such Were the Joys," he writes that "if I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera."** Whatever else they have in common, they are all idolaters in some sense (Cain being a tricky case). So, Orwell presumably knows there is something peculiar about what the implied author of the Appendix says about the "ancient Hebrew." Interestingly enough, Orwell is clear that he finds Christianity "strewn with psychological impossibilities."+  And in context it is clear that the Old Testament does not suffer from these.

Where does this leave us? Pynchon is right within the text of 1984, we are regularly invited to contemplate the religiosity (without religion) of members of the Party and the various forms of social psychological techniques and rituals that facilitate it. But he is wrong to suggest that this is somehow divorced from Judaism. On the contrary, yhe implied author of the Appendix explicitly connects this with the attitude of the "ancient Hebrew." But the text of the Appendix also suggests that its implied author has superficial acquaintance with the book, the Hebrew Bible, that characterizes the life of the ancient Hebrew (something one cannot say about Orwell). And at the risk of overreading, this suggests to me that the vantage point of the Appendix, which is projected much into the future from 1984, and whose implied author is a member of a future intelligentsia -- the official subject matter of the material is the rise and fall of Newspeak -- is one in which the Old Testament is not part of lived experience or knowledge by direct acquaintance, but merely hearsay. As it happens I think (but I would) that this supports my claim (against Pynchon) that the perspective of the Appendix does not hint at (now quoting Pynchon on 1948) "restoration and redemption." But it is, in fact, the state of affairs in much of contemporary life.++

 

 

 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

On Revolutionary Leadership and Feminism (in early Islam)

I want to suggest here that during the years that interest us - from year 3 (the defeat at Uhud) to the beginning of year 8 (the conquest of Mecca) - the Prophet's project for equality of the sexes foundered because he refused to minimize the sexual aspect of life, to hide it, to consider it marginal or secondary. The Prophet was in a vulnerable position. His aims came to nothing because he always refused to separate his private life and public life. He could only conceive of the sexual and the political as being intimately linked. He would go to prayer directly upon leaving ~A'isha's bed, using the small door that linked her room to the mosque. Despite 'Umar's advice, he continued to go on expeditions accompanied by one or two of his wives, who, accustomed to being directly involved in public affairs, moved around freely and inquired about what was going on. One scene in al-Tabari depicts 'Umar as being beside himself at seeing 'A'isha strolling around the battlefront beside the trenches: "But what brings you here?" he cried out. "By my life, your boldness borders on insolence! What if a disaster befalls us? What if there is a defeat and people are taken captive?"--Fatima Mernissi (1987 [1991]) The Veil and The Male Elite: a Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland, p. 162.

Mernissi's Beyond the Veil is, of course, better known than The Veil and the Male Elite. In fact, while scholar.google tells me that the latter book is cited plenty, I have never seen it discussed in high theory in political philosophy. This is a shame because in addition to the themes announced in its title and subtitle, it is a wonderful study in the challenges and trade-offs of revolutionary, political leadership. And while the narrative is not as gripping as, say, the masterpiece of the genre, Black Jacobins (recall here; here), it certainly held my attention through out while discussing key years of the Prophet Muhammad's early struggles and their significance to Islamic jurisprudence, historiography, ethics, and political life. 

As the quoted paragraph indicates, Mernissi treats Muhammad's original program for Muslim political life as fundamentally egalitarian. (The language of 'rights' in the sub-title is a bit misleading rights don't figure much in the book.) Throughout the book, she recounts his progressive views on women's inheritance, property ownership, and agency more generally. And she offers a plausible account how the history narrated in Qu'ran supports her argument.

In fact, in her hands Muhammad recognizes over thirteen hundred years before the second wave feminists that the political and the personal are intrinsically intertwined. And she shows this, in part, through a fascinating discussion of the spatial structure of the first mosque built in Medina with 'A'isha's apartment having its own entry into the mosque. 

Now, for Mernissi later Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh), which governs Islamic communal life in practice, was corrupted, in part, by some dubious Hadith (sayings) attributed to the Prophet (these were promoted by interested politicians);  and, in part -- and this is more interesting -- by a flawed empirical method that treats all the data on par without regard to the systematic and ethical principles that might unify the Prophet's vision. And without some such principles, the evidence that is shaped by pre-Islamic patriarchy (and aristocracy) and by the late years' tactical regressions has no counterbalance (despite clear evidence in the sources that these regressions were challenged by important political agents in the moment).

