Critique of contemporary nihilism

Plato Meets Snoop Dogg

2012-01-18T12:21:00.004+02:00

While having breakfast we just happened to overhear a song by Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa called "Young, Wild and Free". Listen to it here. Let me paste in the chorus below.

So what we get drunk
So what we smoke weed
We’re just having fun
We don’t care who sees
So what we go out
That’s how its supposed to be
Living young and wild and free.

As it happened, our job after breakfast involved reading a bit of Plato, and, quite by chance, we came across this bit of commentary:

Plato (Laws vol 2 654) considers children are incapable of any further education if they have not already had a good musical training. The point was not simply to learn about music or simply to learn how to play an instrument or sing so as to be able to take part in the local festivals. Rather, the more important point was for music to refine the soul of the young person - a crucial stage in opening the mind and the sensitivities of the individual so that it would be receptive to beauty, goodness and truth. Again in the book "Protogoras" (326a) Plato expresses the widely held view that music helps cultivate σωφροσύνη (wisdom, restraint, modesty) and σύνεση (discretion).

Αn entire book could be written about what has happened in the intervening years, but we will just leave the juxtaposition as it is with Plato standing there next to Snoop Dogg.

The Meaning of Life

2012-01-17T09:51:00.000+02:00

For the time being we are expending our energies elsewhere, developing a site dedicated to the ideas of Albert Camus, that great philosopher of the Absurd. He argued that life is essentially meaningless. We beg to disagreed, so we are spending some time now clarifying our critique of Albert Camus' philosophy of the Absurd over at islifeabsurd.wordpress.com

If you have already worked out an answer to the question of the meaning of life, please drop by and let us know what it is. It would be nice if you could save us the trouble of having to find it out for ourselves the hard way.

The Biggest Question

2011-12-13T11:30:00.003+02:00

The story is not recent, but it still helps to illustrate the biggest question.

It was a sunny Wednesday morning in San Francisco, at the height of the summer of 1985. Kenneth Baldwin, 28, dressed in his work clothes, got in his blue pickup truck and began the 3-hour drive to the Golden Gate Bridge. He parked the car and strolled along the pedestrian walkway above the river. He stopped at the centre of the bridge. Waiting until he was completely alone and there were no boats on the river below he counted to 10. He lost his nerve. On the second count he lost his nerve again. Finally, the third time, he lept over the handrail.

The bridge is 225 feet above the river. Since it opened, almost 1,300 people have jumped from it. Only 26 survived. Kenneth Baldwin was one of them.

Looking back at the event, Kenneth says that the jump changed everything. Before the jump he says he was utterly self-absorbed – consumed by depression – feeling trapped in a life that seemed worthless. When he regained consciousness on the deck of the boat that rescued him, he says he felt an intense gratitude for life, which has never left him since. “I'm almost a completely different person now. I know now that I'm lucky to be alive. I may have had a crummy day at school [Ken is now a high school teacher], but I have my life.”

Another survivor describes a similar change of outlook: “It's beyond most people's comprehension. Now I appreciate the miracle of life - like watching a bird fly - everything is more meaningful. For the first time I experienced a feeling of unity with all things and with all people.”

These people are both unusual and very ordinary. It is not normal to be depressed and suicidal, but it is normal, in our culture, to live inside a narrow little box where the windows are papered over and on one of the walls is a huge screen showing brighter-than-life images of air-brushed models, and we watch them over and over again and lacerate ourselves. I remember reading an interview with a woman in her 40s on a diet. She was in tears realising that for decades she had put her life on hold, waiting until she was thin before expecting to enjoy being alive – a period of waiting in which her youth had come and gone – a period in which the miracle of life, if it had ever flickered, had been immediately snuffed out.

The really big question is how the myriad petty anxieties can fall away and people can really appreciate the miracle of life beyond the papered-over windows without having to jump from a great height.

Occupying the mind

2011-12-02T23:02:00.004+02:00

No criticism of the Occupy Movement intended. Just highlighting the point that there will be no real change until we can occupy something a bit closer to home.

I was pouring milk on my Sugar Puffs at breakfast and had visions of the Honey Monster from those childhood cereal ads. Oh no! So I bang my forehead repeatedly against the kitchen cupboard. It works.

The Monster is gone. So I walk over to the table. To my horror the Scooby Do song starts playing in my head. Shit!

It's not so much that such a large part of my childhood was wasted in front of the telly, it's that I feel my mind has been stolen, or rather invaded, and the enemy has dug in and built elaborate military bases in every cerebral corner, and I can't see any prospect of kicking them out.

I recall the mountaineer Joe Simpson who fell and broke his leg in the Andes and had to drag himself down the mountain for days and only just survived. He described teetering on the brink of a freezing cold death, sliding in and out of consciousness, while hearing Boney M singing "Brown Girl In The Ring" over and over - and he had never even remotely liked Boney M.

That would have been no way to die.

This is no way to live.

Occupying the high street is easy. Occupying my mind is a bit tougher.

When is an egg not an egg?

2011-11-26T15:39:00.002+02:00

Answer: When it is a political act.

On the 25 of September 2011 Marina Demetriades took aim at the head of her local member of Parliament (Mr. Othona) with an egg. She did not miss.

This occured in Rethimno, on the island of Crete, during a severe economic downturn. Many people were angry about the failure of the government to keep its promises to protect public services, and angry about the drastic cuts in wages, pensions and rights. On the monring in question Mr. Othona was speaking to a crowd. He had chosen to speak about the importance of the bicycle.

On the 10th of October Marina appeared in court and was sentenced to five months in prison - a sentence that was suspended for three years. The charge in Greek was εξύβριση, which translates as insult or abuse. During the 8-hour trial Mr. Othona did not appear, and the court raised no objection to his failure to appear.

After the incident Marina set up a website to post her defence - a defence that she was not allowed to read out in court. It is a long defence with a long and detailed list of Mr Othona's broken promises, quoting the fine things he had said as an opposition politician, and contrasting them with the recent policies that he was supporting and (as a member of the government) was partly responsible for.

Her blog has attracted a very long list of comments. Reading them, we see that another ugly battle is raging - a hermeneutic battle - a battle to decide how Marina's act is to be read.

What did she do? To her sympathizers she was expressing the collective rage of citizens who were being treated badly by the government and who were being denied a voice in any meaningful democratic process:

"I believe your act expresses a huge part of this downtrodden populus"

"Με την πράξη σου εξέφρασες μεγάλο κομμάτι του ταλαιπωρημένου λαού μας πιστεύω..."

To her opponents her act was childish:

"Citizens acting like impetuous 10-year-olds and 'revolutionary' dreamers..."

"Πολίτες με θυμικό δεκάχρονου και "επαναστατικές" ονειρώξεις. Σας απολαύσαμε από το καλοκαίρι στις πλατείες. Μεγάλο κίνημα, σπουδαία παραγωγή ιδεών. Lifestyle και άγιος ο θεός. Και μετά απορούμε γιά τα χάλια μας."

Or the act represented a rejection of democratic principles and was tantamount to Fascism:

"I disagree with your act and find it clearly Fascistic ... every form of totalitarianism has begun with a denigration of the institutions of democracy and of the people representing it."

"Δεν συμφωνώ με την ενέργεια σου, την οποία βρίσκω καθαρά φασιστική. Σαν ιστορικός θα έπρεπε ίσως να σκεφτείς πως όλοι οι ολοκληρωτισμοί ξεκίνησαν με την απαξίωση των δημοκρατικών θεσμών και των προσώπων αυτών που μέσα από δημοκρατικές διαδικασίες τους αντιπροσωπεύουν."

On the whole, both the sympathisers and the critics see the act as political. By contrast, to the court (if I have understood correctly) the act had no political significance whatsoever. It was simply an act which insulted/abused/attacked another individual (and it was presumably supposed to be irrelevant that the individual in question was a member of the government).

Marina, herself, seems to be troubled by these different readings and is not sure how to interpret her act. Near the end of her home page, after the long defence of her act, she says:

"There is no way I would recommend egg-throwing as a form of social/political opposition. And, to be honest, I don't know how to react when people stop me and congratulate me in Rethimno especially since I have done other things that I consider much more praiseworthy than egg-throwing, although those acts have gone unnoticed."

"Σε καμιά περίπτωση δεν προτείνω την αυγοβολή ως πολιτική στάση και μορφή κοινωνικού αγώνα! Και πραγματικά δεν ξέρω πώς πρέπει να αντιδρώ όταν με σταματάει κόσμος στο Ρέθυμνο και μου δίνει συγχαρητήρια, τη στιγμή που θεωρώ πως έχω κάνει πιο αξιόλογα πράγματα από το να πετάξω ένα αυγό και δεν έτυχαν ανάλογης υποδοχής!"

This hesitancy after such a bold act is surprising, especially in the light of the fact that Marina is a historian. History is a bloody story, and the history of modern Western democracies is no exception. How many were established by a polite and peaceful transfer of power?

Is Fukuyama correct, and does the current status quo represent some great historical end point, beyond which nothing better can be hoped for or fought for?

If this is not the end of history, then there may be one or two revolutions to come before the Earth heats up too much and becomes uninhabitable. It would be nice if those revolutions could be polite and respectful and bloodless, and even eggless and yoghurtless. It would be nice if the oligarchs could be politely persuaded to step down and allow a new form of democracy to flourish. Perhaps they will. It would be nice, for instance, if the bankers could be persuaded to let the whole business of printing and distributing money to come under democratic political control. Perhaps they will. It would be nice if the mulitnational corporations and the "markets" would listen attentively to the arguments of the new democrats. Perhaps they will. But the lesson from history is that they probably won't.

Democracy (if it is not to be a smokescreen for oligarchy) needs a public arena in which the most articulate voices from the grass roots can be heard, and in which voices can be given to the forces for change in society. As it stands, that public arena has largely been closed off. Walls have been built with heavy doors guarded by armed men. An interesting comment Marina made in passing was that on the day of the demonstrations she was disappointed to see how reluctant the TV channels were to let any of the demonstrators speak. The floor was given to journalists, politicians and other talking heads who speculated about what the demonstrators might be wanting and what the protests might mean.

When voices are excluded from the democratic process by high walls and doors guarded by armed men, true democrats will feel the historical need to have those doors opened. Of course, we must first ask politely for the people inside to open them and politely persuade the guards to let us in. If they refuse though...

It's like a jungle out there...

2011-11-24T11:36:00.002+02:00

The police use pepper spray against peaceful protesters at the University of California.

A history professor at the university made this comment:

"The police officer with the pepper spray, identified as Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis Campus Police, looks utterly nonchalant, for all the world as if he were hosing aphids off a rose bush."

In response to the incident Ira Socol asks the question: "What have we been teaching, in our schools, in our homes, in our churches, in our everyday lives, that has allowed so many completely amoral people to not just be among us, but to rise to positions of responsibility?"

Ira's post is spot on and I have no criticism to make of it, but I can see a risk in the discourse that springs up in reaction to events like this. The problem is when we see only the people involved. In the photo of the pepper spray incident we see the policeman - a campus policeman who obviously spent every working day around the students, and who may have known some of the protesters by name - and we wonder how he could be so insensitive, so inhumane, and we start to think about what was lacking at the schools he went to and in the family he grew up in.

The trees are obvious, but can you see the wood? In this case the wood is the institutions that we live in and that live through us. The police force is one institution. School is another. Arguably, language is a third.

An institution is more than the sum of its parts. When a man puts on a uniform, and a dignitary pins a medal to his chest and puts a pepper spray in his hand, he becomes a different kind of being - a being animated by the institution. At the same time, the institution comes alive in him. Something new, and potentially very ugly, is born.

It makes me think of the Baka tribespeople in central Africa, where from time to time the men disappear into the jungle and then reappear some time later dressed in masks, singing and dancing. To their wives and daughters and sisters and mothers they are no longer familiar relatives. They are the living presence of the spirit of the jungle. The voice of the jungle can be heard in their song.

The policeman is the living presence of the spirit of our jungle. He does not sing, but we can hear the drumming of his truncheon on his perspex shield.

Surely if people are brought up by their families and schools to be nice they would never spray pepper in the faces of protesters? We would like to think so, but Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment showed how easy it was to transform otherwise nice students into brutal agents of a totalitarian regime. The experiment had to be abandoned early. Why? Because the students playing the role of prison guards were getting carried away. Carried away by what? By the dark spirit of that particular institutional jungle.

What is clear from Zimbardo's experiment and others is that the darkest institutions take on the ugliest forms of life when they allow their minions to act with impunity. The basic rule is that the people doing the dirty work are not to be held accountable. If I am given a uniform and a pepper spray and told to spray it in the faces of the students, it is also made obvious that I will never be held accountable for my actions (as long as I do what I am told to do). Dark and ugly insitutions - like mobs - thrive on personal irresponsibility.

If we don't change our institutions, the atrocities will continue regardless of how nice people are before they are whisked off to the jungle.

Lady Gaga and the ape

2011-11-21T01:38:00.001+02:00

During my TV dinner I just caught a glimpse of Lady Gaga presenting a book of photos (photos of herself - what else?). She mentioned something she had learned. Shame is obselete, she said.

Nietzsche wrote two sentences about the ape in "Thus Spake Zarathustra":

"What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment."

Along with Darwin and Lady Gaga we accept with perfect equanimity the idea that the ape is there at the top of our family tree.

The inability any longer to be ashamed of the ape that still dwells within us is nothing to brag about.

"Alas, the time of the most despicable man has come - the one who is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man."

The Happy Shopper

2011-11-15T14:17:00.001+02:00

It seems that some people in rooms adjoining the corridors of power are arguing about the ends of social policy. Two voices can be distinguished. The loudest is arguing that the hard and unambiguous facts of economic growth are the only ones that politicians should pay attention to (although doubtless the policies will need sweetening slightly to stop the riots getting out of hand). The other voice - weaker and unsure of itself - is arguing that happiness should also be the object of good government. Economic growth is a means to an end - it says - and the end is human happiness. And in order to make its point more persuasive it insists that happiness is something that can be measured as accurately as the GDP.

Clearly some of those in the second camp have managed to win the ear of the politicians, and so in the UK a body called the National Statistician has been given the job of framing four questions which will be put to 200,000 Britons once a year to find out how satisfied they are with their lives. Christian Kroll - one of the timid young men involved in the project - insists that the "resulting figures will provide both decision-makers as well as the general public with key information about how we can tackle the most pressing social issues of our time."

The disturbing thing here is that people like Christian Kroll seem to think that this breaks new ground. It doesn't. It simply re-presents the old and dubious polarity of the individual subject with her oh-so subjective feelings and goals and ideas on the one hand, and the hard objective data of economic life on the other.

To remain within that old polarity is to miss so much that is important. Above all, you miss culture. What is in decline in Europe (and this is the real crisis) is not the index of individual happiness. It is the integrity – the vitality – of a culture that could draw people out of their monadic consumerist bubbles and put the economy in its place again. But that would not be good for business, so let’s just stick to tweaking the happiness index.

I'm off to the shops. Maybe that'll make me feel less depressed.

A history lesson in the chicken pen

2011-11-14T12:50:00.001+02:00

Too many chickens turned out to be cockerels. There were three of them. Two too many. They had to go. But I put off making a decision until one morning I saw that all three cockerels had somehow forced their way out of the pen and were gathered nearby fighting. The head and neck of the smallest one were covered in blood. Now I knew who would survive.

The nicest survived. The two merciless fighters perished.

I felt then that on our little bit of the hillside social Darwinism had been decisively trashed. The idea that the strong are necessarily in the right is a lie. Strength is not in itself good. It is the opportunity to do good - an opportunity that might be taken or might be missed.

How I prefer to kill

2011-11-14T12:43:00.000+02:00

My first thought was to raise the chickens tenderly. I stroked them every day and had a clear idea from the beginning how that stroking would help matters at the end.

When the time came, I was able to gently carry the first chicken to the block. It lay in my arms in complete trust, and it didn't object when I stretched its neck ever so slightly over the wood. Then with the reassuring hand still on its back I brought the sharpened axe down swiftly. With a single blow the head and the bloody stump of the neck fell to earth and I watched the lid of the upturned eye close peacefully.

However, I have since discovered a better way to kill.

The cockerels didn't let me stroke them. They were fighters. Whenever they saw me coming their neck feathers would rise, and they would stand as tall as possible, open their wings and prepare to rush at me angrily. It got to the stage where I could no longer enter the chicken house. I would open the door just enough every day to throw in the grain.

When the time came round again, I was ready with a heavy iron bar in hand and the axe at the ready. I opened the door, jumped back and waited tensely for the attack.

It is not easy to kill a chicken in mid flight with an iron bar. It is a noisy and messy business. The first blow just makes the bird angrier and more determined to attack, and it comes back again lunging at my chest. The squalking becomes more furious, but two or three blows later the bird is on its side on the ground where the axe can finish the job off.

I now maintain that it is better for the chicken to go down fighting.

A meat licence

2011-11-14T12:26:00.002+02:00

A suggestion to reduce the level of hypocrisy in society: meat should only be sold to people who hold a licence to buy it. To get that licence they would have to pass a test.

They would have to kill their food themselves - with their hands.

There would need to be lessons. They should definitely not be conducted in school. Young people would meet individually with tutors outdoors in the evening. Tutors who are more like priests than school teachers or butchers. The neophyte would learn how to become an agent of death, and learn how to approach the axe and the block and the animal with all due gravity and respect. And after the killing there would have to be a ceremony to honour the dead.

If we insist on eating meat, let us face up to the killing it involves, make it part of our culture and learn to do it with respect.

The truth about eggs

2011-11-14T12:05:00.001+02:00

The statement that meat is murder is a truth that has worn thin with repetition.

A truth less thin is that eggs are also murder.

Lessons from the Baka Pygmies

2011-10-23T12:29:00.008+03:00

The Baka are a tribe of Pygmies living in central Africa. These nomadic hunter-gatherers live in the central African forests and have one of the oldest surviving cultures in Africa, certainly older than that of their taller black neighbours living on the open plains. They are endgangered - more in danger than the whale (which makes me wonder why I have never yet seen anyone walking around with a badge declaring "Save the Pygmies"). But we should call them the Baka, not Pygmies. The name "Pygmy" was coined by foreigners, who have generally behaved despicably towards these people, which is why the Baka prefer to be known by their own name.

From time to time white people think there is a question that needs to be answered - the question of what it is that makes us different from (other) animals. The most common answer the white people come up with is that we are beings with Reason. In contrast to the animals lost in a world of thoughtless instinct, we can think rationally. How would the Baka answer that question? I imagine they would find it a very strange question because it assumes that we are set apart from the natural world, whereas they believe themselves to be a part of it. However, if pushed (because the white people are very good at pushing) the Baka could well answer: "What makes us different is our singing." Singing is a huge part of their culture, and they sing brilliantly. If they have to do someting as a group - say, going fishing - one of them will start singing, and slowly the others will join in.

Listen to the women singing HERE.

I have just been to the tax office - and the taxation system is one of the achievements of the rational mind. It was not a pleasant experience. It made me think of the Blake poem describing the marks of woe on the faces of the passers-by and the "mind-forg'd manacles" that Blake saw . The employees were at their desks - one each. The walls were white and blank, save for a large poster of a wild green landscape. No one was singing.

Of course our white culture still gives a place to singing. Two places, actually. There is singing as spectacle, which is also singing as commodity - as an industry. But to find communal singing among fully-fledged adult citizens, we have to go to the football ground. Do those songs bear any comparison, though, with those of the Baka?

Baka culture has very nearly been destroyed. While they were left to themselves the Baka and the other Pygmy tribes managed to sustain a way of life that dates back to way before the time of the Pharoahs. The whites and the Baka's black neighbours, the Bantu, have driven the Baka out of what remains of the forest, and forced them to live in villages. Paul Raffaele has written an excellent first-hand report of how the culture of the Baka and other Pygmy tribes has collapsed, suffering exploitation, harassment, neglect, disease and drug abuse.

We - as a culture, as a civilisation - can no longer sing, but surely we should be able to see the inestimable value of neighbours who still know how to live through song - neighbours who help to keep alive what we have lost. The Bantu, who consider themselves civilised, despise the Baka and consider the Pygmies the sort of thing that they can own. Are we any better? Are we doing anything to help the tribe survive in a world which is more threatening than anything that previously lurked in the darkest corners of their forest?

To see what we might be doing let's pop over to the UNESCO website where there is lots of material about protecting our World Heritage. Let's put "pygmy" in the search box. We find a page about a West African forest which is now a national park, where the pygmy hippopotamus can now live unthreatened, together with "11 species of monkey which are of great scientific interest". The park dates back to 1926, when it was declared a Forest and Wildlife Refuge by the French. It became one of UNESCO's World Heritage sites in 1982.

The pygmy hippo is safe. What of the Pygmy people, though? The UNESCO website has only three lines about them. Apparently a 3-day conference was organised in Gabon in 2002 to discuss how to "include the pygmies in the development process". The fact that "pygmy" is written with a lowercase "p" is revealing. There is no news of what conclusions the conference came to or what is being done to help the Baka and the other Pygmy tribes. UNESCO have, though, compiled a CD of Pygmy music, just so that it is not lost forever.

The forests, which are full of things of "great scientific interest", are to be protected by being made into national parks. What this usually means, though, is that the indigenous people are expelled, as the Baka have been in Cameroon. Presumably these indigenous people and their amazing culture are not part of our World Heritage.

Within the space of 6 years Paul Raffaele witnessed a massive erosion of Baka culture. Am I mistaken in thinking that it would be so easy to help them survive so that they could hold their own and learn how to resist the threats both from the white and the black worlds?

Happy times at school

2011-10-20T12:13:00.001+03:00

The sun is shining. The cat is stretched out asleep on the warm stones of the balcony. I am wondering if I haven't been a little too negative in the things I have written about school. I get up, walk through the sunshine and say to the cat: "No, I am not against school. There were some happy times." And the memory of one of them floods back.

When I was six and seven I was at a little school in Manchester: the St John's Church of England Infants School. It was quite a long time ago, in the days when children were given free milk in glass bottles with paper straws in the morning break and the toilets were outside in the playground. At the end of the school day all the other kids would noisily jostle out and head off home. I would walk down the corridor to another classroom where my mother was the teacher. There I would wait for a quarter of an hour or so while she tidied up after the day that had just ended or prepared for the day that was to follow. I would sit on one of the pupil's chairs or wander around the room and walk over to the large windows and stand and look out at the empty playground. Stillness and quiet lay everywhere like some huge warm blanket that one could hide under to escape the cold. Those were happy times.

Watching the hit and run

2011-10-18T15:02:00.002+03:00

At the weekend in a narrow street in China a two-year-old girl was run over by a van. She lay bleeding and motionless in plain view in the road. The van driver drove away without pausing. A second van going in the opposite direction drove over the girl's already broken body. He, too, continued on his way. One after another 18 people walked by her. They carried on their way. The 19th person was a garbage collector. She moved the girl out of the way of the traffic and called the ambulance. The girl was still alive. She was rushed to hospital and operated on. The doctors could not save her.

This is not a Chinese phenomenon. Not so long ago in Boston a 78 year old man tried to cross a busy main road. His first name was Angel. He was hit head on by a car sending his body high in the air to land on the road where he lay bleeding. The driver did not stop. The scene was recorded by a nearby traffic surveillance camera on the highway. The old man's body was in the way of traffic. Nine cars slowed down and drove around him. They did not stop. A man on a scooter circled around the man before driving off. Some passers-by stepped off the pavement to get a better look. No one went to his aid or tried to stop the traffic. Quite by chance, a police car drove by, stopped and called the ambulance.

I recently read a long article by an academic arguing how peaceful the world is now compared to the distant past. The article presented statistics and graphs showing the decline in bloodshed. To be honest, I could not read the article. There was an obvious tone of self-congratulation, not for the author personally but for us as.. as... as what? As a civilisation? As people who are now so much more civilised than our forefathers back in the middle ages when a public execution was certain to gather a large crowd? How much more civilised are we if we can see people suffering and just stand and stare and do nothing?

I recall footage of a scene in the states after a passenger plane had just crashed into a river only metres from a highway bridge. The bridge was low. It was lined with a large crowd who had gathered. A helicopter was hovering overhead, dangling a line for a woman who was in the water. It was winter. The water was freezing. The woman tried to hold onto the line. She couldn't. It seemed clear that her arms were too injured and she was too overcome by the crash and the cold to hold on. She was going to drown. What was shocking was that it took an absolute age for one man on the bridge to run down to the river and dive in to save her. Only one man made the effort. Everyone else stood and watched.

And tonight we will turn on the news (if we can bear it any longer), and we will see more images of suffering and avoidable distress, and we will sit and watch and wonder if it might be a nice idea to have another slice of pizza before we go to bed.

Fuck Yeah Revolution

2011-10-14T12:32:00.004+03:00

The crisis is deepening and in places here and there people are taking to the streets. At the forefront in the US is the Occupy Wall Street movement. There is an excitement among groups on the far left that here is a movement from the grass roots that could acquire historical dimensions. The movement at the moment is a loose association lacking any clear leadership. You can see people from the far left, though, elbowing their way forward clutching the blueprint that would transform the motley crowd into a spearhead for a genuine revolution.

I want to find out more about the budding leaders. I find snippets of statements excitedly posted here and there on the web. One I find on a website with the title “Fuck Yeah Marxism-Leninism”. Every page on that site repeats at the top the following quote from Chairman Mao.

A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any private person, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.