In her book, Mernissi never mentions the Islamic philosophers (Falsafa) or Ibn Khaldun. But with them she shares a treatment of Muhammad as a political leader who, unlike failed prophets, recognizes that without arms the ethical message may not have successful uptake. And with them, there is an implied criticism that The Prophet did not handle the problem of succession very well (although with them she recognizes that the way succession was initially handled for the rightious caliphs at least has democratic potential). Because his companions are left without the right sort of guidance, within half a century the Umayyad have re-established the contingencies of (monarchic) birth as source of succession (familiar from trival life) and shortly thereafter the battle of Karbala shatters the very possibility of a unified community committed to justice (forever, it seems).

Okay, with that in place, we can now make more specific the significance of 'Umar to her narrative/analysis. 'Umar was Muhammad's father in law, one of the leading companions of Muhammad, and later the second caliph after his death. And in Mernissi's analysis 'Umar becomes the archetype of a key element in Muhammad's political coalition: strongly attracted to Muhammad's vision on intrinsic moral and political grounds, which provides a chance to overcome political and social crises, but unable to let go of what we would call male entitlement or patriarchy rooted in (tribal) martial virtues.

For Mernissi 'Umar represents resistance to "Islam as a coherent system of values that governs all the behaviors of a person and a society, and Muhammad's egalitarian project, are in fact based on a detail that many of his Companions, led by 'Umar, considered to be secondary: the emergence of woman's free will as something the organization of society had to take into account." (184)* And she describes the political circumstances in which Muhammad has to tack toward 'Umar's commitments in order to ensure the survival of the Ummah.

Now, it is important to recognize that for Mernissi 'Umar is not merely a traditionalist who lacks understanding of a part of Muhammad's vision. For she grants that the crisis years at Medina were fundamentally unstable. And she recognizes that he is not all wrong that part of the cause of the crisis or disorder were the Prophet's women (and women generally), who "were objects of envy." (185) And she implies that this crisis is not just due to the revolutionary internal regulation of Muslim communal life, but also to Muhammad's attempts to change the laws of warfare for his followers. In particular the abolition of using war as a means of enrichment and (sexual enslavement) if that meant turning fellow Muslims into booty (and slavery). (I was reminded of the issues surrounding Republic 470-1). Here's how Mernissi discusses the circumstances of the key decision at the height of the crisis:

In the circumstances of the military crisis in Medina in years 5, 6, and 7, the Prophet did not have many choices for coping with the insecurity in the city. He could either accept and live with this insecurity while waiting for the new source of power, God and His religion, to become rooted in the people's mentality, or he could reactivate the tribe as the police force of the city. The first option meant living with insecurity while waiting for God to show His power through military successes. With the second option, the tribe would assure security in the city immediately, but Allah and his community would disappear forever - at least in their original perspective. Muhammad's message - his dream of a community in which individuals are respected and have rights, not because they belong to a tribe, but simply because they are able to believe they have a link with a God - was dependent on the role that the tribe was called on to play during this transitory phase. Tribal power was the danger. Tolerating it, under any form whatever, as a means of control was a very grave compromise with the Muslim idea of a reasoning human being who exercises self-control. (187-188)**

But because tribal power is needed to make a successful transition from the crisis to Arab unification, 'Umar's more limited vision wins out. I don't mean to suggest that this is all of Mernissi's analysis--she roots the ultimate decision also in the fragility of age (and declining sexual prowess) of The Prophet. So, on Mernissi's view what Islam became after the crisis years is an unsteady mixture between Muhammad's original vision and the demands of realpolitik. 

Structurally, these circumstances are analogous to the way the initial outcome of the French revolution was a victory for men, while simultaneously a step back for women's political participation (and an unexpected disaster for slaves). The underlying problem here is a more general feature of transition problems. Recall that (here, here, here, and here), I understand the transition problem, as how to move from an unjust status quo to an ideal (or vastly improved) state and, in particular, with a population raised under bad institutions (or, if one conceives this [as I would not] in eugenic terms, bad breeding). This is intrinsically challenging. But the problem is made all the more difficult when there are foreign enemies or when the war-economy is a central feature of the pre-revolutionary society. 