Mao Zedong

Perhaps it is a coincidence but the colour scheme of the website is black and white – a stark and dramatic contrast. Appropriate since for Fuck Yeah Marxism-Leninism everything is black and white. The Party is good. The private person (at least insofar as she might insist on a life that is independent of the Party) is bad. The masses are good, so anyone who is not with the masses must be bad. Communists are good; the rest are bad. A life of principle is good; a life shaped by attachments to things and people and places is bad. The future is good; the past is bad.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno said something about the philosophy of history – about the sort of thing also known to those of us conversant with the post-modernist lingo as the grand narrative – the sort of sweeping summary of history that any movement needs in order to have an idea about where it has come from and where it is heading. He said that grand narratives need to be construed and denied. It strikes me that the same needs to be said of the political party that might help us move forward: it, too, must be construed and denied.

The problem is that that idea of construing and denying something at the same time finds no place in a black and white, fuck-yeah view of the world.

I left a comment to this effect on the Facebook page of Jay Rothermel. I don’t think Jay has any direct connection with the Fuck Yeah website, it was just that his FB page included a link to that site, which was how I found it. Jay replied to my initial comment thus:

Adorno spent most of his career writing off the working class in the imperialist countries as bought-off and stupefied by consumer culture. And no one today needs to affirm the party mentality that I or Fuck Yeah Marxism-Leninism have expressed in our blogs. A united front means striking together against the common enemy, not being in programmatic agreement on everything, or even most things.

Jay clearly has a more nuanced view of the Party, but still the mentality is the same. There are the good guys (the working class) and there are the bad guys (the enemy). Of course, if we are to fight for something better, we will have to have a view of who or what we are fighting against (let's call that the enemy), and inevitably it will be a simplification of a situation whose complexity we cannot do justice to without becoming paralysed – a paralysis that would simply allow the false status quo to perpetuate itself. But we need to be careful because some kinds of simplification have lead in the past to people with good intentions being sent to the gulag.

Being of the left and having grown up reading enthusiastically about things like the Solidarity movement in Poland and having gone from door to door in Birmingham helping to raise money for the striking miners, my sympathies are definitely with the workers. Jay’s reference to the working class prompted me to add the following comment:

I once worked as a porter in the British NHS before it was torn to pieces, and I worked with a bunch of guys who were the most stereotypically red-necked, fuck-yeah, working-class people I have ever met. I wouldn't say they were stupefied, but I would say they were damaged. I am also damaged. Adorno was aware of how damaging it is for people to be confined to the role of worker or to the role of intellectual. I would fight for a world less damaging. It wouldn't be a fuck-yeah world, though.

One of the difficult things we need to do is to see and admit the way in which we are damaged. Only then will it be possible to glimpse the vague outlines of a better life – a life that is less at war with itself – more reconciled. If we insist that the only problem is with the enemy who are over there on the other side of the barricade, the chances are that after all the enemies have been shot we will find that we have just replaced one kind of damaged life with another.

All you need is love and an iPad

2011-10-02T14:37:00.005+03:00

Before John Lennon sat down in 1967 to write the lyrics for “All you need is love” I doubt whether he had been reading Hobbes’ “Leviathan”, but the question that Lennon was implicitly answering in his song was actually the exact same question that Hobbes set out to answer some 300 years earlier: What might bring people together – and hold them together - in a peaceful society where life would not be nasty, brutish and short? Hobbes’ answer was fear and prudence. Lennon disagreed. All we need is love.

But a love of what, though? Here are three objects of love.

Did Lennon have any of those in mind?

The song repeats a number of words. The word most often repeated is “you”:

…nothing you can do that can’t be done,
Nothing you can make that can’t be made,
No one you can save that can’t be saved,
Nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.

It is all about you, so the message (or one of the messages) is: Learn to love yourself.

One doesn’t normally associate pop with metaphysics, but “All you need is love” has a metaphysics. Lennon is implying that there is an immutable order in the universe that determines what can be done and made and saved, and that determines where we are meant to be. The implication is clear: to properly love ourselves we need to love our place within that big cosmic order. So this is not a narcissistic love of our appearance or status. Rather it is a love that goes beyond the superficial realm of appearances.

However, perhaps it is a mistake to look too closely at the lyrics. There is nothing you can sing that can’t be broadcast, and when it is broadcast it might take on a slightly different meaning from the one you had in mind when you sat alone writing the lyrics.

John Lennon’s song was first broadcast as part of the first big international TV show, which was called “Our World” and which occurred on June 25 1967. The event was originally conceived by the BBC. The idea was to do what could be done with the new telecommunications satellites – satellites that made it possible to link up different broadcasting companies around the world so that people in different countries (31 were able to receive the signal) could watch the same TV programme at the same time. It was broadcast live with participants from 14 different countries. The participants included people like Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso. The Beatles got the last slot in the two-and-a-half-hour event, and in the end their piece proved to be the most memorable.

It is worth watching the first few minutes of the broadcast as it was seen by viewers in Canada.

The presenter makes the obvious point that what is connecting people around the world is the technology of the “completely new communications age”. He is filmed in the control room so that viewers can marvel at the vast array of technology that has been amassed there.

That YouTube clip is an interview with Marshall McLuhan, who was then the biggest talking head with something vaguely interesting to say about the communications age. The interviewer is a bit of a loose cannon. After pointing out how the broadcast is supposed to bring the world together he suggests to McLuhan that perhaps the new technology actually achieves the opposite: a new divide opens up between those who have access to the programme on TV and the majority of the world in 1967 who had no hope whatsoever of singing along with John Lennon and the rest of the Beatles. Marshall McLuhan completely misses the point of the question and thinks he is being asked about an older generation in the West who don’t feel at all excited about pop culture and TV. For me, that is no accident. Among those infected by the excitement about the shiny, new hi-tech world the human being in all her unshiny humanity gets forgotten. The human beings who are supposed to be united in Our World fade into almost complete obscurity, overshadowed by the technology that is said to be uniting them.

In the end, the message in Lennon’s song proved weaker than the message in the medium itself. The world is no more united now by the sort of love that Lennon envisaged than it was then. There is, though, a pseudo unity around the world with all of us who are sufficiently affluent owning the same high-tech hardware. This gives us something in common, but it doesn’t really unite us. We are no closer to learning how to love ourselves and our world in a way that would prove once and for all that Hobbes was wrong – that we can overcome the worst instincts in ourselves and establish an order that is not based on fear and compusion and petty self-interest.

Samarakis: Naked Among the Clothed

2011-09-27T12:45:00.003+03:00

A favourite book cover:

Although I have had this book for over 15 years and although I read it ages and ages ago, it is only this year that I realised what the cover photo depicted. Perhaps it was the fact that earlier this year a stray goat wandered onto our field and we tried to look after it. A couple of days later it became obvious why the shepherd had never come looking for it. It was ill. It died. Another sad loss. I buried it, taking care to ensure that the grave was covered well enough with a pallet and heavy stones so that the dogs would not dig it up again.

When I next came to pick up the book by Samarakis, I seemed to see for the first time what was on the front cover. I already knew the boy was Peruvian. There was a note to that effect in the book. Now I saw that the baby goat must have just died, and the boy is desperately trying to blow the breath of life back into it. It suddenly looked like one of the most moving images I had ever seen. And still is.

I re-read the short story bearing the same title as the book. It was first published in 1954. What is striking is that nothing essentially has changed.

In the kafeneio the protagonist flicks through that day's paper: stories about the government deficit, a kidnapping, a rape and three suicides - two for financial reasons. Later in the paper the section about what used to be called high society, with reports of how elegant and chic the ladies were the previous evening.

"He ran his hand through his hair, and wiped the sweat from his brow. He was perspiring, although it wasn't hot.

"The war, the hydrogen bomb, the suicides for financial reasons, high society... What a panorama of life!

"Nothing had changed for the better since the war. Things were just as they were before. Once he had hoped, as millions all over the world had hoped, that after the war, after so much blood had been spilled, that things would change. That peace would come, that the nightmare of war would never again cast its shadow over the earth, that there would be no more suicides for financial reasons, that...

...

"In the mirror opposite he caught sight of his face. A very ordinary face. Nothing indicated the turmoil within."

Then on the next page, when the protagonist finally admits to himself that he no longer feels that there is any hope, there is my favourite passage:

"It suddenly seemed a terrible thing to be without hope. He had the feeling that everyone in the kafeneio was looking at him and others in the street were thinking and whispering to each other: 'That man there has no hope!' As if it were a crime. As if there were some mark on him making his guilt obvious to all. As if he were naked among the clothed."

Now, as then, the times have some of us thinking about the "dark face of life". Some. Not so many it seems. And we walk about feeling like the naked among the clothed.

Yet we do not completely despair. There is some hope - however dim. We know there must be, if only because there once was a boy in the hills of Peru who desperately tried to blow the breath of life back into his limp infant goat.

In Defence of Home Logging

2011-09-27T10:54:00.000+03:00

A confession: We are home loggers. We are fortunate to live on the very edge of civilisation, beyond which the land stretches as far as the eye can see without human habitation. Although that wild area is classified by the local authorities as forest, it is not exactly what ordinarily comes to mind when people hear the word "forest". For the most part it is filled not with tall trees but with a sort of bush - the prickly-leaved pournaria that abound in Greece. Generally, they don't grow to much over head height, but in the hollows where the richer soil allows, there are a good few thickets within easy walking range where the pournaria manage to develop into trees over three metres tall.

Well before winter sets in we hike over to those thickets with a rucksac, a hand saw (because although we have a chainsaw, we prefer to keep a low profile in the forest) and a pair of thick gloves (because those pournaria are damn prickly). Now we don't fell thoughtlessly. For a start off, we always leave the tallest trees. Of the less tall trees we choose which are the best to cut so that the remaining trees have space to grow unhindered. What gets felled is cut into lengths about a metre long, packed into the rucksac about 30kg at a time and carried back to the cottage. In my opinion the practice is utterly sustainable.

In today's local newspaper there is a headline on the front page calling on the authorities to clamp down on the "thieves" operating in the forest. I read on and I see that the paper is actually repeating a call issued by a local ecological group. Now, in general we are very sympathetic to the ecologists, but we object to this blanket characterisation of home loggers as thieves. Am I a thief? Whose property have I stolen? If it is the case that other home loggers are cutting trees indiscriminately or if there are places on the mountain where people are filling large trucks with logs, rather than carrying them home on their backs, then I agree steps have to be taken to protect the forest, but let's not start a discourse calling anyone who cuts wood to keep his shivering family warm in the winter a thief, especially in these times of crisis when some families may have no other option.

If we are thieves, here is a photo of our loot.

Walter Benjamin's angel of history

2011-09-23T14:01:00.007+03:00

Walter Benjamin (born 1892) lived through the First World War and its aftermath in Germany. Following the rise of Nazism he fled Germany in 1933 (to escape persecution as a Jew). He fled to France. After the occupation of France in 1940 he had to flee again. He made it to Marseille and managed to get on a freighter bound for India, but he was discovered and put ashore. Later he decided to walk across the Pyrenees to avoid border patrols. He had an American visa and hoped eventually to make it to the States to join his colleagues Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. He managed to cross the border into Spain. While staying at a hotel in the Catalan town of Port Bou he was betrayed by the hotel owner. On 26 September 1940 he was found dead in his hotel room. The circumstances of his death remain mysterious.

A few months before his death he wrote “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. The ninth thesis is a meditation on a drawing by Paul Klee called “Angelus Novus” – a drawing which he had bought in 1921 and which remained one of his most prized possessions.

Here is the drawing by Klee.

Here is the ninth thesis by Benjamin.

A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin

(Below is an edited extract from an insightful piece by Raymond Barglow.)

The intensity of Benjamin’s description here suggests that he experienced the condition from which the Angel of History cannot escape as a personal as well as a political impasse. Although he did not go to prison or suffer any other severe repression on account of his beliefs or activities, his outlook on life is inseparable from his perception of history.

Like so many of his generation, Benjamin experienced the First World War – the bloodiest conflagration in human history up to that time – as pointless and horrible carnage. But the revolutionary upheaval that occurred in its wake, in Germany, Russia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, seemed to represent a turning toward social emancipation as powerful and promising as any that had ever been experienced in the past.

That promise was not realised. The revolutionary movement faded, to be replaced first by a cynical nihilism then by fascism.

Like Klee’s Angel, Benjamin felt caught in history’s tangle – propelled forward, yet incapable of disengaging from the past. He was acutely sensitive to everything going on around him, seeming to live without the normal defensive mechanisms that block out the horrors being perpetrated around us.

In the historical project of liberation, Benjamin represents the Angel of History as being on our side – the angel wants to intervene but does not have the power to do so. Do we? Benjamin criticizes the pessimism that regards fundamental change as impossible and that tells us that historically, utopian dreams have been losing propositions. As an antidote to resignation, Benjamin proposes “the gift of fanning the spark of hope [that was] in the past,” as if memory could ignite a kind of blaze of aspiration across the generations.

Yet Benjamin could not figure out how to join with others to put such a memory-based politics into practice. Although he enjoyed the company of his friends, he conducted his life quite privately, independent of any political association. Alone, feeling too deeply the catastrophe of history, he was himself destroyed.

Our footnote

A suggestion: The angel depicted by Paul Klee has died. It signified the hope of a utopian impulse. Benjamin's Theses on History are a dialogue with historical materialism, which for all its faults, retained the utopian impulse, and insisted that there could be a decisive break with the bad history of the past, and there would be some kind of redemption - it wouldn't all have been for nothing. Is there any discourse like that now? Are we working together – struggling – fighting perhaps – for a better world?

In a sense history has died. Here in Europe at the moment the only talk in the corridors of power is about balancing the books. I don't hear any visions of a better society that might become possible once the books have been balanced. If I raised the question to an imaginary European bureaucrat once the debts have been paid (assuming they can be paid), I imagine being told: "You can shop. What more do you want?" And he leaves before I have time to speak because he is convinced that the question is unanswerable.

Postcript

Henry Giroux’s article on Walter Benjamin’s angel of history reads it in the light of the contemporary situation in America. Here is the crescendo:

We no longer live in an age in which history's "winged messengers" bear witness to the suffering endured by millions and the conditions that allow such suffering to continue. Thinking about past and future has collapsed into a presentism in which the utter normalization of a punishing inequality and the atomizing pleasures of instant gratification come together to erase both any notion of historical consciousness and any vestige of social and moral responsibility owed as much to future generations as to the dead.

Back to school with Spark Notes

2011-09-13T11:16:00.003+03:00

I have just been helping James launch his Quintessence of Dust blog – whose title borrows from a Hamlet speech that – ideally – an educated Englishman ought to have pretty much off by heart. I didn’t, so when James wasn’t looking I Googled "quintessence of dust" to make good the lack. The link that caught my eye was to Spark Notes. I clicked it.

In a plain font in black and white, there was the snippet of the speech:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
Reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving
how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! and yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust?

Here - I take it - there is a reason to pause and reflect upon the ways that we puff up a ridiculous conception of ourselves and our place in the scheme of things - a conception that prevents a more humble appreciation of the realities of our situation. What do I mean? I admit that more needs to be said, but to the right and left of the white box with the Hamlet speech there are large photos of smiling attractive teenagers jumping in the air. I mouse over those photos in a moment of distraction (because it is impossible not to be distracted), and see that those photos link to a page entitled Back To School. I allow myself to be distracted further and click a photo of a smiling, air-borne boy in a check shirt.

Despite the photos, because this is Spark Notes, because I associate (perhaps wrongly) Spark Notes with literature, and because I have just been reading a piece of sixteenth century English drama on the Spark Notes website, I am expecting this Back To School page to be full of things to help students get (back) into literature, or at least back into studying, back into learning, back into a deeper engagement with the wider world.

I was wrong. Here's the list of topics on the Back To School page:

1. The Pros and Cons of Being Brunette

2. First Day of School Pics!
(With a photo of Sabrina and the caption: "We love Sabrina's multicolored shoes—they give her uniform personality!")

3. Thrifty Back-to-School Outfits
"It's that time again—backpacks, schedules, SCHOOL! But first and foremost, it's time to go shopping for back-to-school outfits."

4. The Pros and Cons of Being Blonde

5. Shivani Explains Makeup: Concealer Edition
"Concealer is foundation’s fraternal twin sister; they are very similar, but possess key differences."

6. 10 Best Things about Feeling Healthy
(This is actually about losing weight.)

7. Shivani Gives Her Wardrobe a Makeover

8. Everything You Need to Know About Body Piercing

"Fraternal twin sister" jars a bit for me, but that is the least of the problems here.

This is all aimed at girls. Perhaps Sparky people have done some research and found that boys don't figure much in their target market. But which young lady - after starting to worry so much about her skin, her hair, her figure and her clothes - would be at all inclined to click back to the page with Shakespeare's profound words and muse a while longer about human vanity?

Quintessence of dust indeed.

We are absolutely and completely fucked.

The Suicide of Nikos Kerasiotis

2011-09-11T04:14:00.005+03:00

On September 25, 2008 there was a demonstration outside the New York Stock Exchange protesting the massive Wall Street bail out. One of the demonstrators carried a banner saying: "Jump You Fuckers". As far as I know, no one jumped.

The crisis that began on Wall Street only hit us here in Greece hard much later, and it hit hard first in the construction sector. Masses of people who had been earning a living on building sites lost their jobs. One of those was Nikos Kerasiotis, aged 34. He lived in a tiny two-roomed cottage next to the river four or five fields below us.

At about 10.15pm on September 8 2011 Nikos shot himself in the head with a hunting rifle and died instantly.

I don't want Nikos to be treated as just another statistic. He was a friend, and in this dry, Greek valley with only 14 or 15 households, he was the only real friend we had. He was the only person who came round for coffee or sometimes for a meal, not often, but when Flora - my wife - passed him occasionally on the road, she would invite him up and sometimes he would come. He never came empty-handed, even after he lost his job. The bottom drawers in our fridge are still full of all the apples he brought with him the last time he came to see us, and above them the six cans of beer we never got round to drinking.

The really sad thing is that on any measure of what constitutes a good person, he ranked way up at the top, which must sound like the sort of thing anyone would say of their friend at a time like this, but in Nikos's case it is true. In this backwater of rural Greece where there is so much nastiness and back-biting and mutual hostility, Nikos kept himself way above all that. He was a tall, strong man who had had special forces training during his military service (still obligatory here in Greece), but he never seemed to allow himself to become aggressive when he was wronged. And in a society where corruption is rife, he struck me as incorruptible. Certainly in this little valley outside the city of Volos, there was no one who could be called virtuous apart from Nikos. The best among us has now died, so unnaturally, and unnecessarily.

Why did he do it? It is painful to hear people say - as I heard them today - that he was crazy - psychologically ill. There is something shockingly cold and cruel - almost violent - in pigeon-holing Nikos in that way. However disturbed he may have become, that fatal shot was the result of a long history that deserves respect - a history that must surely have become unbearably painful.

Nikos grew up in much the way that his father must have grown up, spending a great deal of his time in the forest helping his family make charcoal (karvouna), managing huge earth-covered piles of smouldering wood - kaminia - that could never be left unattended for months on end lest the fires get out of hand and the whole forest go up in smoke. As soon as was legally possible, his parents wanted him to work full-time at the kaminia, and so he was taken out of school despite the protests of his teachers who insisted that the unusually bright boy ought to be allowed to continue his education.

I first saw the family one summer about 12 years ago. I had ridden up the mountain for the first time on my motorbike, hurriedly looking for a children's camp that I was supposed to start work at. Somewhere near the camp high on the mountain I took a wrong turning, went up a dirt road in the trees and suddenly came upon a soot-covered couple busy outside the rudest of shelters made from branches covered with old plastic sheeting. I could have asked for directions but I am ashamed to admit that the sight was so unlike anything I had seen before that I quickly turned the motorbike round and sped off back to the main road.

As it turned out, Nikos's family had close ties with the children's camp - they were lending the camp a donkey to help ferry supplies - and soon I got to know them.

Nikos must have been about 20 or 21 then. When I sat down to have coffee with him and his parents in the forest he didn't seem at all bitter or frustrated. I imagine the frustration set in years later, when Nikos moved to find work in the city (Volos) following the retirement of his father and his decision not to continue the charcoal business (where conditions, in any case, had already been undermined by the influx of cheap Albanian labour).

Nikos found work, first in a factory and then on the building sites of Volos, and with that came his first taste of economic independence. The city must have been both liberating and tormenting. The torment seems to have been most acute around the issue of women. Back in the sexless forest I imagine Nikos became accustomed to celibacy, and I imagine him feeling he was saving himself for the woman of his dreams. Among all the smoke and the soot, shovelling earth, packing charcoal and watching over the kaminia, I imagine Nikos dreaming of the tall, proud woman who would become his wife.

Nikos never found that proud woman. A few weeks ago he told us of a day he had just spent working picking pears. While he was in the trees there was an attractive woman from a nearby village packing the pears neatly in boxes. When they met in one of the breaks, Nikos - who had a car - asked her if she wanted to go for a ride with him after work. "I wouldn't give you the honour," she said (the word "honour" sounds old-fashioned in English and not the sort of thing a village girl would say, but the Greek equivalent - timi - doesn't sound at all out of place). In retelling the story, Nikos made it sound more like a joke, but I bet those words were a dagger to his heart.

There seemed to be lots of other stories along the same lines. Just this morning one of the local shepherd's sons - with whom Nikos spent more of his free time - told us another. When his village - Pouri - had its annual festival this year, Nikos invited the shepherd's sons to go with him. They walked into the village cafeteria, where there happened to be a large gathering of the local girls. As soon as they saw Nikos they started laughing. I know that he had spoken in the past to at least one of them and asked her out, and had been refused with the excuse that the girl wouldn't go out with a karvouniaris (charcoal maker).

Now I have never spoken to the shepherd's four sons (aged between 17 and mid-30s) about this, but it seems clear that if a man comes down from the hillsides around here to the city, and is a cheerful bloke with money in his wallet and untroubled by high romantic ideals, he can find female companionship sufficient at least to satisfy the needs of the flesh. The shepherd's sons, despite their father being a ruthless blaspheming tyrant, are a very cheerful bunch who are clearly not having to struggle with celibacy. From what he told us, Nikos went out partying with them a number of times, but could never quite join in the fun. He had his romantic dream and I am sure he didn't want to ruin it.

Nikos just might have made his dream come true, despite all the idiotic prejudices in provincial Greece, if he had been more able to communicate with women. Growing up in a forest with a younger sister whose greatest affections were for the family mule can't have helped. Women seemed to remain for Nikos another species whose behaviour was unfathomable. Hence his tendency to rush clumsily at things when he met a woman he found genuinely attractive.

I doubt though that the romantic problems on their own would have pushed Nikos to commit suicide. While he was in work there must have been an apparent chance of making enough money to rise above the ridiculed status of the karvouniaris. But after being made redundant and having to scrape around for a little money picking pairs here and a little money digging a cess pit somewhere else, he must have felt trapped in poverty, and lumbered forever with the status he had been ridiculed for.

Because Nikos had somehow picked up a good working knowledge of English (and it was amazing that he managed to do that without any formal lessons and without anyone to speak to in English) we suggested he go abroad and look for work. From what I gather, he did seriously consider the idea, but somehow could never muster the courage to leave. He did go to the capital - Athens - to look for work, but either he didn't find any or things went wrong in the big city, and he returned to his tiny cottage by the river (where, by the way, there is only water on the very wetest days of the year).

Now I am left with an awful sense of guilt at not having seen the signs and not having done anything. On the last couple of occasions that he visited us he did keep mentioning guns and referring back to his experience in the army as an outstanding marksman, but those references always seemed to crop up in the middle of discussions of political corruption and economic collapse here in Greece. It made me worry a bit that I might someday see news of an assassination and then see footage of Nikos in handcuffs. It never crossed my mind that he might be thinking of turning the gun on himself. But it should have crossed my mind. It was obvious that Nikos was being far too hard on himself. No one criticised him more severely than he himself did. Fit and tall with fair hair he was a "fine figure of a man" as they say, but he would always say he was unattractive, and flail his long arms around in the air to emphasize the point. He did occasionally allow himself to speak angrily about how his parents had wasted a large sum of their life savings buying him a car without speaking to him first (and choosing a car that really was useless for someone like Nikos) and also speak angrily about his sister (with whom there were disputes about family property, apparently), but at the end of the conversation the impression was always that he blamed no one more than himself.

Turning against himself I imagine that he had allowed the condescending laughter of the stupid girls of the village to play incessantly in his head like a broken record. Perhaps there was no way out, but someone should have tried to help him find a way out. I don't think anyone did. The last time he visited I suggested going hiking together (something he had never done before). I meant it, but looking back, the suggestion probably didn't sound very serious, and to get him to agree I would have had to really insist and encourage him. I didn't do any of that.

I am also ashamed to admit that I never actually went to his cottage to visit him. He invited us over once when he rebuilt the roof and wanted to show us his handy work (or we suggested going over to see it - I forget which), but after that he didn't invite us again and I never took the initiative to call on him. It did cross my mind, but I always doubted whether he would want me to call, because of my own stupid hang-ups, but also because, despite my fondness and admiration for him and my wish for us to be friends, there was always this feeling that we were worlds apart. I never stopped to think that he might need someone to call, because now that I think about it, I don't think anyone ever called on him.

On Thursday evening I went by on my scooter at about 8.30pm. After coming over the little stone bridge I was only about 100 yards from his cottage and it would have been easy to make a right turn and call in on him. I did look up at his cottage. There was no light on and I didn't see him. I just carried on on my way up the hill to our house. About two hours later he shot himself.

Sunrise over the valley where Nikos lived.

A philosophy of EFL?

2011-09-03T12:52:00.012+03:00

In the post today I got an invitation to the International Publishers Exhibition in Athens and a free copy of one of the Mary Glasgow magazines. The exhibition is a kind of conference, and I see from the programme that there are 31 talks. 14 talks deal specifically with exam preparation. Talks dealing with classes at a lower level tend to emphasize things like "fun activities for juniors and seniors," and "exciting" materials for A-C classes, although the excitement there seems to centre around new technology like the whiteboard. One talk title mentions teaching methods, but it is actually about how to use interactive e-books in the classroom, not about methodology as such. Another talk is about how to make education more "effective", reducing "teaching sessions to only two periods per week". Only one talk mentions the word "philosophy", but the subtitle is: "a totally new philosophy for preparing students for all higher level English language certificates" – clearly not much philosophy there, though. Someone with a more thoughtful approach to the business of teaching English has to wait for the last (the 31st) talk given by Cliff Parry from the British Council – a talk entitled "Values in Education", looking at teachers as "models of values" and asking the question: "What are values and how are these reflected in the classroom?" I want to go to that talk (and only that talk), and I find myself wondering if it is entirely a coincidence that Cliff was sent to the back of the queue. Did he do something wrong?

Let's have a quick flick through the Mary Glasgow magazine. Now, I just assumed that Mary Glasgow was ever so slightly radical. Hence my disappointment on flicking through the magazine (bearing in mind that this is the Crown magazine, aimed at pre-intermediate level). Cover topic: money, illustrated with photos of Bank of England notes that have the faces of smiling kids superimposed on them. Plus a star: "Britain's top tennis star, Andy Murray". Page two: a photo of Lisa looking happy in her bedroom surrounded by her collection of 12,000 Pokemon toys. Page three: pumpkin lanterns with faces carved out of the skin – the five faces being those of four famous Hollywood actors and actresses plus the singer, Madonna.

Past the two-page spread about Britain's top tennis star onto page six, which is about money, with more photos of children smiling out of Bank of England notes, supplemented with a big photo of a tall pile of pound coins with the face of a girl in the background staring anxiously at the top of it almost as if it were some sacred totem pole that she must pay homage to. Then flicking over to page seven where there is a piece about a rap star and how he became rich. Following that an interview with a "real British teenager" talking about his pocket money and spending habits. After the English coach clarifies the correct preposition to use when telling the time, we have another double-page spread, this time about Cheryl Cole, who wasn't good at school but who became famous as a singer and talent show judge. The two last pages are almost in black and white, and tell us about the "amazing life" of Florence Nightingale. In one of the frames from the cartoon we see the compassionate Florence reading about thousands of British soldiers dying in Turkey and saying: "I must go to the Crimea – I can help those poor soldiers!" She is appalled by the conditions in the makeshift hospital. "Come on ladies. We must feed these men good food. We must dig toilets. We must wash the floors. We must open the windows," she says to the other nurses.

After all those stories about people becoming rich and famous, and photos of people smiling out of banknotes, and all the concern about money and what to spend it on, I wonder what sort of impression the story about Florence Nightingale might make on a young mind. It's the only story in the magazine about anyone who actually does anything good. It's right at the back of the magazine. The colours are all sepia tones, and the story is about a woman who has been dead for a century. There are some pretty powerful and rather dubious subliminal messages there.

Part of the message comes from the juxtaposition. For instance, children closing the magazine after reading about the "amazing" life of Florence Nightingale, thinking perhaps about how thin and underfed she looked, or wondering if they could ever bring themselves to dig toilets in Turkey, can't help but notice the back cover, which is devoted to sending multi-coloured birthday greetings to Super Mario – "a famous video character". The huge gaudy photo of the obviously well-fed Super Mario must surely obliterate the pale memory of Florence Nightingale in the minds of all but the most sensitive children.

Perhaps Mary Glasgow seemed quite radical back in the 1950s. According to the Wikipedia entry about her she proposed "abandoning the whole apparatus of grammar, replacing it with a simple course in conversation, greetings, courtesy phrases… with songs, cross references to cookery, sport, geography, railway posters and fashion."

Although railway posters haven't caught on as a foreign language teaching aid, Mary Glasgow's more general approach to producing "fun" learning materials has now become pretty much mainstream.

What does this have to do with a philosophy of EFL? What I want to suggest is that we might be able to appreciate the need for something like a philosophy of EFL by reflecting a little on, for one thing, the materials we are using and the subtle messages they might be conveying. If this magazine is anything to go by (and I admit that a sample size of one is a bit limited), by handing out Mary Glasgow materials we are lending support to a mindless celebrity culture. Unwittingly perhaps at first, we are promoting those values, going from one activity to another centering on the lives of the rich and famous. If we are not happy about promoting those values, then we need to start thinking about what values we should be promoting, and that is the kind of thinking that would lead to what would be called in everyday language a "philosophy of education".

But we don't have to begin by looking critically at teaching materials. We could begin by taking another look at things like seating arrangements, whether we encourage students to work on their own or in groups, how we praise and assess them, the way discipline is imposed, etc, etc.

There is lots to be discussed here, and in a two day conference with 31 talks it is a topic that deserves to be discussed in more than one of those talks, and it is definitely not a topic to be relegated to the final talk, when lots of people are probably a bit tired and anxious to get off home.

Does it matter if we don't have a philosophy of education, and if we leave before the Cliff Parries of this world have had a chance to speak? Yes, it matters massively. There is absolutely no hope for society if the educators allow themselves to become unthinking cogs in the commercial machine. Perhaps I am seeing things too bleakly, but my impression is that things have sunk so low that I am cheered just to see that someone has a bit of a philosophy – it really doesn't matter what sort of philosophy it is. Any old philosophy – as long as people are thinking about it and discussing it – is way, way better than the current intellectual self-abnegation on the part of teachers.

In closing, let me just touch on one issue: fun, and giving students material that they want to read and work with, which is presumably the idea behind materials like the Mary Glasgow magazines. Now if we could resurrect Mary Glasgow and ask her to justify this, she would doubtless articulate the sort of progressive approach that David Deubel neatly summed up in one of his blog posts:

Progressives believe that "the teacher should try to arouse student interest and motivation through the use of student centered activities and interests in the classroom. The curriculum should in no way be prescribed and should come from the "interests and needs of the students." It should in no way be imposed upon students from above."

Now the reason why we are called Torn Halves is because the world is full of stuff that is torn in half, and the progressive concept of education is no exception. Of course, we must try to arouse student interest and motivation and work with students as they are, with all their strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncracies, but we must also insist – and find clever ways of getting this across as much as possible – that there are things – values – more meaningful than the bling of pop culture, with all the greed, manipulation and profiteering that goes on behind it. We must insist, for instance, that Florence Nightingale gets put somewhere near the front of the magazine, if not on the cover, and when someone suggests we include a fat, happy Super Mario, we tell them very firmly that Super Mario has no place in the English classroom. We don't object to children whiling away a little of their freetime playing mindless video games, but lets not create the impression that the virtual stooge in a plumber's overall has any right to stand shoulder to shoulder with Miss Nightingale.

The progressives would be more in the right if students arrived directly at the school from lots of little houses on various prairies, each bringing interests and needs that are genuinely their own. That is far from the case. Children arrive with interests and needs deviously whipped up by cynical marketing managers dangling gaudy baubles in front of them. Teachers need to see the school (as I am sure most of them do) as a refuge from the barbarism of commercialism, and their work as an antidote to the pernicious nihilism of business. In such a context it is equally important to have a clear vision of what we ought to be doing, instead of just letting the kids carry on running after those gaudy baubles and patting ourselves on the back for being oh-so child-centred. Another word for that sort of clear vision is: "philosophy".

Blogging as a social indictment

2011-06-14T11:44:00.003+03:00

Very interesting "Farewell" to blogging statement where John Duff (academic) announces the end of his blog and includes some provocative thoughts about the blogging phenomenon, amongst which he says that blogging...

testifies to the the absolutely incredible inability of our current society to make something of people's intelligence, skill, time, and desire to be useful: we have to ask ourselves what is going on when our society has to create a massive virtual repository for less professionally oriented intellectual work, give it none of the material benefits of the actual world of letters or make it subject to the same restraints or regulations, and then even have the gall to call it "self-publishing."

Spot on. In the recent past there has been a flurry of claims floating around the media about the "revolution" taking place on the internet (even appearing incongruously and repeatedly on such totally unrevolutionary channels as BBC World). Under certain conditions (primarily government crackdowns on other forms of communication and social gathering) things like Facebook and Twitter can become key instruments for social movements but that doesn't make them essentially revolutionary. It would be possible to argue that under normal conditions in a fairly liberal regime blogging, micro-blogging and all the social networking systems effectively divert energies into an arena where people can express themselves and let off steam (if necessary) without this having any impact on the central dynamic of the rest of society. The problem for social radicals is that nothing really changes - we remain bricks in the wall, in a sense, but each brick now has its own avatar and a page on FB. The broader problem, though, is that all those energies are going to waste. People are keen to express themselves, to read and form an opinion, speak out and get involved. It is a sad indictment of the current social order that those energies, interests and abilities are not able to become part of a richer, more democratic public life.

Response to Werther

2009-11-06T14:39:00.002+02:00

Werther made some thought-provoking comments about neo-Stoicism on his Unabgeschlossenheit blog, with some interesting references to Martha Nussbaum, whose work we hadn't come across before. We wanted to leave a long comment but it turned out comments can't be longer than 4,096 characters (why 4,096?) so we are posting it here.

First of all, thanks for those pointers towards further reading. I have no access to the Harvard Law Journal but was able to find some Posner-related stuff on the web (but while the bandwidth allowed no Nussbaum or Kronman responses showed up on the search engine lists - so I am left guessing what the Aristotelian critique of that monster Posner might be. Any clues?).

Your point before the reference to Posner was that theory doesn't motivate - it always comes too late - and that it is therefore a practical irrelevance when considering social change. So, if we can't look forward to any positive social change as a result of our theoretical endeavours (which is not to say that change might not take place by other means), it might make more sense for me to use theory more therapeutically to help me live as well as I can in a world which is definitely not the best possible.

I guess you're right that theory is parasitic. Critical theory is doubtless parasitic on a pre-theoretical experience that the system as described by Posner sucks. You are right that no one's life ever takes an about-turn after reading some work of theory (certainly not after reading anything by Adorno). People obviously appropriate texts and use them to make sense of their situation, and that does influence the way people respond to contemporary unpleasantness. Religious interpretations are still popular even in this supposedly secular corner of Europe (I am talking about Greece here, and as someone living with a born-again Orthodox Christian who is preparing for the End of the World), and having swallowed the Apocalypse of St John hook, line and sinker, my partner's view of the way forward is rather different from mine (Oh, the joys of multi-cultural matrimony!).

You say that there have been enough critiques of the system. What has been lacking is the consideration of how we are to live as individuals within it. "What absolutely no one has come up with is a way for a person to live consistently with the principles that underlie those critiques. I think until that happens, nothing will change." Now, the demand for consitency doesn't sound very therapeutic. We must find a way of living a good life in a bad system (assuming we do agree that Posner sucks). That actually sounds quite hard.

Personally, I have been trying to do just that, on and off, for quite a while. In my case what happens is that I end up living less. Because I perceive the system to be bad and wish to lead a good life, I find myself withdrawing from it. The result is certainly not the Good Life, although it may be a less reproachable life. And I certainly don't see it as a way of life that might be a springboard for social change if more people followed suit, because in practise it just allows the Posners to carry on being nasty, and nastily weilding power in their conveniently pragmatic way over the rest of us.

Let me try to tie that into the discussion of Stoicism: The system tries to enslave us to our passions (for consumption primarily), and so I do what I can to overcome that, insisting on the same autonomy that was so crucial (as I gather) for the Stoics. I read that the Stoics wanted, not to moderate passion in an Aristotelian fashion, but to uproot it completely. Somehow, without ever having read a word of Zenon or Kleanthis, and against all my post-Marxist inclinations, I find myself struggling with my own interior life and letting the external world go its own sweet way (in true Stoic fashion). Now, of course, if the same happened to Posner and all his friends on Wall Street and at Halliburton and on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon and the Knesset and elsewhere, then things would change. But that just ain't gonna happen.

You are right that habits and desires have to change. But habits and desires are so utterly mediated by the system that it is hard to envisage a widespread change in them without some corresponding changes in the public sphere. For Marx and Lukacs and a few others the system was dysfunctional and would ultimately sow the seeds of its own destruction. Adorno disagreed.

Interestingly, Adorno came out in favour of a kind of quietism. In section 18 of Minima Moralia he says: "The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life ... but not to attach weight to it as to something socially substantial and individually appropriate." A quiet private life. No bricks through the windows of banks. But Adorno's position is not Stoic. According to Francois Chatelet (whose book on ancient Greek philosophers is the only one I have to hand) the Greek Stoics insisted that everyone could lead a virtuous life (and a satisfying life, assuming that the highest good is the virtuous will) in this world. Adorno insists that the "wrong life cannot be lived rightly." Your desire for consistency in private life seems to imply that the wrong life can be lived rightly. Can it?

I don't want to split hairs with you about Stoicism. I see no point in getting academic about what was and what was not Stoic. I think the difficult issue lies elsewhere. There is something that needs to be challenged, and it is not the definition of Stoicism. It surfaces in one of those interviews with Nussbaum on one of those wellness blogs I mentioned (http://www.politicsofwellbeing.com). Martha says in response to the well-being chaps who want to make everyone content: "I actually think, certainly in the US, that people should be a lot sadder than they are. The reason they're rather jolly is they don't think about the suffering of others, they don't think about the injustice suffered by others. I want to raise the level of sadness and anger in my students rather than diminish it." Nice. I like that. (And, by the way, she sees this inculcation of anger as non-Stoic.) Now, the tension I see is between this social agitation and her insistence elsewhere in the same interview that our political life retain its current liberal character. "The state should not be telling you how to live your life beyond a certain core of political principles." Here, for me, is THE problem. When my Stoic quietude falls away and I get angry about the sorts of things Martha wants us to get angry about, I start seeing the need for political intervention, collective action - not doing cartwheels into beenbags - but the sort of political intervention that would break up the corporate structure and loosen the current structure of power - the very structure that wreaks so much havoc with our habits and our desires. But that could only happen if we had a different conception - a non-liberal - conception of public life. Martha's comment (which may or may not be representative) implies that she sees her neo-Stoicism fitting quite nicely into the current liberal discourse (regardless of her objections to Posner, which unfortunately I don't have access to).

The crux, for me, is not to come up with a better guide to private life, but to finally see the need for a richer conception of the public. Heck, it might even be a bit Aristotelian. It certainly doesn't have to be the Stalinist one that Martha seems to see waving in the background.

The death of a cat

2009-10-21T12:27:00.000+03:00

After the cat's week-long illness, and my sleeping on the floor to keep it company at night (on the floor partly because I didn't want the cat to fall on the hard tiles but also because it is so hard to clean cat piss out of a matress) the cat has died. This is not the first cat death. But no less painful for that.

To the childless middle-aged, a cat can take on an immense significance.

An observation: The dead cat was still not cold. As it lay on the white sheet covering the sofa you could see the fleas leaving en masse. Clearly, if you are a cat, you know you are dead when you see your fleas abandoning you.

An observation and a complaint: People say things like: "Cats get sick and die," or: "Think what it must be like for parents who lose, not kittens, but children," or: "Life goes on," or: "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Why do people parrot inanities?

Everyone believes their misery is unique. They ought to be allowed to carry on thinking of it as unique and not be told by fools that their misery is really only a pale shade of a much richer misery felt by other people.

There are times when it seems that the greatest evil is to say to someone: "There are people far worse off than you."

Ethical irrationalism

2009-10-21T12:21:00.000+03:00

Am I wrong? Is the case against rationalism and therefore the case for a kind of irrationalism (or arationalism) not very simple? For the rationalist the right action, the good life, the way forward (that kind of thing) is lit up by the best argument. The good life is one based on the best possible reasons. It is surely an old observation, though, that evil can find its own reasons - reasons that can doubtless be made, given sufficient cunning, to sound equally good, if not better. If (as Kant assumed and Habermas continues to assume) the criterion has to be formal (to avoid circularity), it is likely that the reasons for evil will seem as persuasive as those for good.

Conclusion: we can describe what is good (and any mother can do that), but we cannot justify it. Anyone who asks the stupid question that was (in my experience) so often set as a topic for undergraduate discussion: "Why should we be moral/good?" is making the wrong assumption. It simply is the wrong question. A better question for philosophy classes is: Why in the hell should we think that morality is grounded in pure reason? And the question for Habermas seminars is: Why in the hell should we think that morality is grounded in discursive/communicative reason?

Second conclusion: if we are good, we are not so because we are rational. As Rousseau suspected, rationality is more likely to be a cause of evil. But in the midst of evil rational beings wreaking havoc while trying to implement the New American Century and while trying to maximise the accumulation of virtual wealth, there is obviously no point hoping that such rationalism will somehow unwind itself or run out of steam and leave the way clear for a new kind of innocence.

No, the only way forward is for a kind of rationalism that is fully aware of its own guilt - a rationalism that knows there are no clean hands, and knows that from an ethical point of view it is vacuous, and only has a content in virtue of the memory of something prior to it.

Habermas's swipe at Lebensphilosophie

2009-10-21T12:14:00.000+03:00

Somewhere in the "Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" (Mmm. Modernity as a discourse. Only a discourse? Essentially a discourse? Mmm.) Habermas (as translated into English) refers scathingly to a "hoary Lebensphilosophie". Although it is becoming harder and harder for me to remember what I have read, those two words are as firmly etched onto the tablet of my mind as all those juvenile pop tunes and TV jingles which refuse to be cleansed.

"Hoary Lebensphilosophie." How can anyone be so scathing about an attempt to do justice to the experience of life in philosophy (which, I assmume, is what Lebensphilosophie is all about)? How can anyone be so mistrustful of anything that smacks of life and is obviously not a stepping back from the flux of life to a theoretically constructed (discursively constructed, if you like) point from which the flux can be judged, can be found lacking, can be regrounded and rebuilt on something more stable, on something less life-like?

What I like about Minima Moralia (Adorno's early work) is its attempt to write about morality from a very temporal experience of our historical situation. Not sure that Adorno has a Lebensphilosophie (does he?) but he sees that philosophy (if it is not to delude itself) must appreciate the fact that it is bound by a certain kind of very human and very historical kind of life. Of course Habermas knows that everything is historical, but he seems to assume that within history a shared concern for truth (or validity - let's not split hairs) will make it possible for history to overcome itself - to bracket all other considerations and redirect the previously messy and bloody business of history in a direction that everyone can see is rationally justifiable- eveyone who buys into the discourse of Reason Uber Alles, that is. But if all claims but truth must be bracketed, the result is nihilism. And nihilism effectively opens the door even wider for the most messy and bloody chapters of history.

Ethical buses and the economics of happiness

2009-10-14T12:24:00.001+03:00

Apparently there are social scientists doing very scientific research about what makes people happy. To this end the World Values Survey Association has polled over 350,000 people and gathered together a bank of data that any scientist would be proud of. Apparently this sort of work is being packaged as something that might be called post-economics – work that pushes economics being a narrow fixation on alienating indicators like GDP, the money supply and other bars in the iron cage of reification.

One finding that has come out of the painstaking and costly research into human well-being is that talking to a stranger while traveling on public transport makes people happier. Ian Bullock picked up on this bit of somewhat fluffy science and wrote an interesting article for adbusters.org (a site we were delighted to come across). Most of the article is a refreshingly humorous unscientific account of his attempt to test this thesis for himself while traveling on local buses. His very personal and statistically insignificant data confirm the earlier findings.

Such findings are laughably unilluminating but the research is interesting insofar as it illustrates the failure of one attempt to go beyond the framework of traditional economics – a failure in the sense that it thinks it is breaking new ground while, in truth, it remains within the very same set of categories that bolster the system that was very nearly brought to its knees in September 2008.

Presumably the train of thought goes a bit like this: there is something brutal and inhumane about contemporary economic reality; economic theory lends support to this by insisting that all the arguments focus on impersonal indicators like the GDP; to go beyond this we ought to bring human happiness into the equation; there need be no sacrifice of scientific rigour because we can gather hard and fast data (and lots of it) about what makes people happy.

There is no denying the importance of human happiness. There is a problem, though, with the utilitarianism that is implicit in this attempt to humanise economics. Unwittingly, Ian Bullock illustrates this perfectly, as he gets on and off Vancouver buses measuring his happiness level on a scale of one to ten and trying various techniques suggested by the social scientists to increase it. Isn’t that what the liberal monads were already envisaged as doing within the market economy? What’s new here? The answer is surely: Nothing.

In rushing to embrace the individual as the missing token of humanity, the post-economists are simply repeating the same crazy oscillation we see elsewhere is society - the insane oscillation between inhumane calculation (e.g. the denial of affordable healthcare) and entertaining pseudo-humanity (e.g. the TV station telling the tear-jerking story of the diseased child and inspiring thousands to give blood). And, again, I don’t want to deny the value of chatting with strangers on the bus, but when we step back and see the bigger picture, does this really get beyond the level of pseudo-humanity? In all probability we will find ourselves chatting to someone on their way to the bank where they will have to beg to save their home from foreclosure. They will be slightly less unhappy when they walk into the bank. But they will still have to beg.

The really daring thing – the thing that would really break the taboos in economics - would be to insist on the need for some kind of ethics. These would be values; not use values or exchange values, but good, old-fashioned ethical values of the sort that Aristotle (and others) would have been proud of.

An alternative picture of Ian Bullock’s bus comes to mind. On a bus I always feel more optimistic about society (and perhaps therefore a tad happier) when I see someone get up to give their seat to someone in greater need. This might or might not make the person losing their seat happy, but it would make the bus a better place. It warms me to see that people still care and still have a sense of propriety (and the act of giving up one’s seat surely involves a mix of both empathy and propriety). Now, these good people surely don’t even begin to try to calculate whether the pleasure gained throught the self-consciousness of virtue outweighs the pain in the legs caused by standing up. They couldn’t. There is a logical hiatus between that kind of utilitarianism and the ethical world of the better bus.

The good bus is one that has shared values that both entrench and demand a concern for others. That concern is a concern for, amongst other things, the happiness of others, but the social order evident in the bus is not one that can be built up on the basis of utilitarian calculation.

In a sense, what needs to be reclaimed is not individual happiness but the idea of a social order – an order dismissed both by liberal economics and utilitarianism – not an order to be ossified and reified, but one that will allow people to be more human than a calculating utilitarian monad.

Gordon Finlayson on Adorno and Habermas

2009-05-25T19:12:00.000+03:00

We were very happy when we found - quite by chance - Gordon Finlayson's blog. It has been a long time and Gordon doubtless no longer remembers us, but we were lucky enough to be present at a party once where Gordon, wearing one of those very Continental-looking striped T-shirts (where the stripes run horizontally and alternate between a very dark blue, if I remember correctly, and white), was playing the guitar, and playing it well. He is now - we gather from the address on his blog - working at the University of Sussex.

What led us to his blog was a link on the Habermasians blog to Gordon's article on the foundations of Critical Theory (published in Telos in Jan 2009). We were keen to read it.
But it is an odd article, though, and we are not sure what to make of it. The last paragraph was a bit disturbing, especially the following sentence:

"Insofar as Habermas, the social theorist, eschews broadly moral reasons as the basis of critical social theory, he stands squarely in the tradition of first generation Frankfurt School critical theory."

I don't think Gordon set out to put Habermas and Adorno in the same bag, but the fact that he ended up doing that makes us less than enthusiastic.

Apparently, the main aim of the piece is to argue that Adorno (forgive me while I identify Adorno with "first generation Frankfurt School critical theory") does not rely on moral grounds when he develops a critical theory that has, amongst other things, clearly moral conclusions. Gordon says there are six reasons why Critical Theory needs to eschew moral grounds:

1 The experience of WWII showed that culture in general and morality in particular failed to provide any resistance to evil.

2 The distinctively moral discourse is a dubious one, being a coercive imposition of reason on sensibility.

3 A morality of principles tends to undermine a person's affective ties to other people and things, giving rise to a cold, authoritarian mentality.

4 In a bad society we can have no (untainted? independent?) conception of the good, which would be central to any moral theory.

To Adorno's own reasons for eschewing a moral foundation, Gordon adds two other considerations.

5 Moral criticism is only really appropriate when criticising deeds for which individuals can be held responsible, but Critical Theory is more concerned with systemic trends that exceed individual responsibility.

6 In a multicultural society with its endemic value pluralism, a (suitably thick) moral theory would be rejected as too parochial.

More important for Gordon is the dilemma that Critical Theory then seems to be faced with. Since Critical Theory has moral conclusions it must have moral foundations, but if it resorts to those it is guilty of a self-contradiction (given the disavowal of a moral theory as a ground).
Isn't that just a little too neat, though? For one thing, the talk of conclusions and grounds fits Adorno's thinking into a mould that just isn't his. Gordon notes Adorno's antipathy to logic, but insists on forcing him into the square holes labelled "ground" and "conclusion". For another thing, there is a certain amount of linguistic juggling going on here. When arguing that Critical Theory has moral "conclusions" Gordon uses one understanding of "moral": "I use the term ‘moral’ here in the broadest sense to refer to the domain of norms and values that relate to and flow from the deepest and most central questions concerning the life, character and actions of social agents, and their relations to the lives, character and actions of others." But when arguing that Critical Theory can and must do without moral grounds, the concept becomes more specific, and is either the principled Moralitat (sorry no umlaut) or the tradition-bound Sittlichkeit.