Mernissi's feminist reading of the history of early Islam is an invitation to her fellow religionists to reject a millennium worth of jurisprudence and for a renewal from within (in this respect she is not unlike the fundamentalists who would have little time for her). But it is also a reflection on the challenges or constraints that pre-existing practices and beliefs generate to or impose on even the most successful projects of revolutionary renewal. To put this poetically, no prophet of political society can truly emulate God's creation from nothing, but s/he has to work with materials that cannot be fully cleansed from the effects of history, at least not at once. 

C.L.R. James' case against Moderation

Toussaint on February 8th [1802] did not yet know the fun extent of his reverses, but as the blows fell upon him he braced himself not for surrender but for resistance. The dream of orderly government and progress to civilisation was over. He had held on to the last shred of hope for peace, but as he saw the enemy closing in, then and then only did he prepare to fight. Grievous had been his error, but as soon as he decided to look the destruction of San Domingo fairly in the face, he rose to the peril, and this, his last campaign, was his greatest. He outlined his plan to Dessalines. "Do not forget, while waiting for the rainy season which will rid us of our foes, that we have no other resource than destruction and fire. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains, burn and annihilate everything in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of that hell which they deserve." It was too late. Events were to show that if he had but mobilised the masses before and purged his army, the French attack would have been crippled at the start. His desire to avoid destruction was the very thing that caused it. It is the recurring error of moderates when face to face with a revolutionary struggle.--C.L.R. James (1938) The Black Jacobins, pp. 243 (in the 2001, Penguin edition) 

In the quoted paragraph, three sub-themes of The Black Jacobins come together: first, the book is a study in revolutionary leadership. By this I do not just mean it's a study of the leaders and leadership of revolutionaries (which it is), but it's also a more general study on the nature of leadership, including counter-revolutionary leadership, during revolutions. It is truly majestic study in this respect. 

Second, the book as a whole is a fierce and insightful polemic against moderates in a revolutionary context. Not all of the moderates dissected by James are leaders and only a few end up on the side of the revolution.  The third feature is that James treats all of his agents sharing in a fundamental nature. And, in general, he is very critical of race-specific explanations (below I give some further evidence of this).

My interest here today is primarily in this second feature because James' treatment of moderation illuminates his overall argument and is instructive to would be moderates and their critics. The theme of moderation is set up, almost surreptitiously, at the start of the book, where he notes, while discussing the nature of slave society of San Domingo, that "the regular clergy of San Domingo instead of being a moderating influence were notorious for their irreverence and degeneracy." (26) While there is no reason to believe that James is a friend of organized religion or clerical privilege, the comment reveals that he also thinks that in some pre-revolutionary and/or hierarchical societies some institutions or classes can play a proper moderating functional role. And one of his criticisms of the clergy of San Domingo, one might say a naturally moderating force, is that they failed to moderate the harms of slavery and general corruption. (The implied contrast is with Las Casas, a "priest with a conscience;" recall here). Slave society has thoroughly corrupted the clergy's humanity and religiosity and, thereby, they end up reinforcing society's ills.

The previous paragraph may be thought a bit forced. But this analysis of moderation runs through James' treatment of the mulattoes. Many of these were property owning. And as the revolution unfolds in France their-would-be leaders "claimed for [their] people social and political rights." (52) These claims are described as "moderate" (52) by James. One of these leaders was "hanged...on the spot" and the other "lynched" by the whites. "Leaders in this terror were the small whites: the managers and stewards of the plantations and the mass of the townsmen." (52)

As the a-synchronous revolutions in France and San Domingo unfold, we see the "moderate" (82)  mulattoes regularly trying to through their lot in with either the local property owners and/or with whoever is in charge in Paris against the slave population.* This turns out to be a disaster for all the mulattoes.

Their error is not merely tactical. It is fundamentally, in James' telling, ideological. For, the underlying problem is that the revolution itself -- which James views, in part, as a mechanism for consciousness raising into discovering what one's true interests are -- fails to do its proper job. This becomes clear in a passage devoted to its effect on the San Domingo blacks which prepares the way for the judgment (from p. 243) quoted in the passage at the top of this post:

For the moment the blacks did not know where their true interests lay. And if they did not, it was not their fault, because the French Revolution. being still in the hands of Liberals and "moderates," was clearly bent on driving the blacks back to the old slavery. (101)

James is quite clear there are exceptions to his class analysis. But generally, moderates during the French revolution are incapable of breaking with slavery because their fortunes are tied to seeing slavery as a species of property. (In fact, James makes clear he thinks that it is fortunes from slavery that made possible a bourgeoisie capable of the initial phases of the French Revolution.) And in James' argument the very forces that benefit initially from revolutionary advances (the Bordeaux slave-owners in France; the petty whites in San Domingo) are the very forces that prevent further emancipation of slaves. In France this is due to loss aversion from economic privilege; in San Damingo it is due to a desire by the not rich (petty) whites to advance in an hierarchical society without abolishing the general (racialized) hierarchy. James echoes without fully realizing it, perhaps, Gouges' insight that (recall; and here with my debt to Eileen O'Neill) French revolutionary mass democracy is no advance for women if it means that enfranchised men can rule over women.