Ending his reconstruction of Adorno's position, Gordon says Adorno leaves his conclusions unsupported by anything other than the description of our historical situation, which is meant to make it clear why a "healthy" set of moral/ethical/normative concepts are just not available to us.

Habermas said such a position was unacceptable. Does Gordon agree? Yes, he does. We must have, he implies, a foundation, and it needs to be (for the six reasons given above) non-moral and yet be capable of leading to moral conclusions. Does Habermas come up with the goods? Unfortunately not. The discourse ethic is empty. It abstracts from the language and concerns of the lifeworld, which happens to be the only source of the moral norms and ethical values that might be used to criticise current social practice.

On a different reading, what is genuinely critical in Habermas's work is a "diagnosis of social pathologies", where the pathology can be identified without making any moral judgments. Society is "sick" and in need of a spell in rehab, but it is not morally bad (or at least the logically consistent critic doesn't want to say it is). Does gordon think this is a fruitful line of thinking? He is not convinced. But he is glad to see that, either way, the discourse ethic (which, it turns out, is not really ethical - not in a nice thick sense anyway) and the social pathology approach both involve eschewing moral grounds, which is what Adorno did, and that makes Habermas a good torch bearer for this proud tradition of social critique.

Hmm.

My response in brief (because too much has been written already):

1 Anything that puts Hab and Adorno in the same bag is, prima facie, unpleasant.
2 What Adorno says, the way he says it, and our interest in reading the stuff (despite the tremendous effort required) just don't make sense unless we begin (or find somewhere pretty damn close to the beginning) concerns that have something moral/ethical/normative about them (concerns that certainly fit into the very general concept of "moral" that Gordon postulates, despite concept postulation being anathema in Frankfurt).

3 The insistence on logical consistency and the idea that Adorno might actually be a closet functionalist reduce thinking to theory. Adorno is a great thinker about the limits of rationality - the irrationality of rationality - not because of value pluralism but because of the entwinement of reason with the domination of nature. You get to a point - don't you? - where you see the need (psychological, social, political, historical) to loosen the grip of reason. Reason is put, once more, in the dock, and is found guilty. Of course, we can't just drop reason, because there is no alternative. But we can keep turning reason against itself to recall and keep in mind the injustice being done to the real substrate of life. To insist on the unreflective forms of systematising reason is to insist that the sad story of domination continue (even if the purported aim is to develop a "critique" of society).

4 Do we need grounds? Gordon seems to assume we do. Personally I feel quite happy without them. What I see in the Dialectic of Enlightenment is the best description yet of how fucked up we are. It is a description that chimes with my own sense of being out of joint and my own initial hunch that society went off the rails somewhere down the line. The description includes values - nature being the most prominent - and I can accept such a value-laden description without thinking that a grave abuse of logical propriety is being commited in mixing fact and value; and I accept it without thinking: "Hey, where's the argument for the principle that nature is a value? What's the Reason for thinking that nature is a value? And doesn't science tell us that nature is just a bunch of facts, and how do you get from that to those lofty values?" There is a sense in which questions like this keep us trapped within the circuit of self-agrandising, instrumental rationality. The point, though, is, without giving up on reason and without giving up on the historical project of liberation of which the development of rationality is so much a part, to see that reason risks denying the very real grounds (not premises) of a more fulfilling life and a more rational society.

Leiter on Nietzsche's Skepticism

2009-05-05T11:33:00.001+03:00

Brian Leiter has written a piece about Nietzsche's moral skepticism (and thanks to Unabgeschlossenheit for putting us onto it). It is an odd combination of some very conscientious Nietzsche scholarship, and a lot of theorizing which causes this particular sympathetic reader of Nietzsche to take offense. With some philosophers (I would cite Heidegger or Derrida, since my sympathies are not with them) one tires of reading secondary texts which teeter on the edge of parody as they parrot the pseudo-poeticisms about the clearing, for instance, in order (supposedly) to clear up what Heidegger was on about. One wants someone - someone like Leiter perhaps - to come along and make it plain for us unpoetic types what the hell Heidegger was on about and whether there is actually anything substantial at the core of his thinking or whether it is all just a cry of pain at the absence of God. What one doesn't want, however, is a long academic thesis about whether Heidegger or Nietzsche were skeptics about the existence of moral facts. Rather than clear anything up, that just obscures things further by forcing one set of ideas into a theoretical framework in which they just don't belong.

But let us be scholarly for a moment (despite the unpleasant sensation that that arouses). What is wrong with the talk of moral facts that Leiter uses (and it is not just his discourse, of course)? Perhaps we are not sufficiently familiar with this discourse, and perhaps that is why it strikes us as odd that Leiter can talk so bluntly about moral facts when so much about that talk seems questionable. Leiter does not say that there are moral facts, but the discourse assumes that there might be, and Leiter goes on to reconstruct one possible argument for being skeptical about their existence: the argument from the universal disagreement in the field of moral philosophy.

What would a moral fact be? But that question only makes sense within a larger attempt to understand the phenomenon of morality. What is morality? Leiter's talk of moral facts implies that morality is either a cognition of something objective or simply a projection of the speaker's feelings. This either/or seems to imply that if morality isn't objective then moral talk is just a lot of hot air (with perhaps the further consequence that any moral critique of existing power structures is a priori untenable, which is definitely not what Nietzsche believed).

Let's take objectivity first. Here and there Leiter seems to suggest that objectivity is (or ought to be) as objective as it was for Plato for whom the Ideas are “pure, clear, unmixed—not infected withhuman flesh and color, and a lot of other mortal nonsense”. What we seem to have lost sight of here is the history of our discourse. Unlike Plato we are only too aware of how historical and therefore how opaque our discourse is. We are only too aware that our language is (as it was for Nietzsche) human, all too human. And so there is no way back to a Platonic concept of objectivity (for which language would have to be a perfectly transparent window on the world). Some kind of historical relativism is inevitable. And it's inevitability is evident in Leiter's article, for the way he sets up the problem only makes sense if you begin from an acceptance that the world is what it is for science: either there are facts to be known by one kind of science or there are feelings to be explained by another branch of science, and philosophy presumably decides which phenomena belong in which scientific pigeon hole.

What about feelings? There is something terribly unsubtle in the talk of the projection/expression of feelings that Leiter buys into. Nietzsche has an interesting history of how the bad conscience comes into being. It is a long and tortuous process. This historical and psychological complexity is completely glossed over by the reduction of morality to a projection of feelings. That kind of reductive talk implies (it seems to me) a kind of shrug of the shoulders: I feel this way, but, heck, I guess you feel differently and I guess that's just moral relativism, so let's live and let live. There is a phenomenon here in serious need of a diagnosis, when morality can be talked about with such a shrug of the shoulders; as there is when talk of morality can centre on idle chatter about flaming pussies.

So what of the either/or? For an old Hegelian-Marxist it is tempting to criticize this for being a tad undialiectical. Morality cannot just be feelings, but it cannot just be the stuff Leiter wants to call facts. Instead of the flaming pussy let's take a more pertinent phenomenon: sin. There is no sin without a historically evolved religious discourse maintained by a community that talks of sin and judges the immoral actions of its members, and judges them harshly. But that discourse will cease to have any currency if people do not feel that their actions and those of other are sinful. There is a unity here of history, language, thought and feeling which cannot come into view if we insist at the outset that morality must either be facts or feelings. Those of us who see in theocracy nothing but a dead hand know by its absence how important feeling must be to morality.

Enough on the either/or. Let me comment on why I prefer to read Nietzsche than Mr Leiter. Nietzsche has a burning sense of what is timely. I may disagree with his interpretation of what the epoch needs, but I appreciate that keeness to respond to the historical situation, and respond to it morally (leaving aside for now the difficulty with the word "morality"). We, too, live at a time when there is much of a moral nature to think about. In the West morality is excluded from so much of the public sphere as culture is handed over to commerce. It is almost tempting to talk about this as a form of repression, and then to see the Taliban as the return of the repressed, to whom the response is naked aggression. When thinking about morality, don't we have to begin from some understanding of what morality has become historically - from some understanding of how we (and that is a very historical we) are to narrate that history - and from some response to the present crisis? Philosophy, on this reading, does not begin from wonder (and certainly not from idle academic curiosity) but from a sense of unease - a sense that society is not a whole of which we are contented parts, but rather that it is fragmented. Philosophy should at least help us to delineate the lines of that fragmentation insofar as this touches on the most basic categories of our thinking, even if it cannot come up with a blueprint for a happier whole. However much I disagree with the details, I appreciate that this what Nietzsche addresses. He does criticize a Platonic theory of value, but not because it is a nice topic for an academic paper, but because it is a necessary prelude to a critique of a social self-delusion - a delusion bound up with a negation of what we feel (of what we FEEL) ought to be affirmed.

To put it another way. I like moral thinking to be not just thinking about morality but thinking that is itself moral - thinking that aims to be an intervention with moral purport in a situation (like ours) that cries out for a moral response. In such a context it strikes me that idle talk of flaming pussies is reprehensible.

Anti-Humanism? A Response to Reiner Schurman

2009-05-04T14:54:00.001+03:00

A long time ago (we forget when, and we stupidly did not keep a note) Reiner Schurman wrote an article entitled "Anti-Humanism: Reflections of the Turn Towards the Post-Modern Epoch." In it he purported to see in philosophy the signs of a move to a new epoch in which the human subject is no longer at the centre. Prior to this there was a "humanistic epochal economy" as Schurman calls it, but the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger (the three he focuses on in the article) signal its expiration. Beneath the title of the article, a quote from Foucault's "Order of Things" sums up the main idea: "Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

The primary idea which has had its day is that of the subject as a point of origin. Epistemologically, the humanist idea is evident both in Plato and Descartes for whom knowledge can be based on clear and distinct ideas available to the private reflection of the subject. For the antihumanist, knowledge rests on a historically shifting order of things - a transient order that the individual is subject to, not the origin of.

A similar shift occurs in the conception of the practical subject. As Schurman puts it, the individual "even less appears as history-making, as a person responsible for his doings, as the initiator of a new order of things - in one phrase, as a moral agent."

Now there is definitely a shift in philosophy away from transcendental subjectivity, but to lump Marx and Nietzsche and Heidegger in the same bag and call them anti-humanists is just too much to swallow. Take Marx: one of the key quotes Schurman relies upon includes the following comment about the proletariat being a class which "suffers the total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity." Clearly, when Marx criticises idealist notions of human subjectivity he does so for the sake of developing a theory to assist the redemption of humanity. Hardly anti-humanism.

Similarly with Nietzsche. On Schurman's reading, Nietsche affirms "the radical fluidity of inorganic, organic, social and cultural forces, all treated as equal so long as one of them does not impose its temporary order upon the others." He makes it sound as if for Nietzsche human being dissolves completely into a play of forces. Schurman's reading comes across as decidedly partial. Admittedly, Neitzsche does recall feeling himself to be "6,000 feet beyond man and time" (while out walking in the countryside in 1881) but he also writes about a new type of man - and Zarathustra is meant to be the paragon. As he puts it a few pages after the quote that Schurman lifts from Ecce Homo: he holds up "the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman - for example when it contronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solenmity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody - and in spite of all of this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousnes really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins."
Is there not an opposition to a certain kind - certain kinds - of man in the name of...in the name of a better kind of man? This is blotted out completely by the term "anti-humanism".

What irritates most of all is Schurman's apathy - his quiescent fatalism. He refers back to the Stoics in glowing terms as if the post-modern anti-humanists manifest the same wise equanimity. He also says that understanding "always comes ... once the battle is over. What gives rise to thinking thus totally escapes our grips." "Totally." Now this might be true of Heidegger, but surely not Marx and Nietzsche. Nietzsche writes at great length about the genealogy of morals - about the historically mediated psychology behind the most prominent ideas in religion, philosophy and morality. These are couched as views (perspectives) and therefore partial - ideas that express their own psychology - but ones that grasp something or at least hope to come to some kind of grip with the past in order to have a more confident attitude towards the present and the future. And there is a struggle here - hardly equanimity - one that arises out of a disgust with the present and a concern for the future. Similar traits are evident in Marx, although the focus is on property relations and the commodity form instead of psychology. And if Marx ends up being something of an economic determinist it is only because he thinks he can see a crisis brewing, which hardly amounts to equanimity.

All in all, I find the idea of a general turn to anti-humanism unilluminating. Pronouncing the death of man is a cute way to follow Nietzsche's pronouncement of the death of God, but it strikes me as an unhelpful way of characterising attempts to treat the human situation more truthfully.

For the sake of pity: Why read Nietzsche?

2009-04-27T16:10:00.000+03:00

There was a time when I could not stomach Nietzsche at all, but lately I want to read nothing else but Nietzsche (with the possible exception of Stendhal, and that only because I wanted to see if Nietzsche's glowing comments were justified - and they were).

Anyone who believes that our overriding moral obligation is to help the poor, the homeless, the refugees, the malnourished, the diseased, etc, etc MUST read Nietzsche. This is not to say that the morality of pity is defenseless; but it deserves to be challenged. Nietzsche suggests we look backwards at the genealogy of this morality and forwards to what it aims at.

As far as the aim is concerned, where is all this pity heading? Are we just trying to make sure that everyone is comfortable, with a warm meal and a bed and a TV and no sound of gunfire in the vicinity? But obviously it is not enough for those of us who pity to be content with their comfort, their warm meal, their bed, their TV and the absence of gunfire. No, we want there to be a crisis somewhere - a crisis that will be a call to action, that will get us up out of our armchairs and out into the streets knocking on doors to raise money for the moral effort. So if we achieved our goal and everyone was warm, comfortable and well-fed and well-entertained, would we be happy? Would we feel better? Or would we feel that something was missing? Are we do-gooders not ever so slightly parasitic - parasites of the poor and needy?

Am I alone in yearning to help others while suffering from a congenital inability to help myself or to help something that we might call "us" (a word - an object - completely alien to me)? Is this not - as Nietzsche suggests - a little decadent?

Learning from the Taliban: a lesson in zeal

2009-04-23T23:03:00.003+03:00

James drew our attention to the news from Pakistan (from a region close to the one we visited in our youth):

Taliban fighters spilling out of the Swat Valley have swept across Buner, a district 60 miles from Islamabad, as Hillary Clinton warned the situation in Pakistan now poses a "mortal threat" to the security of the world.

The US secretary of state told Congress yesterday that Pakistan faced an "existential" threat from Islamist militants. "I think the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists," she said. Any further deterioration in the situation "poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world", she said.
...
In Imam Dheri, the Taliban headquarters near Mingora, a Taliban spokesman, Muslim Khan, told the Guardian their goal was the establishment of an Islamic caliphate first in Pakistan and then across the Muslim world.

"Democracy is a system for European countries. It is not for Muslims," he said. "This is not just about justice. It should be in education, health, economics. Everything should be under sharia." The drive into Buner signals the next step in that strategy. Khan said Taliban fighters were being deployed to ensure sharia law was implemented there too.

Given that Pakistan is a kind of democracy and given that it has been an ally of the West, there is, if not a threat, at least a challenge. To which the response should be...what? Bomb Swat? We disagree. The rise of the Taliban in particular and Islam in general as the Other of the West should first lead to a little soul searching - a little introspection on our part.

There was an interesting documentary this afternoon on Press TV (a station which could have been called The Voice of Tehran, but wasn't). It showed the lives of a handful of young Muslim women in Sweden, looking especially at the difficulties they face being Muslim in a non-Muslim society. Perhaps this tiny sample was completely unrepresentative, but what was striking was the sharp contrast between strong Muslim women, on the one hand, who insisted on their firm beliefs despite the almost constant barage of unfavourable comments and, on the other hand, the terribly flabbly looking Swedes who didn't seem to have much of anything to believe in or insist upon. Far from being oppressive, the hijab was something that made these already strong women feel even stronger. The zeal in their voices and the sparks from their eyes as they talked about the significance of this otherwise flimsy square of fabric was something to behold.

Those women are not the Taliban, but they are both aspects - the one armed, the other unarmed - of the rise of Islam as a global counterforce.

But a counter to what? To democracy? The Guardian report unfortunately does not give me enough of Clinton's comments to know what the perceived object of the threat is exactly. Regardless of what she thinks, though, it is surely a fact that there is not much in the West, beside the sheer force of high-tech weaponry, to oppose.

Another image: The US military hiring shopping space in a busy mall to set up what is in essence an amusement arcade equipped to create the most dramatic war-gaming experience a kid with a Playstation could ever dream of. And this is supposed to be cutting-edge military recruitment. War is a thrill. War is adrenaline. War is power. Power is pleasure. The dubious equations follow one after the other, but they don't amount to anything that anyone with a mental age of more than 13 could seriously believe in, and stand up and eloquently defend in the face of criticism in the way that those Swedish Muslim women stood up and eloquently defended their insistence that the appearance, the sexuality, of a woman should not be a public issue.

Before we start shooting we need to think a little more about what we have lost - about how awfully flabby we have become. There is surely a case to be made for an intelligent and commited kind of moderatism - a firm belief in a separation of powers, and the constitution and the rule of law, etc. But there are times (like today) when it seems that that is not what we have. Instead we have this dreadfully adipose hedonism, which doesn't even deserve to be described using a term ending in -ism since that implies an ideology, which is nowhere to be seen.

Nietzsche - that great philosopher of anti-Facism - drew an enlightening distinction between weaker reactive cultures and stronger active ones. The West increasingly appears to be the weak reactive global player, only gaining strength by creating a media panic about an axis of evil. The Islamic world seems much les reactive. It has its faith, which the people would insist on and be inspired by even if Muslim families were not being blown up by unmanned aircraft controlled at a safe distance by timid post-Nintendo GIs. The Muslim is fired by ideas and beliefs that could be spread to others. What puts the fire in us that we could spread it to others. Wellness? Relaxation self-help techniques? A conscientious approach to dentistry? Hip-hop?

No, before we start shooting the misguided zealots of Swat we need to think long and hard about how there can be a cultural/ethical/moral/political renaissance in the West. Things have to be changed. Those who talk of dumbing down are not wide of the mark. But how are we to smarten up? I don't know, but I appreciate the way our zealous Muslim brothers and sisters are unwittingly making this a burning issue. A new standard is being set. Instead of trying to shoot it down, we need to rise up to it.

The IKEA test of the free spirit

2009-04-23T23:00:00.000+03:00

Non-Europeans unfamilar with the IKEA phenomenon will need some background: IKEA is a Swedish manufacturing giant that no has huge warehouses outside every major European city (or so it seems). Hence my mother in a small town in northern England now has exactly (EXACTLY) the same furniture as a Greek family living in a suburb of Thessaloniki in northern Greece.

I went to IKEA. It was painful. I couldn't eat any of the traditional Swedish meatballs they were serving (because the idea is that you don't just go to IKEA to buy cheap flat-pack furniture - it is meant to be pretty much a day out for the family, hence the children's play area and the traditional Swedish meatballs).

What sprung to mind was the IKEA test of the free spirit (for readers of Nietzsche who might be wondering if they are, or are not, free spirits). To take the test you have to need furniture and really want to get it at the lowest possible price. You then go to IKEA, where there is such an abundance of cheap furniture (all so clevely flat-packed that it is virtually possible to furnish an entire dining room for a family of five with stuff that can be fitted into a small hatchback on a single run). And then you must see how you feel. Those who pass the test are those who genuinely feel an achingly deep nausea as horrible images of that Munchean scream come to mind again - a screaming figure on a bridge (as I recall) - a bridge to...nowhere?

The tyranny of the focus group

2009-03-31T12:35:00.000+03:00

Recently we met a rather naive woman weeping over the fate of her book. She had got a contract to write a book of educational materials, and she had assumed that she had won the contract by virtue of her strong opinions about what would make a good book. She had a lot of experience in the field, she had thought long and hard about the room for improvement in this particular area, and felt she knew very well what would make a really good book. Her book would be different from all the other books in that particular market, which were all, to a greater or lesser degree, bad.

Then she found out that the plans for the book and the sample chapter had to be given to a series of focus groups - groups of teachers, ordinary teachers with no particular expertise, but teachers representing the vast majority of the market for the book. The feedback was not all positive. Changes had to be made. The book had to become more like all the other books on the market. It had to become more like what was already familiar.

The weeping author was dismayed. She had assumed that the publisher would organize a campaign to persuade potential buyers that this new kind of book was better and should be preferred over the familiar but inferior stuff. Clearly this would spark a debate about the pros and cons of different kinds of books. But it turned out that there was to be no debate and no attempt at persuasion. The focus group would decide, and there could be no questioning of the anxieties, prejudices and narrow-minded ideas that doubtless underlay their decision.

Between sobs she described her previous conviction that the free market in goods could also be a free market in ideas and a free market in values - what better context for the most persuasive ideas about the Good to rise up and hold sway? But if companies are always looking for the lowest common denominator, there is little hope for the Good. After seeing first hand that sales are everything and that nothing else really matters she has become so bitter that she now doubts the very idea of democracy. The Good, it seems to her now, is something that will be grasped first by the few, by a kind of cultural aristocracy, who must have the means to convince the many. This shopkeeper's daughter - more familiar with plastic spoons than silver ones - is now wondering how there could be a revival of that cultural aristocracy - a revival of Culture itself, perhaps.

Socialising the losses

2009-03-20T21:54:00.004+02:00

We just can't seem to concentrate on our rereading of Nietzsche's "The Genealogy of Morals", which we'd been planning on doing since Christmas. Partly it is the continuing sense that the world is on a historic brink and we just can't find the kind of Taoist inner calm to give our minds entirely over to a very difficult text from the 19th century. There are too many troubling things like Credit Default Swaps, which we still can't fathom out - things that are a real thorn in the flesh. It seems imperative to understand what Credit Default Swaps are, and what the other derivatives (derivatives of what?) might be, and how it could come to be that the value of all those derivates exceeds the total earnings of everyone on the planet. It seems that over the last decade, while we were tending our hillside vegetable plot and sleepily reading Rousseau's "Confessions" in the evenings, Finance was taking off in a historically unprecedented way and we were completely unaware of it until something hit the proverbial fan.

We've already mentioned the video Money as Debt, which was a real eye-opener and set a convincing agenda for monetary reform, and today, while trying to find out about Quantitative Easing, of which the BBC and Al Jazeera are full at the moment, we came across an oddly heart-warming blog - "oddly" because this is the blog of a trader who seems to have been led by a careful consideration of the numbers (which just don't add up any longer) to the conclusion that the free market needs a radical rethink, beginning with the banks and the money supply. Nathan Martin seems like a very sound chap.

Nathan has some charts. Some of them (because they touch on our evaporated pension funds) are too shocking for us to look at. But there is one that we would like to reprint here. It is a chart of the reserves held by banks. Now a sensible chap would assume that banks would actually have to keep quite a lot of money in the vault, and certainly not lend out more money than they have (although a sensible chap who has had a chat with a few bankers might end up thinking that maybe it's okay for banks to lend out - say - 10 times the amount of money they keep in the vault, as long as they do actually keep that tenth safe and sound). Am I just stupid, or does it not seem right if regular chaps are borrowing money to buy cars and houses and suchlike from insitutions that actually don't have a dime?

Did Marx foresee all of this, or was he so focused on the extraction of surplus value from the sweat of the worker that he paid insufficient attention to the way the whole show ended up being run for the benefit of the banks?

It is all so difficult to understand, though. We find ourselves scratching our heads like idiots and wishing we had studied some economics alongside our philosophy instead of spending so much time pouring over half-understood early 19th century German poetry. For one thing: If banks create 97% of the money out of thin air when they give loans, why does there seem to be so much pain when things go wrong? They never had the wealth in the first place, so they haven't really lost anything, have they? If the deposits of regular savers are such a small part of banking business, why can't the government just guarantee all those deposits and let the banks fail? And with the sub-prime people, why not just cancel the debts and let them keep their houses? There seems to be a choice between cancelling the debt (hitting the banks and other lenders, i.e. the culprits) and the government taking on the debt to relieve the banks (which effectively passes the debts to the tax payer, i.e. the victim). If that is the choice, surely it is better to let the banks take the hit.

Maybe we are just naive, but we want to see Obama set the tone for things by nationalizing savings and pensions, and closing the rest of the financial services sector down. A run on Wall St? Ban share trading and turn all shares into stakes in a state pension system, and offer companies loans of state-printed money in place of the funds raised by the sale of shares. The companies don't want to be hamstrung? Hey, that's not being hamstrung; that's democratic accountability. Pie in the sky?

Nathan reminded us of a nice commentary on the right-wing criticism that current government intervention smacks too much of socialism. What the government is doing, though, is socializing the losses, spreading the debts of the rich across the rest of the populus; during the good times, by contrast, the profits remain private.

Globalization or genuine economic and social development?

2009-03-17T12:05:00.001+02:00

Please excuse the vagueness, but I dimly remember some fairly recent developments in the fishing business off the west coast of Africa. Let me sketch in the outlines of the story: for millennia families with small, home-made wooden boats fished the seas off the west African coast in a sustainable way, then a few decades ago huge trawlers from foreign ports started sweeping the coastline and taking a massive proportion of the fish stocks - stocks that were depleted to such an extent that the relevant authority (we forget which) had no choice but to ban foreign trawlers and pass a law allowing fishing only from the traditional small boats.

The reasons in this case were partly ecological but also partly an expression of the self-interest of business (because there can be no fishing business - either modern and globalized or sustainable and traditional - without fish). The point that we want to make is this: Why think that either ecology or this simplest form of business self-interest are the only reasons for putting the brakes on globalization and looking for some alternative form of development? The policy on the west African coast was great for the local population and fantastic for the economic autonomy (or let's just call it the autonomy) of the region. Are these not also extremely good reasons for putting on the brakes? Seeing the community in this part of west Africa flourishing, do you not see a reason for questioning the kind of globalization represented by the foreign trawlers?

Part of the resistance to this idea seems to come from an odd dynamic in the discourse of globalization itself - the way it has built into it a belief in both a technological imperative and what might be called an arithmetic fetish (the conviction that more or faster must be better than less or slower). Globalization of a certain sort (big foreign trawlers, in this case, and because they are much, much bigger and much, much more effective at catching fish, it goes without saying that they are - in a supposedly absolute sense - better) is identified with progress, and everyone wants progress, don't they? It just seems so self-evident that business must become big business, and that big business must become even bigger. Is this not progress? Is this not unquestionably good?

Another example: Opel in Germany. Opel make cars, a lot of cars, and they are a big player in the German economy. Some ridiculous percentage of the German economy revolves around the manufacture of cars (including all the associated car-related businesses). It's not just Opel, but Opel is one of the biggest. Entire German towns (one of which is Bochum) have grown up around Opel factories and depend on the continued existence of the business. Doubtless hundreds, if not thousands, of German youngsters go to technical schools in the hope that they will one day be able to find work with Opel.

Once upon a time Opel was bought by General Motors, whose headquarters, apparently, is on the 30-something floor of a tower in Detroit. In the midst of the crisis, the workers (and their bosses) in Germany hear that the board of directors in Detroit is thinking of closing the German operation down. Some of those at Opel argue that it makes no sense. It obviously looks different from Detroit.

Can it be right that the future of such an important part of the German economy is decided by a handful of guys enjoying the view from the top of a steel and glass tower in Detroit? Although there is a lot to be said for foreign investment (injecting capital into an economy that lacks it), there is something very dubious about investors then controlling the fate of entire communities - and controlling it without any meaningful accountability (because it seems that our wonderful form of globalization does not require the guys from Detroit to travel to Bochum and persuade everyone there that they must give up their jobs. Where is the justification for allowing a tiny group of people to have greater and greater control of larger and larger parts of foreign markets (and markets mean jobs, which mean communities)? This justification is especially difficult to grasp if we bear in mind the extent to which a company like GM was depending on things like the infrastructure in Germany and the local educational system to provide skilled workers and the health care system to keep them fit and healthy - all paid for, presumably, not by GM but by German tax payers.

I find myself looking for the most dubious assumption behind all of this. What is it? Is this the really dubious assumption: Only if we allow the unbridled pursuit of profit, will the economy develop? Now for that not to be an empty tautology about the accumulation of profit, it must mean the following: Only if we allow the unbridled pursuit of profit, will people's needs for goods be satisfied. (This is the message we were fed so often during the Cold War with footage of empty East European shelves, implying that only the free market can come up with the goods.) Isn't this a very, very dubious assumption? The trawlers (they may have been Spanish - forgive my terrible memory and laziness in checking the facts) off the coast of Africa did not improve the supply of fish to the local African market. And I wonder if GM's purchase of Opel all those years ago did anything to improve the manufacture of cars. Did more people get better cars as a result of it (assuming more people ought to have cars, which is itself a dubious assumption and unfortunately one whose serious discussion is discouraged by the principle of the free market that consumers will decide such things, not citizens through debate and democratic decision-making)?

This might be old socialist pie in the sky, but the opposite might sometimes be the case. If a car manufacturer did not have to worry so much about making a profit and fending off hostile take-over bids, it might be able to develop a better kind of car. I seem to remember reading a scurrilous article about a prototype of an electric car by Ford that was scrapped perhaps because it was too reliable and too easy to maintain (so that there would be little or no profit to be made from spare parts and frequent maintainance). By easing off the profit neurosis, the phenomenon of built-in obsolecence could be ended, which would be one good thing.

There is no reason here to make profit into a sin. I have my little book and it would be nice if I could make a profit out of it. I would also like to set up my own little publishing business so that I could publish my book and similar books myself. However, I would find it perfectly reasonable if I was looking, for instance, at publishing opportunities in Nigeria and found that the Nigerian government only allowed me either to lend money to Nigerian businessnes or to sell my expertise, not buy up a massive part of the Nigerian publishing industry. In a similar way, if there is a future in fishing off the west African coast, could the Spanish (instead of sending in the trawlers) not provide credit to local fishermen or sell their know-how so that the locals can improve their techniques (providing that the improved techniques are sustainable)? Even if we limit ourselves to ignorant and bovine economic motives, there are opportunities to make money in this way without, for instance, making a quick profit by scooping up pretty much every fish in the waters off west Africa. In this way, is the development of real and sustainable economies not possible without the expansion of irresponsible foreign ownership and control? Is it not possible to rethink globalization so that it doesn't become synonymous with the growth of a hideous international oligarchy (and it is a terrible contradiction that western democracy is effectively a tool for the growth of such an oligarchy)?

Democratic Banking

2009-03-16T14:44:00.003+02:00

Doubltess everyone else saw Money As Debt years ago. I only got round to seeing it a couple of days ago. Hugely recommended, especially for those, like myself, who are economically illiterate.

We had previously considered it outrageous that our schools did not and do not organize a single meaningful classroom activity on our great democratic tradition. The same must now be said of money and banking and international finance. If it can be so effectively summed up in a 47 minute cartoon, it ought to be compulsory viewing for every 18-year-old still in full-time education.

The conclusion we draw is that monetary reform is imperative. The picture (which may or may not be quite accurate - we are not in a position to say) of a financial system dependent on an ever-expanding debt that can NEVER in principle be repaid is just as disturbing as the rape of the planet.

Our working hypothesis, while we hurriedly follow up some of Paul's interesting footnotes, is that the banks must all be nationalized and that banking must become politically/ethically/socially concerned. The idea that banking is a business that must be allowed to go its own sweet way while it wreaks havoc with our prospects for a pension so that we will probably now have to go on working until we drop dead at the lathe - this idea must be publicly vilified. We are surprised that in all the articles we previously read about democratic theory we never came across an injunction to democratize the banks (and democratization surely presupposes nationalization). It just seems glaringly obvious that the state (or state controled organisations) should issue the loans, and issue them WITHOUT interest (bring back the sin of usury, if necessary). Of course we have heard before that the state cannot be trusted. Now it is clear, though, that the banks certainly cannot be trusted. And if the state cannot be trusted, then democracy cannot be trusted, in which case let's scrap the charade of voting. No, we think the state can be trusted, but we feel that this presupposes not the rise of the technocrats (the Bernanke's of this world) but putting a stop to the anti-democratic dumbing down of the populus.

Of course the crisis ought to be a great opportunity for some radical change, now that there is no ignoring the political, social significance of the economy. What is almost as depressing as the loss of one's pension, however, are the signs that nothing essentially will change - everything will be geared to getting us back to the unethical, undemocratic, depressing and alienating mess we were in before.

Media Impartiality: the Polite Nihilism of the BBC

2009-03-15T23:53:00.002+02:00

Two things cropped up recently which raised the issue of impartiality and made us question this extremely dubious value (the second we will leave for another post). One was the BBC's refusal to broadcast the charity appeal for the victims in the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath one of the editors of Spiked.com (which we had previously considered a thinking person's source of commentary in the few times we had come across it) was on Iranian TV (Press TV - the voice of Iran in English, and one of the few English language channels we can get on our satellite service) lambasting critics of the BBC who had been urging the BBC to take a stance and side with the Palestinians. The BBC must remain impartial, he said. The media, (in its editorial line? in choosing its mix of programming? in each individual programme? insofar as it purports to provide that hallowed thing called "the news"?) should remain impartial.

To some extent, impartiality has its attractions. One wouldn't want the sort of media which (apparently) Lebanon has. From what we gather each channel there is tied to a particular party, and can only be expected to toe the party line. (But is the problem here the mere attachment of a media channel to a social movement, or is the problem the narrowness, the unpleasantness, the pig-headedness and the lack of generosity of that social movement?).

But what is wrong with impartiality in the media? Isn't there something oddly empty about the concept of impartiality? Is there anything in impartiality to get excited about - something one really might want to defend, to promote? The negativity of impartiality is clear - we don't want to slip into a Lebanese situation. But what is the positive content of impartiality? Is there any?

In practice, does this discourse of impartiality connect with anything that actually matters to us?
I have just watched a programme on the staunchly impartial BBC, a documentary about the arms dealer Viktor Bout. The programme bore signs of trying to remain, to some extent, impartial. Russia, Britain, the US and other countries were mentioned, and there was no obvious attempt to besmirch the name of any of the countries involved. Bout is Russian and was obviously protected and aided by the Russian establishment, but nothing was made of this in the programme. Bout was also employed at one time by the British and at another time by the US, but this was mentioned in passing. The programme did not bash the British or the Americans. Were these things glossed over in the name of impartiality?

What was striking about the Bout documentary was the way it focussed entirely upon Bout as an individual - the so-called Merchant of Death, and entrepreneur without a conscience - and the way it then devoted so much time to telling and reconstructing the gripping story of how the man was tracked down and finally caught by a US team in Bankok. Was it impartiality that demanded this focus on the story of Bout as a wicked individual? Of course there was no impartiality with respect to Bout. Everyone on the programme agreed he was a man without a conscience who would sell arms wherever there was the money or the diamonds to pay for them. No time was devoted to the view of Bout as a victim or a pawn in a larger game. Was it out of a desire for impartiality that we got this very personal, this very partial view of Bout as the Merchant (the sole merchant working on his own initiative) of Death? Is this kind of partiality acceptable because it is so obviously the product of a media team doing its best to be impartial?

The Bout documentary is a perfect example of what the hailed value of impartiality means in practice. It means not rocking the boat. By construing Bout's story as the story of an evil individual - a story that appears to come to a complete end with his imprisonment - the programme avoids any of the boat-rocking that would have been involved in following up the Russian connection and the the business of Bout being employed by the British and the US after he was on record as someone acting in breach of international law (breaking arms embargos, money laundering, etc). There is also the phenomenon of the arms industry. Arms manufacturers sold arms to Bout. Who were they? Were one or two of them in NATO countries - countries supposedly unsullied by ties to the axis of evil? Some or all of these darker questions must have occured to the programme makers, but the decision was obviously taken to avoid them so as...so as not to rock the boat.

A provisional conclusion: impartiality is defended so loudly to stop journalists feeling guilty for having glossed over so much that ought to have been brought to light, and to stop them feeling guilty about just doing their job (finding something pleasant to fill the gap between adverts). But behind the earnest talk about impartiality is not only the guilt of individuals but also corporate self-interest: boat-rocking would not chime well with advertisers (all of whom have a vested interested in leaving the boat unrocked). Personalised dramas (like the Bout documentary) that do not raise thorny issues about the social system make good sense from a business point of view.

So what is there to object to here? Is it a lack of truth? It cannot be. The Bout documentary, let's assume, told no lies during the 25 or 30 minutes alloted to it. The documentary did not tell the whole truth, but there was never any possibility of it doing so in such a short space of time. Truth cannot be the issue here. The BBC, we might assume, takes care to fill its schedule coveying information that has been checked for accuracy. And in all of this no party line is being toed. It is all truth (for the sake of argument) and it is all impartial (again, for the sake of argument).

The problem does not concern truth, it concerns power and ethics. The impartial avoidance of boat rocking places the present system of power and social control beyond criticism prior to any investigation. The exclamation: "I am impartial" means "I do not judge; I do not criticise." But what if our particular boat deserves to be rocked? In that case, does impartiality not start to lose the moral high ground?

There is an ethical imperative (let's call it that) to rock this particular boat. If there is something ethically questionable about the status quo (as there is with the arms industry and the whole business of fomenting and perpetuating international tensions, for instance) then there is nothing to be gained ethically/morally by espousing impartiality. Do you not agree that there is something questionable here? If so, you see an imperative not to be impartial.

How about a provisional sketch of the virtuous journalist? She is first and foremost a woman of convictions (far from the impartial man who is proud of apparently having no convictions), who sees that there are urgent issues that need to be dealt with, and who sees that there are things which are being covered up that ought to be brought into the clear light of public scrutiny. It is no good just being interested in the Truth. The truth is everywhere. The virtuous journalist hates deception, but she is not a lover of the Truth. She is engaged by the contemporary situation and the way deception becomes a force to perpetuate injustice (assuming injustice is the thorn in the flesh of this particular journalist). As well as being engaged by everything that is dubious in the status quo, the virtuous journalist has a keen sense of responsibility to the public, or (looking at it slightly differently) has a keen sense of her role in raising the level of public debate in our as yet infant democracy. Again, what is at issue is not so much the Truth but the public's ability to comprehend more of what shapes their lives, and their ability to make intelligent judgments. Just as uncovering deception involves an engagement with power, the contribution to the public debate touches on the issue of power - the power of the people in a democracy to genuinely shape their world. The virtuous journalist hates to see the public being bombarded with masses and masses of disconnected newbites that mystify rather than illuminate.

But perhaps the Viktor Bout documentary was a bad example. Let's look at another. I can imagine a spokesperson for the BBC reminding us that Stephen Sackur has his Hard Talk programme. Now there is a man who can often seem to rock the boat, and rock it while remaining absolutely impartial (perhaps the metaphor needs altering so that there are many boats and Stephen rocks each of them equally). One week Stephen will be interviewing a Zionist, and will be insisting on answers to the hardest questions about Israel's flouting of international law, for instance; and the following week he will be interviewing a Palestinian spokesperson, demanding with equal vigor an answer as to why the faction will not recognise the state of Israel. There is no pussy-footing around on Hard Talk. Stephen does look for the hardest questions and he insists on answers with a steely look in his eye, although the discussion always ends with an apparently warm hand shake. Is this not an example of impartiality in the media at its best?
Hard Talk is a good example of what passes for impartiality, but it is also an example of how this ends up being all but indistinguishable from nihilism. Stephen has all the air of a man who is earnest about the Truth. But he is only allowed to ask the questions. They are the hard questions, admittedly, but they are only questions. All the answers come from those being interrogated. One week the Zionist is given a platform and appears to be able to justify bombing a thousand Palestinians and seems to eloquently justify the idea that all of Palestine belongs to the children of the twelve tribes; the following week the Palestinians seem to be equally able to justify firing rockets into Israel and equally eloquent in defending their right to the land they occupied before it was handed by foreign powers to the Zionists. The effect of this in the long term is the exact opposite of Stephen's incisive questioning. Although with the incisive question Stephen seems to grab hold of the side of the boat (in readiness to give it a good rocking?), in the long term the inescapable conclusion is that there is no authoritative way of judging what ought to be done. Although the guests are allowed to make the most noise, it is Stephen's silence that ends up being the most notable. Stephen refrains from judging. All the other "impartial" programmes do likewise.

The media constitute not just one public space but THE public space in contemporary society. In this context the stance of Stephen and his colleagues takes on an epistemo-political significance. The message goes out that there are no values that we can come to rest on publicly, apart from the implied ones of maintaining a certain level of politeness, of being willing to shake the hand of anyone no matter how much blood is on it, and of always resisting the temptation to remove your shoes and throw them at someone. One must always be polite and one must always let the other chap have his say, but one must never be deluded that one's own criticism (if one is still capable of developing a critical position of any sophistication) will be anything other than just another futile point of view. This is the polite moral nihilism propagated by the BBC.

The upshot of this is that defenders of journalistic impartiality cannot be allowed to end the debate with their appeal either to impartiality or the Truth. Since in practice the pursuit of impartiality seems to involve avoiding anything that would rock the boat, they need to have a good reason for not rocking the boat. But how could they develop that argument and still remain impartial? And they need to have an argument as to why the media should continue to sap the public's ability to make intelligent judgments about the most important social developments. They need to have an argument to justify spreading the sort of polite nihilism spread so ably by the BBC.

Habermas's deafness to the call of pop

2009-03-12T13:17:00.001+02:00

We tore a few chapters out of the Philosophical Discourses of Modernity and we promise to re-read them (our bags were already close to the 20kg limit and Habermas's hardback book was heavy) but in the meantime the same old thoughts keep floating into view. And they floated again just now as we were watching the Polish channel 4 Fun TV while eating our museli (because hearing about the latest wave of suicide bombings doesn't seem to aid the digestion of one's breakfast). And there was a new (to us) video of a song by Morandi (nationality unknown - never heard of them) entitled Save Me. Well photographed shots of young adults in work situations looking as if life is meaningless. People wanting to be saved. And the song is clear about how they are to be saved. Romance. If you are a boy, the apparent lack of meaning will evaporate - it seems - when the girl next door or the girl in the office or the girl in the field (a lot of the video is shot in a sunny wheat field) finally says "Yes".

It surprises us that less is said about the way the youth have this message drummed into them with an even greater idiotic frequency than the youth in North Korea are made to march in unison.

It also seems to us that Habermas should have watched more of this stuff while he was eating his museli. Maybe it would have made him think a little more about communicative action and about communication generally.

Long before young people get to the point where they have the education and the intellectual maturity to meaningfully participate in the kind of rigorously rational debate that Habermas thinks should govern social life they will have watched thousands of hours of pop videos - pop videos that communicate a message - a message which is immensely effective despite being crass, banal and just plain misleading.

There is very little variety in the message. At the risk of stating the glaringly obvious, we will sum them up. Firstly, The Save Me video is an example of the love song in which an idealised girl/boy announces, "Love (boy-girl stuff) is the Truth, the Way, the Life" - romantic love (consummated, although this is generally left as an implication) is the Saviour. Secondly, there are the ego-tripping songs typified by rappers that objectify everything and praise only themselves and their possessions. Thirdly, there is the angry nihilism of rock where the ego is subsumed in a wave of hate and aggression. Finally, and this is probably the most important message, and one that probably underlies all the others, there is the deification of music itself. By chance, before we had a chance to finish our museli this morning 4 Fun TV played the Guru Josh Project video again - a piece with a DJ turned composer with a synthesizer and a saxophone solo and the words, "Trust in me and you will find infinity" - "me" being the music itself. Music says that only it can fill the gaps in reality. Music itself redeems, which implies that music itself is enough.

After a few thousand very carefully crafted pop videos it is difficult to ignore these messages - these semi-discursive forms of communication. Does this not constitute an immensely powerful force preventing the emergence of the kind of communicative action that Habermas was arguing for?

For Habermas's communicative action to finally take center stage (because up to now it has been in the depths of the wings) a culture would have to emerge for which Rational Truth is the highest social value. That great will to Truth would finally have to become hegemonic. Assuming that this is indeed desirable, the question is: How is it to be accomplished? It certainly won't be accomplished if the sentimental education of the youth is left to the culture industry. But How? In other words, how can the youth be persuaded to kill the DJ?

Habermas needed a theory of music. How does the call of reason chime with the call of music, including the call of pop? Habermas just seemed to dismiss pop, presumably because it is so banal. But there can be no doubt that pop is a massive force to be reckoned with. The Taliban outlawed it. That doesn't seem to be an option for us. But something needs to be done. What?

Web design and the wolverine

2009-03-12T13:12:00.001+02:00

It has been a long time since the last post. The reasons: a waning of the force that through the green fuse ... (Dylan "do not go gentle into that good night" Thomas) brought on partly by the sudden professional setback. Prior to September it seemed we hd a great future as a writer of multiple choice questions for secondary school pupils. The first book was already in the shops and plans were underway for a second to make it into a mini-series. Then came the crash and news that the publishing company was to close its publishing business in Greece. First there was some hope that the head office in the UK would continue some of the Greek publishing projects. Six months later that little hope has been dashed.

So it becomes harder to get out of bed in the morning, then harder to switch the telly off and do something worthwhile.

But we have not let things slide completely. We may not shave every day, but we manage not to let more than three days go before putting the razor to the stubble. And partly by force of circumstance we have been trying to branch out to find other ways to keep that old wolverine from the door. Since the market for multiple choice questions has collapsed we have had to look for some other niche. Quite by chance we heard from a Cumbria tourism workshop that guest houses in Keswick were not finding it easy to create web sites for themselves at a reasonable price. Well we are not web experts but we do know how to create a few HTML pages that validate and we have had experience over the past year of setting up and promoting a site for self-catering cottages in Cumbria. We don't know about XML or Content Management Systems, but we do know about online booking systems in Cumbria and how to get free photos and logos from the Cumbria Tourism Organisation. And we know how to get onto the first page of the Google search listings. That gives us something to sell, or so we thought. And this is the second reason for the lack of posts. We have been busy setting up our little web design business for Keswick.

Robbie Williams had that song a while back which repeated the phrase "advertising space". Now when we discuss the web in schools the kids are quick to trot out the cliche that the web is all about improving access to information. Of course they are mistaken. The web is all about creating more space for advertising. This is depressing. And it is especially depressing when one finds oneself caught up in the same business (to say we are "caught up" is a little dishonest because we are taking the initiative - no one is prodding us). We have created a page, for instance, to promote guest houses in Keswick, and we are now that we are getting some success in the Google rankings we are trying to sell space on it to guest houses whose own sites are down on pages 18, 19 or 20 in the Google rankings.

As youths we felt very keenly that it was important to keep ourselves fit - fit for the future. We were sure that within our lifetimes there would come a call - a call to like-minded people to rise up and fight to make the world a better place and prove once and for all that Adorno was wrong to say that "progress" over the last 5,000 years has been nothing but the move from the slingshot to the mega-tonne bomb. We made sacrifices. We said "No" to easy pleasures and a life of idleness. We did push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups and went on punishingly long cycle rides. We were careful about our diet - not to look slim and beautiful but to be fit and ready for the call to take our place at the cultural barricades.

We were not keeping ourselves fit and healthy and eternally ready to create advertising space. How did this come to be? Are we to blame? Or was it just the time, the age, the epoch?

The strange twists of life.

Plum Pudding, Communicative Action and the Will to Truth

2009-01-29T14:04:00.003+02:00

Apologies for the absence. Understandable, I hope, given the vaguely festive period maintained by the states still under the influence, albeit vestigial, of the Pauline message (and was it really St Paul who was to blame?). I will not waste space on details of the plum pudding for I know that they hold no interest for you. You are beyond them. In any case, plum puddings deserve to be written about in a certain way to bring out their real value. Since that value is nothing more than a dim memory to us, since it is no longer present for us, we must leave the description of it to others (and for some odd reason the name Garrison Keillor comes to mind - apologies for the spelling).

A sign of how bad we are with plum puddings is that even while pouring the burning brandy over them with the lights dimmed so that the kids gasp and others worry that the tablecloth might catch fire, we are mulling over the theory of communicative action. This is no doubt a sickness. Perhaps it wouldn't appear to be so much of a sickness if any progress were being made developing something that might be called a groundwork for the critique of the said theory. But it is not. Nearly 20 years later we are still treading the same stagnant waters while obsessively mulling over the same doubts and the same half-remembered quotations.

Here they are again:

Wasn't Habermas wrong to make everything revolve around speech? When we leave our hillside retreat we see that there really is too much speech. People talk a hell of a lot. From a Habermassian point of view that ought to be good, were it not for the fact that so much of what is said (and perhaps it reaches a few decimal points beyond 99%) is of zero cognitive value. Werther will tell me that Habermas was aware of this, despite being surrounded mainly by intellectuals and despite shunning music, and mentioned this fact in a little known letter to someone on the other side of the world. Doubtless he did, but the observation seems to me to be fatal for the theory. People generally don't give a toss about the truth. Let's not beat about the bush. The problem being, not a lack of speech, but a lack of thinking. People think so very little. Speech is easier. You do it with friends, and it can be very pleasant to get carried away by the back and forth of the banter, and you find yourself saying things that you really don't believe in just because those are things that need to be said to keep the conversation going in an appropriately chummy way. Did Habermas develop - as a sideline - a theory of banter, of chatter? We vaguely remember Heidegger's disparaging remarks about the "They" (and I have this impression that the they are those who are lost in chatter and banter and chanting and flag waving and other such activities). Of course there are a few clearings in society where people do seem to comport themselves in a more authentically Habermassian way - one thinks of law courts and the academies - but this is not the kind of speech that really keeps the whole social show on the road.

Hence, again, our fondness for Theo. For him, the only way forward was not for more speech, but more thinking. And does thinking not presuppose a certain ambivalence about the value of speech - a certain disinclination to say very much - an inclination to leave the room once the banter really starts to get going?

If Habermas believed that all speech implied, presupposed or in any way hinted at a will to truth or somehow obliged the speaker to damn well pay attention to the truth, he was wrong. Speech is much more about putting an end to loneliness - that terrible sense of isolation when one pulls up the drawbridge and remains alone with one's thoughts. And because so much of speech is chatter, rather than open people up to truth it continually reinforces the linguistic walls that block it out.