Now, James is clear that, in revolutionary moments, moderation always leads to ruin in virtue of the actions of (what for a lack of a better term, I'll call) reactionaries, who, rather than settle for modest loss of status, end up gambling it all in continued defense of privilege:

The current legend that the abolition of slavery resulted in the destruction of the whites is a shameless lie, typical of the means by which reaction covers its crimes in the past and seeks to block advance in the present. In May 1792 the whites were all tumbling over each other to give rights to the Mulattoes, and Roume says that when the decree of April 4th arrived, they published it the day after. It was too late. If they had done it a year before, at the outbreak of the slave revolution, they would have been able to master it before it spread. Why didn't they? Race prejudice? Nonsense. Why did not Charles I and his followers behave reasonably to Cromwell? As late as 1646, two years after Marston Moor, Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Ireton had tea with Charles at Hampton Court. Cromwell, great revolutionary but great bourgeois, was willing to come to terms. Why did not Louis and Marie Antoinette and the court behave reasonably to the moderate revolutionaries before August 10th? Why indeed? The monarchy in France had to be torn up by the roots. Those in power never give way, and admit defeat only to plot and scheme to regain their lost power and privilege. Had the monarchists been white, the bourgeoisie brown, and the masses of France black, the French Revolution would have gone down in history as a race war. But although they were all white in France they fought just the same. The struggle of classes ends either in the reconstruction of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes.--Black Jacobins, 103-104 (emphasis added)

It is important to recognize that James' intent here is not to justify terror or genocide. By this I do not mean he moralizes against them. He clearly thinks terror and genocide become inevitable in certain circumstances and are pretty much the expected outcome when the (previously) privileged use terror to defend their hierarchy. 

Rather, the emphasized part is the key feature of James' view on political life that moderates -- be they Girondists in Paris or Toussaint in San Domingo -- fail to grasp. And the reason why on James' view the moderates fail to grasp this, is that they are (i) too interested in generating the (economic) fruits of post-revolutionary peace and (ii) mistakenly assume all others are similarly motivated; the moderates, thus, do not grasp (iii) that those that have benefitted from tasting being on top of the hierarchy cannot be bought off easily with the (expansive) fruits of peace. Toussaint's "desire to avoid destruction" was motivated by his interest in keeping financial and human capital on the island so that prosperity could be maintained (even if shared more widely).

It is an interesting question to what degree (ii-iii) really fit James' Marxist scheme of history. In addition, not all extreme social hierarchies are undone by revolution. One can think of instances of relatively peaceful regime transitions (South Africa, Chile, etc.) that may vindicate the moderate's belief that violent revolution is not always inevitable. I do not wish here to dispute James' believe that at some moment the moderate must choose sites and, perhaps inevitably, will choose wrongly. Rather, what James can teach the moderate, or at least has taught this skeptical liberal, perhaps unwittingly, is the recognition of the significance of the fear of status loss in possible transitions. To what degree such fear can be bought off financially or accommodated with a new kind of status, I leave to another occasion.

 

 

On Adam Tooze, Ideology and Liberal Historiography

If Jamie Dimon quipped that to make sense of Dodd-Frank one needed the services of a lawyer and a psychiatrist, the same is no doubt true of the business of deciphering Donald Trump. But historians can contribute too.¹⁸ Trump offered to a bewildered present a throwback to an earlier era. Born in 1946, the same year as Bill Clinton, Trump would take office at seventy years of age, recycling a rancid version of the baby boomer narrative, which in the 1990s had still seemed fresh. Trump’s racial attitudes reflected the animosities of the era of civil rights, desegregation and New York in the 1970s. His boorish manners and sexism echoed the Manhattan party scene of the 1980s, when bond traders toasted one another as “big swinging dicks.” The sense of national crisis that drove his campaign was a reflux not so much of the recent past as of the first moment when modern Americans felt the world changing around them—the late 1970s and early 1980s. The trauma of defeat in Vietnam, America’s urban crisis and angry Japan bashing—thirty years on Trump was still harping on those fears, but now transposed onto new enemies: China, Islam and undocumented Latino immigrants.--Adam Tooze (2018) Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, 569.