That pretty well sums up what we have been thinking about for nearly a month. Not a kind of thinking that breaks new ground, that moves things forward. More treading stagnant waters. There were fragments of other ideas (though, again, nothing new). The idea of the Homo Sapiens, for instance. Who the hell thought that one up? Who threw both logic and common sense to the wind by proposing that because people think (sometimes and badly) they are essentially thinking beings? True, Adorno makes a lot of thinking. More thinking is our only hope, but for Adorno there is no obvious ground for optimism about some global upsurge of thinking. Even we who do think (a little and badly) feel how unnatural the process is. We who have a field and like to potter around in it confess that pruning trees feels more natural than the more laborious cogitation. We really do enjoy pruning. Of course, even as we prune thoughts are humming around us like oddly lethargic but terribly persistent flies. We carry on pruning, though, because it is so much harder to stop and really think about and lay out in some sensible order those humming thoughts - thoughts that hint at truth, at some meaningful beyond, but actually contain so little, if anything, of it.

Another fragment: If Habermas had bought into Adorno's line that thinking is more important than speaking, what would he have done? Would he have tried to argue that we are all obliged to think, and to think about the truth, and that we are guilty of some cerebral pragmatic contradiction if we just carry on mulling over the same old cogitative rubbish instead of really and logically thinking about the matter in hand, developing our thoughts in the most extensive and systematic way possible? Instead of Descartes' dumb assertion: "I think", would he have tried to argue that I - that we - are morally obliged to think, and to think well - to think about the Truth, and to subsequently base our whole being on that? If so, it would have been another pointless exercise.

As a postfestive postscript, how about this for a conjunction? We came across this little quote in a book by Deleuze on Nietzsche (a book given to us ages ago that we have only just got round to reading - and a good read, as it turns out). The quote is from the third section of the Genealogy of Morals, and begins with an odd statement about the meaning of life, but the more interesting bit for us is what he predicts about the fate of the will to truth.

"What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not for this: that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness - there can be no doubt of that - morality [and here Nietzsche seems to be thinking of an austere form of European Christianity] will gradually perish. This is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe - the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles."

On almost the same day we read that, we saw Lilly Allen's latest pop video on the Polish channel 4Fun TV. Lilly's song (called Fear for some reason I can't fathom out yet) is a wonderfully British, and apparently sincere, expression of the silliness of stardom. It has its witty moments, one of which is the line: "I am a weapon of massive consumption."

It is clear that Nietzsche had no inkling whatsoever that the cultural pacemakers of the future would be the likes of Lilly Allen.

Habermas's Shoes

2008-12-19T00:41:00.000+02:00

After seeing the footage of Al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at President Bush, who seemed to be almost smiling, I couldn't help wondering what Habermas would have made of it all. Shoe throwing is certainly not communicative action of the sort that Jurgen analysed at such great length; but then he never intended communicative action to be the only form of moral action. What would Habermas say? Would he say that we should always do what we can to promote dialogue, even if the other side recently decided to bomb your capital city without previously discussing the plan with the citizens and persuading them that it was indeed in their best interests to be bombed? At the time Al-Zaidi took his shoes off Bush was in Iraq and he was talking; a discourse of sorts was going on - a discourse which certainly wasn't improved by the throwing of the shoes. My guess is that this would be the crux for Habermas: as long as there is some kind of dialogue there is both hope and the obligation to continue it, however imperfect it might be. Al-Zaidi should have kept his shoes on and tried a little harder to put his case to the president, even if it had to be somehow distilled into the briefest of questions and even if it meant that he might not be admitted to any future press conferences.

But when so many of your fellow citizens have been killed or maimed or orphaned or turfed out of their property or forced into exile, and the man responsible is opposite you with a wry smile on his face and you feel the anger boiling within you and you expect him to say something dumb like: "Let's discuss this calmly," is it not completely reasonable to take your shoes off and throw them at that ridiculously smiling face? Surely the absence of a moral justification (assuming there isn't one) is no reason to condemn the act. The act is not only an act of violence; it is also an expression of the anger felt by someone who would be moral but who finds himself in a situation where morality is everywhere thwarted. Worse, he finds himself in a situation where the grossest immorality has been packaged and presented as a step forward for democracy, and where the conscientious participation in the little dialogue that is allowed inevitably lends a veneer of justification to the whole bloody episode. The virtuous man is not a man of the mildest emotions. Montaigne was quite right (in his essay on cruelty) that the virtuous man is one who can feel intense anger. In a situation like the one Al-Zaidi found himself in it is to be expected that the anger of the virtuous man will boil over (we are looking for virtuous men, not for saints). And we, as people concerned with the fate of virtue, should lend our support, even though we know that there is no moral justification for the act.

The Poet, Christ, and a Girl Called Pam

2008-12-17T12:17:00.002+02:00

Always on the lookout for torn halves we came across this odd little juxtaposition in a short piece about the eminent British poet John Betjeman. This section begins by emphasising the religious faith of the poet.

"Betjeman longed for unthinking belief, for an end to reflection and doubt:

The church is just the same, though now I know
Fowler of Louth restored it.
Time, bring back
The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.
(Norfolk, 1954)

"This yearning to be overwhelmed by something greater than himself sometimes took physical forms. His poetry often expresses a longing to be mastered by large, athletic women:

Pam, I adore you,
Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl,
Whizzing them over the net, full of the strength of five.
(Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden, 1940)

(Not) Learning to live better on less

2008-12-15T16:24:00.000+02:00

A book that made a massive impression on me was "Living Better on Less". I came across it during the Age of the Yuppie and it played a (small) part in persuading me to take a vow of voluntary poverty - one I have kept.

When the economy really started to fall apart recently I thought: "This is my chance - my chance to write a sequel, perhaps with the title 'Living (Even) Better on (Even) Less.'" For a moment it seemed as if the crisis might prompt a kind of globalised soul-searching and lead to a fundamental change of values, with people not just resentfully trying to get by on a falling income but embracing the idea of actually living better on less, warming to the idea of, for instance, darning a few socks instead of immediately binning them and buying new ones. People, it seemed, would soon find a pleasure in not having to buy so much, and in not having to work so hard to buy so much that just ends up on the scrap heap. With a forced halt to over-consumption, wouldn't people inevitably sit down and rework their old, unthought assumptions about the Good Life?

But I have just heard on the BBC world business report that HMV reports that although its book sales are declining, the meltdown has had no effect whatsoever on sales of electronic games. Figures are also out from Play.com, which, apparently, is reporting that this will be its best festive season ever for sales. With this my hopes are dashed. Global soul searching and the hoped-for rethink of the Good Life would require a little more reading (not much, but enough to give booksellers a bit of a lift in these hard times). Instead, people are flocking to the bright, pixel-lit world of digital distraction to take their mind off things while the economy bottoms out.

Conclusion: Nothing will change and I will be wasting my time writing the above-mentioned sequel.

Unfortunately I do not remember any of the poem by Holderlin except the fragment "von Klippe zu Klippe", which appears in his description of a terrible waterfall cascading down a hillside and crashing horribly from one rocky ledge to another (if I remember the image correctly). What a perfect depiction of our failure to learn absolutely anything whatsoever from mistakes made in the past.

Confession of a Sickly Lad

2008-12-15T15:25:00.002+02:00

Why were we never encouraged to read Hazlitt's essays? Had we been so, we might have come across the following paragraph (from essay 8 "Of the Ignorance of the Learned" in the collection entitled "Table Talk"), and we might have realised how etiolated and sickly we were becoming before it was too late (and now, of course, it is far, far too late).

"Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape. It is an old remark, that boys who shine at school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out into the world. The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at school, and on which his success depends, are things which do not require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful faculties of the mind. Memory (and that of the lowest kind) is the chief faculty called into play in conning over and repeating lessons by rote in grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic, etc., so that he who has the most of this technical memory, with the least turn for other things, which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his childish attention, will make the most forward school-boy. The jargon containing the definitions of the parts of speech, the rules for casting up an account, or the inflections of a Greek verb, can have no attraction to the tyro of ten years old, except as they are imposed as a task upon him by others, or from his feeling the want of sufficient relish of amusement in other things. A lad with a sickly constitution and no very active mind, who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy for himself, will generally be at the head of his form. An idler at school, on the other hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels the circulation of his blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a breath, and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, feel the open air in his face, look at the fields or the sky, follow a winding path, or enter with eagerness into all the little conflicts and interests of his acquaintances and friends, than doze over a musty spelling-book, repeat barbarous distichs after his master, sit so many hours pinioned to a writing-desk, and receive his reward for the loss of time and pleasure in paltry prize-medals at Christmas and Midsummer."

Deconstruction as Nihilism

2008-12-15T00:39:00.001+02:00

We always had this hunch that deconstruction was a rather sophisticated game played with words, not something that had any intrinsic connection with the critical impulse - the need to engage with what feels like a social malaise - which had originally led us to philosophy, having spent some time on the barricades and been troubled by questions concerning the truth of our protest. In short, it just seemed obvious that deconstruction was a form of nihilism. So we didn't see the point in spending much time wading through the turgid Derridean monologues, and consequently never actually came up with a cogent critique.

Still, it would be nice to have a critique, which is why we were delighted to come across (14 years too late) a lovely paper by Jack M. Balkin entitled "Transcendental Deconstruction, Transcendent Justice." Balkin wants to rescue deconstruction and establish that it can be part of a movement for greater justice, and apparently it is in terms of justice that the moral/ethical/political/practical import of deconstruction can best be panned out, according to Derrida. Prior to rescuing deconstruction Balkin conveniently points out why it is need of a helping hand - and this is the bit we like.

Balkin picks up the argument in a lecture given at the Cardozo Law School in 1989, in which Derrida was responding specifically to criticisms of political quietism and irrelevance. In a nutshell, Derrida maintained that people fighting for justice were calling into question certain identities and differences in the prevailing discourse of justice enshrined in law, which is just the sort of thing deconstruction does. The deconstruction of the human/animal distinction would tie in, for instance, with the arguments and intentions of animal rights activists who want animals to be accorded rights previously reserved for persons. "Hence, Derrida wants to insist, deconstruction is relevant to justice because we can deconstruct the boundaries of who is considered a "person" or, more generally, a proper subject of justice. By challenging these boundaries, we can move from a world in which the conception of a subject of justice is wrongfully limited to one in which it receives a just expansion."

And now the criticism:

"Derrida has not shown that the only way in which these oppositions might be deconstructed leads to increasingly just results. If deconstruction calls into question the boundaries of subjects of justice, it does not follow that the only way to question these boundaries is to advocate their expansion. They may well be unstable, as Derrida insists. Yet their instability might be evidence that they are about to implode, rather than expand. Furthermore, even if there must be an expansion, one can expand the boundary in two opposite directions - by expanding the scope of what is assigned to the "human," who is a subject of justice, or by expanding the scope of what is assigned to the "nonhuman," which is not a proper subject of justice. In this way, the instability of these boundaries might well be used, as it has in the past, to show that blacks, or Asians, or women are not fully human beings, or that the distinction between women and animals, for example, is so unstable that it cannot fully be maintained.

"Indeed, one can understand the history of bigotry as the continuous deconstruction of an imagined unity of humankind. It is the perpetual claim that the unity of humankind is a pious fiction, a papered-over discontinuity and heterogeneity, and that the Other within this imagined unity must be located and understood in all of its difference and inferiority. The egalitarian claims to rediscover the true similarity of the subjects of justice by reclaiming those who were wrongly grouped with nonsubjects; the bigot claims to rediscover the true similarity of nonsubjects of justice by rejecting those who were wrongly grouped with the subjects of justice. Both deconstruct boundaries and categories, and the act of deconstruction does not decide between them."

So deconstruction is a tool that can be put in the service of both our favorite or our most hated social movements. Balkin tries to rescue deconstruction from this nihilistic conclusion by saying that both the discourse and practice of justice rely on and ultimately spring from an inchoate sense of justice - a sense that achieves its determinacy through our local cultural mediations - and this is just what the practice of deconstruction relies on and is guided by. And a deconstruction so guided could not be called nihilistic.

But this is singularly unconvincing. There are many inchoate senses - some of them nice and some not so nice - and my hunch is that deconstruction just doesn't have the resources to come down on one side or the other. The reason may be that it does not self-consciously speak out of and tie itself to a particular historical situation. A useful contrast here is with Adorno, who never hides the fact that his thinking is orientated by the experience of surviving the holocaust and of reacting to its horror. However general and philosophical the discourse becomes, Adorno insists on that connection with a particular historical situation. And Adorno continually comes back to the way philosophy is implicated in or complicit in that historical situation. There is nothing comparable - is there? - in Derrida's philosophical works.

By the way, Balkin's paper really is nice. He is sympathetic to Derrida but cuts through opaque generalities with ease and brings them face to face with the nitty gritty of trying to do justice in a court of law. He beautifully shows how the idea of an infinite responsibility to the Other, which sounds so unequivocally moral on first hearing, would promote injustice without some way of seeing that the victim is not duty-bound to see her situation from the point of view of the oppressor. This - another by the way - ties in with our immediate moral predicament of whether or not to carry on being a hunt saboteur.

Doubting Hegel #1

2008-12-07T08:49:00.001+02:00

Hegel doesn't have to worry about the pineal gland because consciousness is, from the beginning, embodied. Is this not, though, just the idea of embodiment? "What else could it be?" you might reply. "Hegel is an ideas man and could not possibly paste the body itself into his text." No, the probem is otherwise: Hegel seems to do the sort of thing we see in Kant and try to rely on a super-thin notion of embodiment that might encompass all self-conscious historical agents – thin enough to capture merely the conditions for the possibility of self-consciousness. But does the particularity of the body not make some very important differences? Can Hegel really hold apart the ideal from the empirical?

For the married man the doubts might be prompted by the realisation that his domestic relationship bears so little resemblance to the master-slave dialectic. "Why is my wife not interested in the sort of struggle for recognition that Hegel describes? Why does she show no inclination to risk her life in a battle of wills, or just show an interest in doing something exciting like skydiving?" he might wonder. Is Hegel not describing a dynamic that is peculiarly patriarchal and ascribing it (falsely) to the eternal structure of self-consciousness?

Our hunch is that psychology does make a difference, and that Hegel errs in assuming he can write the phenomenology of spirit without relying on the empirical stuff that psychology tries to fathom.

Which is why – to be honest – we are more tempted to read Nietzsche now than Hegel. The strength of Nietzsche was to put the psyche – with all its abysmal opacity – at the centre.

Apocalypse Now... and again

2008-12-07T08:46:00.001+02:00

Flashes of torn things keep coming back to us. One of them is a scene from the film "Apocalypse Now", in which Martin Sheen is on a small boat heading up a winding river into the dark depths of Vietnam in search of Kurt, played by the unforgettable Marlon Brando. Somehow Sheen is handed his mail along the way, begins reading a letter from his wife, and reflecting, which is when we hear him say that when he is in the jungle he thinks of his wife, and when he is with his wife he thinks of the jungle.

In our experience, it is not necessary to spend time in some God-foresaken Vietnamese jungle in order to experience this ambivalence towards both domestic life and its opposite.

Marx's complicity: a voice from the cave

2008-12-04T10:51:00.000+02:00

Quite by chance we came across some biographical notes about Millican Dalton - the insurance clerk who, in his mid 30s sometime between the wars, dropped out of the rat race and went to live in a cave on a bed of bracken leaves in Borrowdale in the English Lake District. The vegetarian pacifist with an addiction to very strong coffee died in the winter of 1947 at the age of 79 when he had moved from his cave to a tent in the valley to escape the worst of the weather.

To say that his story strikes a chord with us is an understatement. If we were looking for a guru (which we definitely are not) Dalton would be our man (although Dalton was only really interested in taking people on walks through the wilder parts of the Lake District, not in becoming some hideous lifestyle coach).

We mention him here, though, for another reason - because the story of him and his cave in Borrowdale reminds us of a sort of Marxist blindspot. It is a source of immense sadness to us (and one reason why we left the country of our birth) that we could not follow in Dalton's footsteps even if we had wanted to. The entirety of the Lake District has been turned into a National Park with rules and men and women in uniform on patrol. And the hillside with the cave is now the property of the National Trust who have fixed a cast iron sign to the entrance of the cave forbidding fires (even, presumably on damp autumnal evenings when a man would have to light a fire in his cave just to survive). The collection of fallen branches as firewood is also prohibited, regardless of whether the collector ever puts a match to them.

Everywhere, it seems (and is it not so?) in that land that was once a haven for the eccentric has been fenced off and patroled so that there is absolutely nowhere left to escape to.

Now, from the point of view of the Marxist I imagine there is nothing to object to here. Nature is nothing of value until it is worked on, and Nature as a whole is there to be dominated in the great historical advance of the forces of production and their corresponding relations of production, and there must be more such domination because socialism or communism or whatever you want to call the Good Life will only be possible when those forces of production have reached a tremendous pitch. The idea that there should be things that are untouched and that should remain untouched - the idea that, in an act of humility, it might be good to lie down amongst them (on your bed of bracken leaves) or simply walk through in wonder - this just cannot make sense within the Marxist framework.

Of course the National Trust is not a Marxist organisation, but I guess the Marxist is duty bound to support it (or something similar to it) and affirm the historical neccessity and the trememdous progressive value of an organisation that will at last manage these natural resources and ensure that nothing - even what now passes for wilderness - is beyond social control and does not bear the stamp of society.

The mind and the arse

2008-12-03T12:30:00.000+02:00

Another unformed idea that we will probably never follow up: There is a mysterious connection between the arse and the mind.

Background: Freud talks somewhere about phases in very early childhood development and in connection with this develops a typology of characters (people whose development has been arrested at one stage or another?). One phase is the anal. When I first read this I thought it was just the product of a truly perverse imagination. And then the recollection of some very odd bowel-related behaviour in my own youth (I will spare you the details – it was not nice).

Only now has it occurred to me that there might be some connection between being anal and my inability to stop this obsessive grappling with my ideas – holding onto them instead of letting them drift away as ideas naturally tend to do in order to take pleasure in less intellectual pursuits. Is this cogitation not repulsively anal? Was there, in the end, no need for Descartes to resort to the ridiculous idea of the pineal gland to link up the mind and the body because, in truth, they were one and the same thing – the mind being not the body in general but the part at the greatest poetic distance from the lofty seat of ratiocination: the arse?

Hang on, though. Am I not according some priority to the arse, as if it comes first and the mind is some outgrowth of it – some hideous protruberance? But, as any mother knows, the arse in its original form is an orifice with no self-control. It poses no obstruction to the natural evacuation of the bowels, hence the importance of wrapping the loins of the infant well when it is taken to the supermarket. If the natural evacuative process is interrupted, this only starts occuring later on. And could this not be the work of the nascent mind? Could this nether region not be the place where the mind first flexes its mental muscles – the first muscle being the sphincter – feeling for the first time its ability to go against nature, to arrest the otherwise relentless flow of nature?

Of course there can be no biological determinism here. At best, the anal sphincter can only be a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the evolution of the mind, as we can see from another bearer of that important ring of muscle: the goldfish, which, if we are to judge from its behaviour, is a stranger to philosophical reflection.

Real people: Where are they?

2008-12-02T19:38:00.000+02:00

Werther wrote a nice piece entitled The Grad Student about a meeting with someone nasty in academia and including a reference to real people beyond the confines of the college. That connected so strongly with the memory of a little epiphanic moment I had decades ago when it seemed, having wandered off campus, that I had found myself amongst truly real people. (Alas, how the mind plays tricks on one.) So I wrote a lengthy comment describing my little epiphany and my subsequent disillusion (although I don't think there was anything necessary about my disillusion or that any great generalisation can be made on the base of it).

By the way, Werther begins with an interesting comment about character. Yes, I am all for character (but my interest in it may be a function of my lack of it). More - much more - needs to be written about character. (And another by the way: one of my gripes about Marxism - or a Marxism that has ignored Nietzsche - is that it seems to say nothing about character. Too much forces of production and relations of production and surplus value and reification and commodification, but no character and no reflection on what happened to character and how we might get it back - assuming it could still be rescued.)

First thought about freedom

2008-12-02T19:18:00.000+02:00

A thought to be followed up later (blogging, after all, seems to allow for just thinking off the top of your head): the political discourse over here puts freedom as the number one value (if I am not mistaken) but people seem to have very, very little interest in any meaningful notion of freedom (I doubt whether many people in those flag waving crowds at election rallies were thinking to themselves: "Hey, we're free" or "I'm so free" or "This is it - this is me free - at last - free at last") so it seems there are two choices: drop the nonsense about freedom because it just doesn't connect with social reality or damn well do something to get people interested in their freedom (but what would that be? a military coup? Mmm?).

That needs thinking through (or binning maybe).

The folly of EU grants

2008-11-30T11:53:00.000+02:00

It will probably all stop now that so much wealth has gone up in smoke, but up to now there has been wave after wave of EU funding for various projects in Greece. They all seem to be organised in the same way and backed up by the same line of thinking. One example: grants given to the thousands of little private schools in Greece to help them connect to the internet and gain a presence on the web. It works like this: There is a short list of things the grant scheme covers, schools pay for those things and then fill in an application form to have the cost covered by grant money minus the VAT (sales tax).

Does that sound sensible? Does that sound like the best way to raise educational facilities?

In practice, what happens is that everyone simply sees a great opportunity to cash in instead of being inspired to fundamentally overhaul the way teaching and learning is organised. The typical school, I imagine, finds a way to get a web site made, but has little idea how to use internet technology in the educational process. The scheme seems to assume that with the financial incentive schools will take an interest in new technology and somehow educate themselves. But no. The web site is made; the grant money is gratefully received; and the school goes back to teaching in the way that it has done for decades before the idea of the hypertext transfer protocol ever dawned on the likes of Tim Berners and his team. A lot of money for very little gain.

And in Brussels (or wherever these schemes are hatched) do they not see that they are setting things up for a huge scam? In a country like Greece (perhaps the same as elsewhere) every self-respecting businesswoman can find someone to sell them IT stuff and write a receipt for twice the money they actually paid. And the sums are large. A little school with only three or four classrooms can make thousands of euros in this scam. The computers will find their way into schools, but the EU will have paid a massively inflated price for them.

My only conclusion is that the people in Brussels (if that is where they are) overlook this massive and predictable financial loss because of an ideological commitment to a half-baked free market philosophy. The money must be given directly to individual business people as a spur to private enterprise (in practice: pocket-lining) rather than give it to some public sector group, which would smack too much of socialism.

But wouldn't it have been so much better for education (and supposedly advances in education were what was really at stake here) to do just that: use the money to set up public sector initiatives: free seminars and workshops organised locally for school owners to find out about all the useful things that can be done with new technology (including all the free things that can be done - another oversight of a scheme which assumes that progress can only be made by purchasing things). And as for the hardware, the state could have set up its own bulk-purchasing organisation and bought everything for a quarter of the price the EU finally paid for it, and then give it to the schools for free - to schools that have attended a few seminars and workshops and shown that they are most probably in a position to do something useful with the hardware.

Would that be socialism or just common sense?

The persistence of religion

2008-11-30T11:51:00.000+02:00

Back at the University of Essex in the 1980s religion simply wasn't an issue for us. I suspect that there were a few (more?) quietly religious people attracted more to Heidegger, Derrida and writers talking about the Other with a capital "O", but they never made their faith, or faith as such, into an issue. It just never came up for discussion, as far as I can remember.

In truth, religion persists. Take a short walk from the academy in any direction and you will soon meet people for whom there is more than can be grasped by the modern mix of science, epistemology and the dubious ethics within the limits of modern rationality (Kant, Rawls, Habermas, et al).

The question is: is this a sign that the Enlightenment didn't drive its message home hard enough and really sweep away the last vestiges of medieval mysticism or is the persistence of religion a sign that the Enlightenment was lacking? I used to believe the former but slowly I have come to feel that the latter is where the truth lies.

One issue is death. For the Enlightenment death is passed over in silence or left as a fact among other facts (perhaps being lumped in with an understanding of how organic matter is composted). Is it necessary to argue that this is a failing, that it is just plain unacceptable when seen from the standpoint of someone whose loved one has died?

The shortcoming is evident in Marxism. Does Marx anywhere concern himself with the death of the worker? How will the worker die? What will his/her death mean? How important is it that the culture (any culture worth affirming) embrace death and give it significance instead of ignoring it or treating it as just another moment in a cycle that is adequately described by organic chemistry?

A hunt saboteur beyond good and evil?

2008-11-29T00:01:00.000+02:00

Actually he had no intention and no interest in becoming a hunt saboteur in the beginning. He was angry but he tried to speak to the red necks in fatigues in a polite way - as polite as possible given how worked up he was and how out of breath after rushing up the footpath - asking them to move further away from the house because the sound of the shots was so irritating (disturbing, actually, for someone who retreated to the countryside for the quiet only to find a few months later when the hunting season started that almost every evening and weekend in the winter grown men with guns and with their sights set on the quivering breasts of birds that are barely more than two mouthfuls big make you feel that you have been transported back to Sarajevo during the siege). He thought there might be an appeal to the idea of respect for others. No need to bring animal rights into it, so he emphasised the nuisance, the annoyance they were causing to others, and how it would be so easy to remedy the situation by just walking further away from the house. He could point to a huge sweep of land stretching all the way to the hills in the far distance, without houses or roads - seemingly just as suitable for blasting lead pellets into the soft flesh of our winged kin. No, they would not budge an inch. No, they were not causing a nuisance to anyone, they said. They and their fathers and their fathers' fathers had been hunting at that very spot year in, year out for literally ages. Bang! They carry on hunting, and the sound is deafening. (And those pellets are made of lead by the way. The European Union has gone to such lengths to ban lead in petrol, but it remains permissible to spray the countryside with lead pellets - especially worrying when it is on our side of the watershed.)

A man with a dog that shows no interest in barking faced with a red neck with a gun who refuses to stop shooting feels an acute mix of frustration, impotence and rage. As he walks back down the hillside with the gunfire behind him and the pellets audibly falling around him, he feels something has to be done. Action must be taken. A protest must be made. It is an imperative from the guts (one is tempted to say from the blood, but maybe not).

For the record, he phoned the police, who - it turned out - saw nothing wrong with shooting so close to the place where peace-loving people live. Just out of interest, he asked if the policeman was a hunter. Yes, he was.

Since then he has become a hunt saboteur. Reluctantly and with a bad conscience, but he has done it.

The problem now is the pricks of his conscience. If he had to justify it, could he? He wanted to feel he was on some kind of moral high ground - that there was some kind of moral/ethical justification for these little, hamfisted acts of sabotage. But it soon seemed as if there was no moral justification. Sabotage goes beyond morality, does it not? The moral life presupposes what Kant called in the Critique of Judgment (admittedly not about morality) the sensus communis (a shared background of values). Without that, the person for whom morality is an issue and who objects to hearing the few remaining birds being shot has two choices: passive resignation or amoral action.

While trying to get things clear the image of Habermas floated into view. There must be dialogue, together with a respect for everything that a good dialogue presupposes, like letting the best argument rule the day. Hmmm. But what if the red necks refuse to enter into any kind of meaningful dialogue? Suddenly it seems that Habermas takes dialogue for granted. If the other refuses to discuss the matter, dialogue breaks down and further talk is pointless. The red neck is convinced he is in the right (it is a tradition here, after all, for grown men to put on camouflage clothing and shoot animals for fun in their free time). He and all his fellow red necks, however, see absolutely no need for the distressed resident to be convinced of the rightness of what they are doing. It is all well and good to argue that communication is a privileged locus of morality because there are principles implied there that map so nicely onto the Kantian paradigm, but if the bastards refuse to communicate, what do you do? You inevitably have to break some rules, destroy a few things, make the lives of some others difficult. This is to throw Kant out of the window (even if the hope is that after you rush downstairs you may later be able to go outside and pick him up again).

He wonders: Does anger not have its right? If you keep pushing me and angering me, eventually I will respond in an unpleasant way. Is this not life (our sort of life)? Is it not a denial of this life to turn the other cheek? (And in this case what would it be to turn the other cheek? "You shot that bird. Hey, shoot another bird."?) It is not as if this could ever melt the hard heart of the hunter, so nothing would be gained. (Not that this saboteur on his own really believes that there is something to be gained.)

So is the hunt saboteur not, in a sense, beyond good and evil? He acts in the name of morality but is acutely aware that what he is doing is unjustifiable in the present circumstances. (And how horribly those paternal echoes of "Two wrongs do not make a right" ring in his ear.)

And then a Kantian thought: If he were not alone in this reaction, would the sabotage not help to clear the ground for a new evaluation of things - a new sensus communis that would marginalise the hunter and make him lose his narrow-minded cockiness?

Is this, though, an abandonment of morality for the sake of morality or an abandonment of it simply because one just has to get something off one's chest?

Driving with Hegel on my mind

2008-11-28T01:03:00.000+02:00

A couple in a car. Lost. He from a gloomy part of northern Europe. She from sunnier parts much further south. Married long enough for the hours of silence to have ceased being an issue. He - driving, because he is expected to drive but also because he wants to drive, because it is less boring and it takes his mind off the fact that there is so little to be said now - reaches for the map, again. She notices, sleepily at first, then says they are lost - that he doesn't know where he is going. Immediately she sits up and urges that they ask someone. Pull over and ask that man over there, she says. Every fibre of his being resists the idea. He tries to ignore her insistence and looks at the map. If he can only work out where he is, he will be able to find the route they need to take. A little time, a little searching is all it will take. Patience. Calmness. We/he/I can find the way. She loses her temper.

....

Back at home. It is cold but not very cold. She curls up on the sofa under a duvet and complains of how cold it is - of how it is so very cold and how she cannot stand it. Won't you light the stove, she asks. He cannot remember a time when she lit the stove.

....

He is a skeptic. She has found the path that will hopefully lead to spiritual fullfilment. There are spiritual leaders who show the way - leaders who can even predict the future, it seems. The Turk will lose Constantinople. The writing is on the wall. It is only a matter of time.

....

Thinking back to "The Phenomenology of Spirit" and watching his wife, he feels that something in the dynamic of this relationship is absent from that intriguing (if ultimately incomprehensible) book - something that ought really to be there. That oh-so famous master-slave dialectic now seems more dubious than ever. Was it really supposed to sum up THE wellspring of history? But it seems to assume that humanity strives for freedom, autonomy, dominance - all of humanity. The slave was one who wanted to be the master but who gave up first in the struggle. The man who reaches for the map and who lights the stove and who is so skeptical sees a woman who chose heteronomy before the struggle even started. Surely there are many, many more who are only too happy to be led - who want to be led - who do not want to drive - who do not put a priority on their independence? Does this not reveal a little psychological blindspot on Hegel's part, or is it I who have missed something?

Is it fair, though, to call this heteronomy? It implies a lack that could just be a figment of the imagination of the one who refuses to wind down the window and ask for help. With a great intellectual effort he can just about glimpse the suggestion that she wants to ask because it is enjoyable to do so. She has a reason to speak to a new person - a new person who might add a new shade, a new touch, a new story to her already rich social world - her personal world. He is not completely immune to that, but it has long since ceased to be an instinct (if it ever was). There is something in him that denies it - that refuses it. People are met, of course, despite this. And after the fact he appreciates it. But the feeling is weak and never manages to connect with the springs of action in the future. He will always prefer to reach for the map instead of wind the window down and ask the stranger.

At the end of the day, which of the two is to be found lacking?

A Paradigmatic Pessimist

2008-11-26T10:05:00.000+02:00

Psychologists - I have been told - occasionally put a glass half full of water on the desk and ask the patient to describe what they see. The pessimists are said to be those who see not the visible plenitude but the lack, calling the glass half empty.

I confess: Show me a glass that is full to the brim and overflowing and I will say: "Hah! The glass is full now, but it won't be long before it is half empty."

Protectionism: the power of a suffix

2008-11-26T10:01:00.000+02:00

As political leaders feel the sand slip between their fingers and start to panic, pronouncements are made about what must not be done. An oft-heard soundbite is that there must be no return to protectionism.

What amazes is how this very word has acquired a power to close off debate. There really is no need for debate once it has been uttered. If something can be called protectionism, it must simply be bad - very bad. Isn't that just obvious?

Hang on, though. Isn't this a bit odd? Protectionism is about protecting things and isn't this - prima facie - good? Since the verb "protect" is not short of positive connotations, how have they managed to make such a closely related noun into a word that sounds so bad?

An odd sort of language game (would Wittgenstein recognise it as such?) is being played which puts the onus where it ought not to be. Because it is so easy to label a policy protectionist without any argument to justify such a slur, the onus immediately falls on the person who would protect - they have to justify curtailing economic liberties (known simply as "freedom" - another dubious identification that has also been pulled off by another linguistic sleight of hand (strange how spin gets so firmly sedimented in language)). The game is set up in such a way that there is no assumption about anything being worthy of protection. "Protect what?" The forces of this dubious "freedom" are on the offensive - they set the terms of the debate - and who are you to stand in their way? "A detour? Why? Justify yourself? Try and justify diverting the course of world history?" The attempt to justify it has come to sound almost blasphemous.

This was a topic that came up very briefly yesterday in a paintshop. Somehow my joking complaint about the price of five litres of undercoat (25 euros) touched off a short exchange about globalisation and the free market. The shopkeeper indicated gruffly that he was having none of it. The spin had not got to him. But he was a man of very few words - very firm opinions but with little to say about them. Perhaps those most affected are those who play the language game - those who inevitably have to accept the terms of the debate that have already been established by the mysterious forces of linguistic imperialism (hegemony someone said - was it Laclau?).

At the risk of mixing up too many metaphors, the shoe should really be on the other foot. If people are in work in a country and feel some sense of security and some sense that life is not the bitch that elsewhere it is said to be, then whoever wants to throw the borders open and make a mess of the situation ought to be grilled long and hard and forced to come up with a bloody good explanation for why this is necessary. Why does this not occur? It is simply announced that these are the Forces of Freedom and it is taken for granted that the gates must be opened.

Despite the recent harranging of that blackguard protectionism, it is to be hoped that the present catastrophe will provide an opportunity for the terms of the debate to shift somewhat. The promise of unending economic growth, which was always twinkl ing in the eye of the economic libertarian, has proved to be a deceit. Greed has lost its theoretical underpinning and is now seen for what it really is. Is the ideology not going to collapse? Is the table on which the language game is played not going to be turned?

Returning from the monastery

2008-11-09T01:37:00.000+02:00

Wouldn't it be better to dwell for ten or fifteen minutes upon eternity instead of switching on the telly to see the news?

The believer will argue at great length about the Truth of what he believes in, but it is almost certainly the case that this argument has no connection whatsoever with the reasons why he is such a passionate believer.

How can people pursue their own salvation so calmly while the rest of the world is damned? ("You are in our prayers," though.)

What angers the Orthodox Greek is not so much atheism as Catholicism. The stranger walks by unmolested while an unholy row goes on within the family.

How odd it is that some people can still talk in all earnestness about sin when, for so many others, the word is little more than the echo of a myth.

Although it sounds somewhat trivial on his lips, John Lennon's "Imagine" is not entirely unconnected to the message of Christ. Was the "Good News" not supposed to spread the message of peace and harmony? If so, what are we to make of the total lack of progress in that direction over the last 2,000 years? Is that not time enough to judge whether the Christian ideal of selfless sociality can lead anywhere?

Is it not said somewhere that the meek shall inherit the earth? If earthly inheritance matters, is it wise to put everything off until the apocalyptic day of divine intervention, which might mean having to wait another 2,000 years or perhaps a lot, lot longer?

It is interesting to listen to believers telling each other about the various miracles. They listen so eagerly. This is what they want to hear. They must believe that miracles have occurred. Above all, they want to hear, not about icons that weep, but about the miracles performed by those with an unshakeable faith. The subtext is: Faith is salvation.

The message today was: humility is far more important than doing good deeds. The introversion of the Orthodox Church is remarkable. Society really is left to rot.

What would be more difficult for a Protestant: entertaining the idea that the Orthodox dogma concerning the Holy Spirit might be right or kissing an Orthodox icon? Isn't the dogma more of a balcony than a corner stone of the religious edifice?

The skeptical world-weary Protestant can sense an echo of a lost significance in an Orthodox Church with its dark interior and the oil lamps flickering before the glimmering icons and the chanting in a language that goes back to the time of Saint Paul. There is a real pull. Even the atheist is moved. But how all that evaporates as soon as the theological discussion begins over coffee and biscuits in the Arhondariki. How repulsive the beating of that dogmatic drum is.

The Meltdown and Fordist Nostalgia

2008-10-08T11:21:00.000+03:00

Does anyone really understand credit default swaps? "Arcane" is really an understatement, and yet it seems that the market in credit default swaps rose to something like three times the U.S. gross domestic product. From what we can gather, credit default swaps are effectively a way of betting that a company will go bust.

Then there is the degree of leverage. Everyone, it seems, speculating with huge sums of borrowed money. Why just invest the thousand dollars you own when you can borrow another 99 and play the tables in the capitalist casino with $100,000? Apparently, this kind of leverage ratio (around 100:1) was behind the collapse of the two largest companies in the mortgage business in the U.S. (Fanny May and Freddie Mac - and who chose the names by the way?).

Trying to make sense of this huge parasitic economy almost makes you nostalgic for the old image of the capitalist who built a real business with bricks and mortar and employed people (even if there was a questionable extraction of surplus value) to manufacture real things that could go in a showroom or on a shelf. Heck, that almost seems like an idyllic state of affairs in comparison to the crazy business of pure speculation where there is no commitment to the kind of real economic activity that creates jobs and keeps communities together.

Suicide

Suicide rates were used by Durkheim as an indication of levels of anomie (if I remember correctly). Now that the economy is collapsing, aren't levels of anomie rising? Shouldn't a small percentage of players in the leveraged lido of speculative capitalism feel some of that anomie?

In the media, at least, I haven't come across any reports of suicides. Wall St, it seems, is a long way from India, where we heard of the farmers who had taken out loans (miniscule by Western standards) to buy new GM produce from Monsanto promising an unprecedented yield and invulnerability to pests - crops that were then destroyed by pests, plunging the farmers into debt - a debt which was so shameful for them that they chose to drink lethal quantities of pesticide rather than contintue to live.

Does no one in the credit default swaps business feel like drinking pesticide? Is it just impoverished Indian farmers who have a sense of honour?

Castoriadis on the Meaninglessness of Capitalism

2008-10-06T01:06:00.000+03:00

In a minor essay entitled The Crisis of the Identification Process Castoriadis really touches base. He sums up the crisis of meaning in capitalist societies - the crisis which is at the root of our search for alternatives.

Every society, he says, needs to develop a self-representation - it needs to come up with an idea, or an image (this being the work of what Castoriadis calls the social imaginary) of what it is (in our case, an idea of who we are) and an idea of what it is up to (an idea of the ends of social action). This self-representation has to move people - Castoriadis goes on to talk about societies loving themselves - and the conception of the ends of social action needs to motivate people. In the words of the psychoanalyst, these must be representations that people cathect.

Modern societies instituted two central significations: the ever-increasing rational mastery of nature and society, and the search for a form of social freedom, whether it be liberal, socialist or revolutionary. The second has virtually withered away, and what remains is no more than rare acts of voting and frequent acts of shopping - neither of them capable of defining a "we" that has some solidity.

To quote: "The sole signification truly present and dominant today is the capitalist one, that of the indefinite expansion of "mastery," which at the same time-and here we come to our central point-finds itself emptied of all the content that might endow it with the vitality it once enjoyed and that could, for better or for worse, allow the processes of identification to be carried out.

"One essential part of this signification was its mythology of "progress," which gave a meaning both to history and to future-oriented aims and which also gave a meaning to society, such as it was, as supposedly the best support for this kind of "progress." We know that this mythology is now falling into ruin. But what, we may ask, is today the subjective expression, for individuals, of this signification and this reality that is the "expansion," apparently "unlimited," of "mastery"?

"For a small number, it is, of course, a certain "power," whether real or illusory, and the increase thereof. For the overwhelming majority of people, however, it is not and cannot be anything but a continual increase in consumption, including alleged leisure, which has now become an end in itself. What is becoming, then, of thegeneral model of identification that the institution offers to society and that it proposes to and imposes on individuals as social individuals? The model is now the individual who earns the most and enjoys the most. Things are as simple and banal as that."

This reminds me of Thatcher's rise to power in the U.K., which was supposed to be some kind of renaissance of British culture - a re-invigoration of what Castoriadis would have called the British imaginary. In practice I don't remember much more happening than a war with the Argentinians (over a handful of islands whose real value was never made particularly clear) and a campaign launched in the media to "Buy British".

It also makes me think of the prevailing image of governments in the West - especially in Europe. The government tries to project itself as little more than a competent manager of the economy. In Europe there is absolutely no attempt to engender a self-consciously European culture with a new social identity and a new sense of purpose as Europeans. From the standpoint of the party politician, society is little more than the market and the institutions that support it. Once society is identified as the coexistence of consuming monads the need to define - to create - some sense of "we" simply cannot register.

As a psychoanalyst Castoriadis emphasizes the psychological role that an enduring sense of this "we" can play for the individual. The identification serves as a defense against death - the identification with an imagined imperishable collectivity is a way of living with one's mortality. The absence of this helps to explain the modern individual's desperate need for a continual supply of distractions. In the words of Cornelius: "The modern individual lives in a headlong flight from the knowledge both that he is going to die and that nothing he does, strictly speaking, has the slightest meaning. So he runs, he jogs, he shops in supermarkets, he goes channel surfing, and so on-he distracts himself."

However much liberals insist that there is a liberal society (and for the market to work there must be a society of sorts) there is still this lack of a meaningful sense of who we are, what we are doing and where we are heading. Some liberal theoreticians might have an answer to that question and feel happy with it, but in actually existing liberal cultures no answer is instituted - we are not (consciously) doing something together, striving to achieve some collective goal. As individuals we are just out to maximize our personal happiness, and as politicians we are just trying to tweak the money supply to ensure that there is continual economic growth (because if gaps started to appear on the supermarket shelves the entire liberal edifice would crumble).

Toward the end of the essay Castoriadis makes a point that has been on my mind for a while now: going beyond capitalism requires going back to the past. History has become virtually meaningless. The liberation of the individual as a consumer presupposes that the past is made irrelevant (because history is our past, not mine). As he puts it: "I do not see how a new historical creation could effectively and lucidly stand up to and oppose this bizarre formlessness in which we live unless it were to instaurate a new and fecund relation to tradition. ...Thatdoes not mean that we should restore traditional values as such or because they are traditional; rather, we should establish a critical attitude whereby we are capable of granting recognition to some values that have been lost."

In a sense, a new radicalism will also have to be a new conservatism.

Marcuse, the Media and Perpetual War

2008-10-06T01:01:00.000+03:00

Here is a quotation from Herbert Marcuse (from his essay "Repressive Tolerance") that touches on the issue of peace.

"The authorities in education, morals, and psychology are vociferous against the increase in juvenile delinquency; they are less vociferous against the proud presentation, in word and deed and pictures, of ever more powerful missiles, rockets, bombs - the mature delinquency of a whole civilization."

In connection with the debate about peace Marcuse's essay has an interesting implication: We need to understand the delinquency of our civilization. The cause of peace needs more John Lennons and more songs in the style of "Imagine" but it also needs more thoughtfulness. The thinking is especially necessary because of a strange phenomenon - the strange coexistence of a popular belief in peace and a popular tolerance of perpetual conflict and war. Many people have got John Lennon's message and they support the ideal of peace, but they see it as nothing more than a dim and distant goal - little more than a pleasant dream - and they accept that in the meantime the fighting is bound to continue. For the sake of peace we need to understand how people can believe in peace but tolerate war.

Undoubtedly there are numerous causes. One of them, though, must be the influence of the media. In addition to turning violence into a form of entertainment and allowing each child to see thousands and thousands of entertaining murders, there is also the peculiar way that violence is treated in the news.

For the editors of news programmes, terrible acts of violence make good news. If Palestinian rockets hit an Israeli house, this is news. People must see the house, the hole in the roof and the fragments of the rocket. They must hear the local people denouncing Palestinian terrorists. The average viewer is left with the impression that the world is filled with warring parties. There cannot possibly appear to be a solution because nothing is explained. The terrorists appear to be incomprehensible beings who were presumably born to hate. But behind every Palestinian rocket is a long history - almost invisible in the media - of injustice. I don't think I have ever seen a report on the news of Israeli checkpoints on Palestinian soil, and it does not take much imagination to appreciate the damage that is done when the Israeli army controls the movements of Palestinians in and out of their villages on land that is internationally recognised as theirs. Similarly, I have never seen a report about the Israeli policy of cutting the supply of water to Palestinian villages in the area where the Israeli Wall is being built. If the events leading up to the violent outbursts were better understood, people might be able to see how easy it would be to prevent the violence and the so-called terrorists would cease to be incomprehensible aggressors.

Another questionable aspect of the news is its attempt to be "objective" or "impartial" or "neutral". There are two sides to every coin. If there is an interview with the spokesperson of one side, there must be an interview with the spokesperson of the other side, and the interviewer cannot appear to take anyone's side. Every report of a violent outburst carries the silent message that we cannot say who is in the right and who is in the wrong; there are just these two parties fighting and so far the death toll is X and the number of injured is Y. In this message there is a lesson for the viewer: Like us (we who speak and write in the media) you should not take sides; just tolerate the fact that there is so much conflict in the world.

The cause of peace does not need this kind of objectivity, impartiality and neutrality. Rather it needs people to speak out against injustice. It also needs people to speak out against the lying declarations of those who profit from war. If someone says: "To stop the spread of the weapons of mass destruction we must use our weapons of mass destruction and unleash the mother of all battles," they must be criticised ruthlessly, not treated with impartiality. No one promotes the cause of peace by treating oppression and injustice with neutrality.

Although the media want to project an image of impartiality, they always end up on the side of the victors. In many cases there are vested interests in the background or there is simply the assumption that every government announcement is news whereas the reports from peace groups and human rights groups are not. Because of the refusal to criticise they also have to accept the terms of the debate which are usually set by the strongest groups in society and those with the funds and the connections needed to promote their views. Hence, the "objective" reporter will tell us about the "violence" caused by the terrorists in one place and about how "effective" the army (our army) has been in another place. Similarly, before the war in Iraq American spokespeople were matched with their Iraqi counterparts on the news. After the defeat of the Iraqis few people in the media see any point in giving the defeated an opportunity to express their point of view. The war becomes history and the media (the writers of the news, at least) just accept the new status quo.

If the media were on the side of peace they would also be more careful about their coverage of protests and demonstrations. Demonstrations for very honourable causes are not seen by the media as occasions to highlight people's grievances. Instead, the cameras wait for the inevitable clashes with the police and the impression is created that demonstrators are aggressive hot heads who have nothing coherent to say.

With satellite television and the internet there are now some alternative channels that are commited to the cause of peace - channels such as Democracy Now. Unfortunately, they are not able to gain a wide audience. Partly, this is a problem of funding but it is also because most people have already been quietly persuaded that peace is a lost cause, and that, anyway, it is much better to just sit back and enjoy the entertainment than worry about issues that require a little thought. It's nice to imagine a world of peace, but let's face the facts, it's just not possible, is it?

What is (not) to be done. Castoriadis on Lenin.

2008-10-02T11:18:00.000+03:00

It has been a long, long time since we read Lenin's "What is to be done?" - so long that we couldn't remember why we were so reluctant to call ourselves Leninists. By chance, though, we have just come across a gorgeous little essay by Castoriadis entitled "The Role of Bolshevik Ideology in the Birth of the Bureaucracy" (going back to 1964) and now we remember just what is so cock-eyed about Leninism (and the Trotskyite version to boot).

What it boils down to is our disagreement with the idea that people ought to be subordinated both to the will of the Party and to the drive to increase the forces of production. Castoriadis emphasizes the way work is organised. Workers ought to be directly involved in determining what is done and how it is done. For Trotsky, apparently, there was no need for this because the aspirations of the workers had already been achieved once the Party had gained ascendance. Henceforth the priority was the fastest possible industrialisation, and the prevailing view was that this meant beating the capitalists at their own game - pushing the rationalisation of production further and faster, and cutting out the anarchy of the market. Although it was supposed to be a dictatorship of the proletariat, in practice the workers had no option but to do what they were damn well told to do. As Trotsky put it: "The dictatorship of the proletariat is expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of production, in the supremacy over the whole Soviet mechanism of the collective will of the workers, and not at all in the form in which individual economic enterprises are administered."

Castoriadis has a nice summary of Lenin's advocacy of a rampant instrumental reason, borrowed from bourgeois/capitalist culture as if it were something entirely neutral: "In all Lenin's speeches and writings of this period, what recurs again and again like an obsession is the idea that Russia ought to learn from the advanced capitalist countries; that there are not a hundred and one different ways of developing production and labour productivity if one wants to emerge from backwardness and chaos; that one must adopt capitalist methods of rationalisation and management as well as capitalist forms of work "incentives." All these, for Lenin, are just "means" that apparently could freely be placed in the service of a radically different historical end, the building of socialism."

Castoriadis lets loose and slams into this ridiculous idea of the neutrality of technique: "The idea that like means cannot be placed indifferently into the service of different ends; that there is an intrinsic relationship between the instruments used and the result obtained; that, especially, neither the army nor the factory are simple "means" or instruments," but social structures in which are organised two fundamental aspects of human relations (production and violence); that in them can be seen in condensed form the essential expression of the type of social relations that characterise an era - this idea, though perfectly obvious and banal for Marxists, was totally "forgotten."

What a great guy? Why did we forget about Castoriadis? We were lucky enough to see him speak in Essex back in the 1980s, but then we stupidly forgot about him as everyone became obsessed with Derrida, Lacan and some rubbish about bodies without organs.

Habermas's Discourse Ethic In A Nutshell

2008-09-21T13:14:00.000+03:00

Habermas's moral theory is meant to address a particular historical situation in which morality may appear to be on shaky ground. Broadly speaking, the situation in question is a modern, liberal society in which the older, metaphysical understanding (that could, for instance, assume that natural rights were moral absolutes) has collapsed and given way to a more historical and sociologically sophisticated understanding that all our categories, including the moral ones, are social constructs. To the post-metaphysical self-understanding that is not uncommon in modern, pluralistic societies there are no absolutes, and it can then appear that the prevailing morality is groundless.

The task Habermas sets himself is to reassure the post-metaphysical pluralist that there is a foundation for morality in the pragmatic presuppositions of discourse itself. Morality doesn't need a metaphysical ground because one is provided by the nature of language itself.

The morality in question is characterised by the concern to accord everyone equal respect - and this is treated as an uncontentious principle that virtually everyone in a post-traditional society accepts. It is fair to call this morality Kantian, and it is fair to say that Habermas has been trying to bring Kant's moral philosophy up to date in a way that ditches Kant's solipsism.