One of the non-trivial sub-texts of Tooze's argument is the complacency of the Democrats and even the whole 'political class' in the face of the rise (and eventual) triumph of Trump. I don't want to claim that Tooze always or even often treats his targets as complacent, but it is a recurring theme in the book.* Now, interestingly, on Tooze's presentation, the complacent uniformly believe not just in technocratic skill, but also that by and large the present system is unavoidable (interestingly this flattens any difference between "the determinism of Thatcher and Merkel,"  and that this system is in some world-historical sense progressive ('progress' is repeated frequently in the book).

Tooze is very critical of the political class. Even so, as Perry Anderson notes (83ff.) in his by now (justly) famous review essay, Tooze also admires the complacents's skill which consist in, in part, in managing, so it seems, the irrationality that democracies naturally generate without undoing the liberal status quo (free trade, markets, glocal integragration, etc.) My interest in mentioning this is not Anderson's who is engaged in a polemic from the Marxist left against Tooze's self-proclaimed left-liberalism (p. 21 Crashed; p. 53 in Anderson).+

In fact, I quote the passage at the top of the post  because it is a place where Tooze alerts the reader to his own intellectual perspective (qua historian). And the way I read him, Tooze treats Trump as a kind of expression of atavistic sentiments and outlooks (e.g., 'throwback;' 'recycling;' 'reflux.' etc.) That is to say, just like the complacents, Tooze embraces, despite his sense of contingency, a notion of progress (in his terms an arc of  history) in which some ideas are modern and modernizing and others are old-fashioned or outright primitive. (Because of his progressive Marxism, Anderson can't really object to Tooze's stance here.)

To be sure, Tooze is doing multiple things in the quoted passage: first he explains, briefly, where Trump's ideas come from given Trump's social milieu and personal trajectory.  Second, he is conveying the sense of bewilderment of an establishment of having to confront these ideas and the manner in which they are performed anew. Third, he himself is judging these ideas/performance ("boorish," etc.) I don't think any of these three features are objectionable, and Tooze is transparent about them.

But, fourth, because Tooze treats these ideas as atavistic, he can't quite explain their nature (or their appeal) qua historian (or engaged citizen). So, while throughout the book, Tooze understands the grounds of popular dissatisfaction would with the status quo (the complacents), we're now left with a mystery why the progressive left could rarely capitalize on this dissatisfaction. For, and again Anderson is good on this, why did not ordinary citizens embrace the progressive Keynesian solutions Tooze advocates at the ballot box?

And, in my view, part of the problem for Tooze -- and this emblematic for much liberal thought in the broad sense -- is that he views the fears and desires Trump represents so well as atavistic to be overcome rather than as permanent possibilities of the human condition.** Now the moment one says this one draws the suspicion one is willing to slide into a normative defense of Trump and author authoritarian tendencies. (I have learned that to cast even minimum doubt on the reality of say, moral progress of humanity, is to invite opprobrium.)

But  the fact that those whose business is not to be bewildered were, as Tooze correctly notes, "bewildered" by Trump's rise (and Brexit, etc.) shows that there is a defect in the self-conception of contemporary liberalism. That's different from suggesting that there is a defect in contemporary liberalism that causes the rise of Trump and other authoritarian tendencies (that may be true, too). Since I care about liberalism's survival I think this is a defect in our self-conception worth addressing. The moment one respects what is taken as atavistic as a permanent possibility, one might govern and campaign (and communicate, and theorize, etc.) in a different fashion. For, even recognizing a possibility as a possibility allows one to better prevent it from happening and not treat it as mystery. It is also a start of a better explanation of why it did happen.

That is to say, I think one of the problems in contemporary liberalism is the unstated assumption that certain forms of progress are permanent and that once achieved no back-sliding is genuinely possible. But an ideology that takes its own victories for granted (in being justified and secure), after the fact, really is an ideology.*** What I admire in liberalism is a willingness to learn from experience and self-correct; it strikes me this is a feature within liberalism we need to change, or, better yet, revert back to the wisdom of Judith Shklar and Karl Popper (here; here; here) and be willing to expect the worst.