Habermas first reinterprets Kantian morality so that it ceases to assume that moral agents can judge for themselves with an autonomy that implies a historical vacuum what caurses of action are consistent with the basic principle of universal respect. The new Kantian moralists recognise that their deliberations can only get going because of a background of inherited values that are part and parcel of the particular culture that they belong to, and they accept that partly because of their own fallibility the truth about moral rightness is something that can only be established through dialogue. In the place of Kant's description of a moral solipsism, Habermas describes morality as a collective endeavour of a society with a historically specific culture. Instead of the Kantian moral subject trying to work out in a solipsistic way which policies would meet with universal agreement, the concern for universality is played out through a dialogue about moral norms which is open to everyone. The dialogue concretises the Kantian concern for universal respect as long as no voice is excluded and the norms that come out of it are those that everyone can agree to.

In Habermas's words: Kant's principle of universal respect - known as the categorical imperative - "receives a discourse-theoretical interpretation in which its place is taken by the discourse principle (D), according to which only those norms can claim validity that could meet with the agreement of all those concerned in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse."

In addition to this reinterpretation, Habermas wants to come up with a better justification as to why we ought to uphold the principle of universality that is at the core of our morality in a pluralistic society.

The justification begins from the idea that anyone who says anything about what is moral or immoral participates in a form of (discursive) action that has a particular set of pragmatic presuppositions. It is worth clarifying that this is a not a discussion in which people express what they want and try to come to a compromise - it is a discussion in which people try to establish what norms it is right for society to follow. To put the crux of Habermas's argument as simply as possible: Anyone who claims to say something true about morality implicitly raises an issue that can be criticised and in order for this claim to win out it must meet with the rational assent of those who join the discussion. Whether the speaker realizes it or not, if truth is the issue here, the speaker is obliged to appeal equally to the rational assent of everyone else. In this way the discourse ethic is uncovered by identifying what debates about moral norms presuppose, and Habermas's claim is that something very similar to Kant's categorical imperative is presupposed by the discursive act of saying what is or is not moral. Speakers concerned to establish the truth about morality are inevitably obliged to accord equal respect to all those whose assent must be relied on in the collective endeavour to establish what the truth of the matter is.

(Note: the use of "truth" in this reconstruction of Habermas's argument is misleading since Habermas draws a distinction between the truth of claims that refer to an independent objective reality - as is the case in science - and the validity of moral claims that do not refer to some reality indpendent of our history and culture. However, in the context of the critique we want to develop here the distinction is irrelevant. The important point is that the morality of the discourse ethic is all about debating moral norms with all the impartiality and the concern for the strongest arguments that characterise the endeavour to establish the truth of the matter.)

Having found a ground for the principle of universal respect in the pragmatic presuppositions of discourse Habermas restates how significant this discourse ethic ought to be in our current historical situation:

"The discourse principle provides an answer to the predicament in which the members of any moral community find themselves when, in making the transition to a modern, pluralistic society, they find themselves faced with the dilemma that though they still argue with reasons about moral judgments and beliefs, their substantive background consensus on the underlying moral norms has been shattered. They find themselves embroiled in global and domestic practical conflicts in need of regulation that they continue to regard as moral, and hence as rationally resolvable, conflicts; but their shared ethos has disintegrated."

Habermas also acknowledges that it is possible for the pluralist to give up on morality, accepting perhaps that man is a wolf to man and believing that within the framework provided by liberal society pretty much anything goes. He also acknowledges that people can resolve their differences without recourse to moral discussion. It is still not uncommon for those who are not expected to agree with us to get shot or bombed before being given a chance to participate in the kind of discussion Habermas describes. Interestingly, the discourse ethic does not call this into question because it implies nothing about what ought to be discussed or what ought to be seen as a moral issue. We can quite consistently observe the principle of universal respect when trying to establish the truth about morality on Monday and then resume shooting on Tuesday because, apparently, national interests are at stake, not moral principles. He assumes that people want to resolve their differences through a discussion of what is the morally right thing to do, and with his discourse ethic he wants to say that participants in that discussion are bound by a principle of universal respect because this is something that their discursive activity presupposes.

Interestingly, Habermas envisages the possibility that some unworlded individuals in this pluralistic society might want to collectively work out a shared ethical framework as rich as the older one but now with a secular basis. Quite bluntly he says that "such an effort is doomed to fail." The problem is that without an old-fashioned ethical life it seems inconceivable that there could be agreement about what constitutes a good life or what ought to be our highest aims.
Although the members of the pluralistic society cannot agree on whether football is a sin (because they can't agree whether the word "sin" has a meaning any longer) they can agree on the morality of keeping the discussion open and respecting everyone's point of view.

Habermas wants to go beyond this because anyone wanting to participate in this discussion will soon face the question of how people are to judge what, in reference to any particular practice, is the right thing to do. Okay, they must keep the discussion open so as not to sacrifice the search for truth/validity, but how are they to come to any agreement in a pluralistic society in which agreements are so hard to reach?

Habermas proposes the principle of universalisation: "A norm is valid when the foreseeable consequences and side effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion." Presumably this is derived from an interpretation of what is required by genuine respect for the other parties to the moral debate. From his clarification of the reference to coercion here, it is clear that any kind of emotive language or rhetorical arm-twisting or spin is prohibited to ensure that it is the truth (or validity based on the strongest argument) that holds sway, not, for instance, the charisma of personalities or the power of images. As he puts it, if this principle is followed, "nothing but reasons can tip the balance in favor of the acceptance of a controversial norm."

Habermas is not adamant about that particular formulation of the principle of universalisation, but he insists that some such principle will have to be adopted in order to ensure that norms capable of commanding universal agreement are selected.

Footnote: There is an excellent section from: The inclusion of the Other. Studies in Political Theory. Jürgen Habermas. MIT Press, 1998 available on the marxists.org website. It sums up perfectly the point of Habermas's communicative ethics.

The Irrelevance of Habermas's Discourse Ethic

2008-09-21T13:10:00.000+03:00

First of all it has to be admitted that there is something quite neat about the discourse ethic. It very neatly fits the Kantian concern with the universalisability of our norms into a modern understanding of truth as socially and historically mediated. However, despite the neat updating of Kantian morality and despite the way the discourse ethic is able to make connections with a contemporary democratic and human rights discourse, there is still so much that makes it ethically irrelevant.

First of all there is the practical irrelevance of the principle of universality when people actually discuss moral issues. As Habermas points out, the discussion always relies on a background of shared beliefs and this means that on most, if not all, substantive moral issues it will be impossible to reach agreement with everyone who might have an opinion about the matter. Hence, for a decision to actually be reached some points of view will have to be disregarded. In practice boundaries have to be drawn, meaning that we specifically do not seek the agreement of everyone.

Furthermore, Habermas's universality is not as universal as it might at first appear. He acknowledges that the discourse ethic says nothing that would unsettle those who still belong to traditional ethical communities. As he puts it: "To be sure, structural features of communicative forms of life alone are not sufficient to justify the claim that members of a particular historical community ought to transcend their particularistic value-orientations and make the transition to the fully symmetrical and inclusive relations of an egalitarian universalism." So the pluralist is not looking for the agreement of anyone who still feels bound to a traditional way of life. The all important debate is a debate for commited pluralists - a debate which will inevitably involve dismissing the views of dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists for whom the principle of universality can not yet mean very much.

Another feature of the discourse ethic that renders it well-nigh irrelevant is its formalism. By simply describing the ideal form of a moral debate it cuts itself off from saying anything whatsoever about substantice moral issues. Most of those who are concerned about morality in the modern world are probably concerned with the withering of ethical life - the way in which morality is becoming increasingly irrelevant. This is one of many trends that those who are concerned about morality might well want to criticise. In relation to these concerns the discourse ethic is completely irrelevant.

One of the advantages of the discourse ethic for Habermas is its neutrality. Only a neutral principle (one that is all form and no content) can provide a sure basis for consensus in a pluralistic society. The theory is also supported by a narrative of increasing universality, which is his answer to the question of how the transition to a post-traditional morality can be justified. Older forms of ethical life were limited to the family, the tribe or the city, but Kantian morality in its discursive incarnation surpasses all such limitations in the direction of a pure universality. Because in practice there is no universal community to address, the claim to universality can only be made good if the universal principles achieve neutrality, and this is what squeezes out all the substance of the culturally specific ethical life. Habermas seems to say: If the substance has to go in order to achieve universality, so be it. But for many of us it is that very lack of substance - the withering of ethical life - that is the primary issue.

It is becoming harder and harder to say anything meaningful in public about morality. Anyone who tries to speak out about the morality of short selling on the stock market, for intance, sounds like some quaint relic from the past rather than someone raising a claim to truth that must be taken seriously and debated impartially. The detailed arguments of economists about the beneficial effect of short selling on the liquidity of the markets sound much more authoritative, and these purely technical considerations completely brush aside the issue of the morality or immorality of the practice. The discourse ethic is silent here, having nothing to say about that marginalisation of a substantive matter like this.

Another reason for the irrelevance of the discourse ethic springs from the sort of rationalism entailed by the claim that norms must be agreed upon solely because of the rational force of better reasons. This just doesn't connect with, for instance, the concern about the degradation of the environment. Those concerns are based not on some kind of theoretical knowledge but on a recognition of things like the beauty of nature, the power of the sublime in nature, the value of diversity and the significance of maintaining some semblance of harmony. People have to be brought up to recognise and appreciate these values. If they don't "see" them, there won't be the necessary shared background for meaningful arguments about particular environmental policies.

Then there is the problem of the apparent irrelevance of action for the discourse ethic, even though moral discourse is all about what ought to be done. Older forms of ethical life were guided by, for instance, the hope for salvation, which helps to motivate moral action. Hopes like this are excluded from the procedural morality of discourse. Those who participate in the discourse are presumably motivated to find the truth, or something resembling it, but this is not a motivation which would then inspire action once a norm has been agreed upon. Whether or not one actually does anything seems to be completely irrelevant.

Habermas is aware of this: "uncoupling morality from questions of the good life leads to a
motivational deficit...Discourse ethics intensifies the intellectualistic separation of moral judgment from action even further by locating the moral point of view in rational discourse. There is no direct route from discursively achieved consensus to action. Certainly, moral judgments tell us what we should do, and good reasons affect our will; this is shown by the bad conscience that "plagues" us when we act against our better judgment. But the problem of weakness of will also shows that moral insight is based on the weak force of epistemic reasons and, in contrast with pragmatic reasons, does not itself constitute a rational motive. When we know what it is morally right for us to do, we know that there are no good (epistemic) reasons to act otherwise. But that does not mean that other motives will not prevail."

An example: We might have a discussion about war and decide that no war is ever moral because it is never in anyone's interest to be shot, and then we might just go home and mow the lawn while the shooting continues in some suitably distant land. There is no contradiction in believing that war is immoral and doing nothing to stop it.

Even speaking out against war seems to be pointless because that kind of speech is not directed at identifying the truth but at forcing the immoral to pay attention to the voice of morality even while they dismiss the relevance of the arguments.

Although Habermas passes over this as if it were a minor hitch, but it is surely a damning indictment of a moral theory if it makes talking about morality seem to be the only morally valuable pursuit.

Part of what makes action seem irrelevant is the absence of any concern with particulars. The discourse in question is always a discourse about generalities: "Is abortion morally acceptable?" "Is human cloning acceptable?" etc, etc. It is a discussion of the norms society is to recognise, not a discussion of what ought to be done in the particular cases that we find ourselves involved in. this is really where the greatest irrelevance of the discourse ethic becomes apparent. If I am called up to fight I must take a stance with respect to my country, the war and the reasons for it, the death and suffering that will be caused, my own possible death and the way my actions will be judged. This situation in which I have to act one way or the other is far removed from the debate about when a war might be considered just and under what circumstances.

To put it bluntly, the discourse ethic is not an ethic for life but just for the practice of talking about life. What could be more irrelevant that an ethic that has nothing to say about life?

So many of our ethical concerns are concerns with the fate of particulars caught up and abused by various social systems - they are not concerns with a lack of universality. The concerns for the environment are concerns with the fate of this very particular earth and the very particular places of value that it still has. In a similar way, we are more concerned with the disappearance of indigenous cultures than we are with the fact that so few of their beliefs could ever gain universal agreement. We are concerned about them in their particularity not as mere instances of the universal. For Habermas, though, the universality of reason is everything and the particulars pale into some prerational insignificance.

In a sense, the central moral issue of the age is the reconciliation of the social universal and particularity. Apart from the environment there are issues about the disintegration of (very particular) communities and their increasing powerlessness in the face of globalised economic forces, the increasing irrelevance of history and a loss of a sense of identity and rootedness. From the perspective of the prevailing forces of rationalisation (that insist upon the removal of distortions from an increasingly global market) these fail to register as issues that might call the rationality of a liberated market into question. Habermas's one-sided concern with universality affirms this, making it irrelevant to those of us who see that there has to be some other rearticulation of the universal and the particular.

Reification and Post-Revolutionary Sex in "History and Class Consciousness"

2008-09-18T11:14:00.001+03:00

Unfortunately, Lukacs says nothing in "History and Class Consciousness" about what happens to sex once the identical subject-object of history comes onto the world stage. Will it be better?

Although Lukacs is quiet on this subject he does point out how awful the reified view of sex can be, and as an example he quotes Kant's comments about marriage:

"Sexual community", says Kant, "is the reciprocal use made by one person of the sexual organs and faculties of another . . . marriage ... is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for' the duration of their lives."

Here is the reified fragmentation of the subject (the person signing the marriage contract and claiming possession of various kinds of property) and the object (the body). Sex would seem to be a merely bodily need - an urge that must be satisfied sooner or later with all the necessity of the natural laws observed by the scientist.

The question is whether the identical subject-object of history will inevitably overcome this fragmentation and also become the identical subject-object of love (assuming love combines both sex and something more mental, intellectual perhaps even spiritual). Will proletarians necessarily become better lovers? I can find nothing in "History and Class Consciousness" that implies they will.

The proletarian identity with which the new historical agents must identify utterly is a very abstract one with no connection to gender. Since the proletarian identity is the only one that matters there is plenty of scope here for excluding any more meaningful definition of the feminine and the masculine. But then the proletarian becomes indistinguishable from the Kantian. Two heroic proletarians marry to ensure that their sexual needs will not disrupt the heroic course of the proletarian revolution.

What characterises the Kantian is an instrumental approach to things that ought to be part of that organic unity that Lukacs refers to so often in the earlier sections of "History and Class Consciousness". Unfortunately a similar kind of instrumentalism seems to be implied by later sections of "History and Class Consciousness." The revolution is supposed to overcome it, but only for the proletariat considered as a whole as the proletariat ceases to be the passive object of blind market forces, industrial rationalisation and the machinations of the ruling class, becoming instead the subject of history. But since the class is everything won't individuals be treated in an instrumental way? To maintain the power of the proletariat individuals will have to make sacrifices - perhaps (heaven forbid) some individuals will have to be sacrificed. Will not the ends justify the means (especially since a defining feature of the proletariat is that they have been shorn of ideals and presumably have no commitment to the bourgeois principles that protected the rights of individuals)? Seen from the standpoint of the individual the revolution appears as the apotheosis of instrumental reason, not its overthrow.

If instrumental reason runs rampant and if gender roles pale into insignificance with the rise of a proletarian uniformity, there is little reason to think that the number of sexual Kantians will drop after the revolution.

Love and the Revolution in "History and Class Consciousness"

2008-09-18T11:14:00.000+03:00

The fact that the course of history was so different from the one envisaged by Lukacs gives some indication that something was missing from the scheme of things in "History and Class Consciousness." One of these was surely love.

We will deal with sexual love in the next post. Here the issue is love of a more political nature - like the love of the patriot. According to Lukacs' scheme of things patriotic love must be dismissed as irrational or bourgeois or counter-revolutionary. It must be dismissed because there is no place for it in the concept of the identical subject-object of history. Now there is the question of whether patriotism really is irrational, but what interests me here is more the question of whether love must not be part of the revolution.

Unfortunately Lukacs says nothing about the love of the revolutionary in "History and Class Consciousness." Revolution seems to arise as a matter of necessity as the proletariat struggles for its very survival against a ruling class that insists on squeezing more and more out of it. At a moment of crisis the working class might fight back to defend itself, but for this to spill over into a revolution that would be sustained in the way that is envisaged in "History and Class Consciousness" wouldn't people have to start to love being proletarians or revolutionaries?

In "History and Class Consciousness" it all sounds completely intellectual once the crisis forces the proletariat to fight back. The philosopher-historians in the party help the workers to understand how they are the real source of all value in capitalism whilst being treated as an expendable resource and whilst being denied any power. And the workers are also supposed to gradually understand their role as the first historical agents who are guided by an insight into the real essence of history (the insight that history is absolutely unconditioned because all categories are historical to their very core). But this is all so theoretical, however true it may be. Once the crisis is past, will the revolutionary momentum be sustained simply by the idea that now history has achieved its true form? Must there not be an affective tie to the revolutionary movement? Must we not love being proletarians? Must we not love the revolution and the situation it creates where nothing any longer seems to be solid or fixed - where everything is up for negotiation or reform or obliteration by the party?

But doesn't revolution appear to be chaotic, and is it not difficult to love revolution? There are many other things to love - things that the white heat of the revolution might jeopardize. These stand in the way of the revolution, and Lukacs would need to come up with a persuasive critique of them. He seems to say so little about them in "History and Class Consciousness" because of the assumption that the proletariat are being pushed into such a desperate situation that these other objects of love cease to be of much significance. The struggle for survival, which has to be waged collectively to match the power of the ruling class, is the only priority. But are these people who have nothing to love but the revolution the people we would want to hold up as exemplary?

Lukacs, commodification and historical nihilism in "History and Class Consciousness"

2008-09-17T16:59:00.000+03:00

Lukacs on commodification in "History and Class Consciousness"

Lukacs leaves us in no doubt about the importance of commodification. As he puts it in History and Class Consciousness (HCC): "It is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities ... [for] at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure." To clarify, he says that " the structure of commodity-relations [can] be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them."

The claim that the entire structure of society revolves around the phenomenon of commodification is a very strong one.

According to "History and Class Consciousness" commodification is the defining phenomenon of what could be called bourgeois society or capitalism. Of course commodities did not appear for the first time with capitalism. What is new with capitalism is organising society so that the highest end is the production of commodities. Other ends are pursued but only insofar as they do not interfere with the markets on which things can be commodities.

There is a second crucial feature of a society in which commodification is the universal structuring principle: the creation of a labour market in which labour also exists as a commodity. Lukacs quotes Marx: "What is characteristic of the capitalist age is that in the eyes of the labourer himself labour-power assumes the form of a commodity belonging to him. ...it is only at this moment that the commodity form of the products of labour becomes general."

One consequence of this analysis is that commodification beomes THE political issue. Hence, Lukacs says little about unpleasant working and living conditions or inequality in wages or inequality of opportunity and access to education, health care, etc. No, the top issues are the commodification of labour and the organisation of society for the production of commodities, and whatever flows from those phenomena.

Lukacs' objection to commodification

Lukacs has two objections to this in "History and Class Consciousness". Firstly, it is inhuman. This seems to imply a concern for the individual and the alienating effect of the mechanically rationalised labour process exemplified by the factory assembly line. He refers to "a mechanical existence hostile to life and a scientific formalism alien to it." And again, of the labourer he says, "he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not." He also has an interesting reference to the "journalist's 'lack of convictions', the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs" entailing that "his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic par of his personality." On the mathematical rationalisation of work processes in factories and offices he agrees with Marx that "Time is everything, man is nothing." And in relation to commodification: "this self-objectification, this transformation of a human function into a commodity reveals in all its starkness the dehumanised and dehumanising function of the commodity relation."

There are many such comments in the earlier parts of "History and Class Consciousness" where Lukacs seems to be motivated by a humanistic concern for the quality of the individual's experience of life in a capitalist society, and the comments which often include references to an organic unity that has been lost imply a retrospective view of aspects of life that need to be recovered from the pre-capitalistic past.

However, this is a misleading impression because Lukacs ends up affirming the alienating effects of both the labour market and of rationalisation in the workplace. So his real objection must lie elsewhere.

It arises out of Lukacs' underlying concern with history. More important than the alienation of individuals is the alienation of history - an alienation which might be redescribed as history not being true to itself, or as historical agents not yet understanding the true nature of history - not yet seeing that everything in society is historical. Although capitalism disrupts settled communities and frees up the historical process, the idea still prevails that there is a natural order (the market with its atomised players and its apparently natural laws of supply and demand, etc) that should not be disturbed (or distorted as Milton Friedman would have it). The objectification involved in commodification goes along with a view of society as a system governed by quasi-natural laws.

The idea that there is an economic system that can be studied scientifically and that political decisions must conform to the insights of the science of economics is the intellectual correlate of the practice of commodification. But if historical agents still see themselves as having to conform to some kind of natural order, then the historical process has not yet achieved what might be called authenticity - it is not yet for itself what it is in itself.

What is reification?

The reified view of society is one which is - for Lukacs in "History and Class Consciousness" - insufficiently historical. Instead of seeing the social as utterly historical, some aspect is assumed to be 'natural' or prescribed by some moral imperative that limits historical action.

The reified attitude treats history as if it were a part of nature, governed by laws that are not themselves historical and subject to change. This is the objectification implicit in the term 'reification'.

For there to be no reification people would clearly have to believe that there is no natural substratum to society - no natural order and no fixed rational order that might put an end to history. Although our particular society has its quasi-objective historical tendencies that historical agents need to understand and work with, these are relative to our society with its particular history and they will doubtless cease to be effective once the prevailing social order has been overturned.

What is good about capitalism?

For Marx capitalism was a necessary stage in the development of the forces of production - especially important since a liberated society requires an advanced system of automated production so that people are not obliged to spend the best part of their lives doing unfulfilling tasks in the production process. For Lukacs capitalism succeeds in producing the kind of subjectivity needed for a genuinely historical movement.

What initially appear to be the worst aspects of capitalism are, for Lukacs, the necessary preconditions for the emergence of a new class that will allow history to achieve its authentic form:

"On the one hand, this transformation of labour into a commodity removes every human' element from the immediate existence of the proletariat, on the other hand the same development progressively eliminates everything 'organic', every direct link with nature from the forms of society so that socialised man can stand revealed in an objectivity remote from or even opposed to humanity."

This might sound like a criticism but actually it is a process that Lukacs affirms. Lukacs' ideal historical agents must have no vested interests in the status quo. Hence, the value of the way capitalism destroys the settled communities that might give proletarians affective ties to a particular social order. Hence also the value of industrial labour and urban life that remove workers from the connection with the soil and the countryside felt in agricultural communities. Although some would call this alienation, according to the Lukacs scheme of things it is the liberation of subjectivity necessary for the emergence of the first authentically historical society.
Beyond this, capitalism also produces just the kind of class that will enable history to come into its own: the proletariat.

Why the proletariat?

Any authentic historical movement must have a collective subject that understands itself as such. For Lukacs, the bourgeoisie is a collective subject but it is trapped in an individualistic self-understanding. Workers, on the other hand, tend to be forced by conditions at work to see themselves in collective terms and readily see that they need to join forces in order to defend their interests.

The significance of the proletariat follows partly from the idea of history as a process of becoming. Since it is not an act of pure creation it involves both objectivity and subjectivity. We don't create ourselves anew with each generation, rather we find ourselves as objects in a process that also involves our subjectivity (the way we see ourselves and the world around us).
Lukacs' idea of the proletarian combines this moment of objectivity and subjectivity. The proletarian is an object insofar as his labour power is treated as a commodity and as something to be calculated and rationalised and fitted into a mechanistic process. The proletariat is the collective subject of the capitalistic process insofar as proletarian labour is the source of all exchange value (assuming the truth of the labour theory of value).

As Lukacs puts it in "History and Class Consciousness": "By becoming aware of the commodity relationship the proletariat can only become conscious of itself as the object of the economic process. For the commodity is produced and even the worker in his quality as commodity, as an immediate producer is at best a mechanical driving wheel in the machine. But if the reification of capital is dissolved into an unbroken process of its production and reproduction, it is possible for the proletariat to discover that it is itself the subject of this process even though it is in chains and is for the time being unconscious of the fact. As soon, therefore, as the readymade, immediate reality is abandoned the question arises: "Does a worker in a cotton factory produce merely cotton textiles? No, he produces capital. He produces values which serve afresh to command his labour and by means of it to create new values.""

Another important factor for Lukacs is that "The proletariat "has no ideals to realise." When its consciousness is put into practice it can only breathe life into the things which the dialectics of history have forced to a crisis; it can never 'in practice' ignore the course of history, forcing on it what are no more than its own desires or knowledge. For it is itself nothing but the contradictions of history that have become conscious."

If the proletariat could become conscious of itself as both the object and the subject of history, and see itself as simply realising a historical potential (as opposed to imposing an ideal on the historical substratum) then it would be the first subject in history with "an adequate social consciousness." In his famous phrase it would become the "identical subject-object of history" - one that understands society as thoroughly historical (with no natural substratum) and one that is capable of changing society in accordance with historical tendencies.

History would then be "uncontaminated by any trace of reification", allowing "the process-like essence to prevail in all its purity" - and this is the process which "should represent the authentic, higher reality."

A critique of Lukacs

The standard criticism - which Lukacs also made in 1967 looking back at what he had written in "History and Class Consciousness" - is that he failed to distinguish between reification and objectification. In a nutshell, the objectification involved in having your own house, for instance, is an essential part of human self-realisation, whereas reification only refers to alienating forms of self-objectification.

For me this is too much of a technical issue. The more disturbing issue comes out when I try to imagine what Lukacs' proletariat would do. An authentically Lukacsian proletariat would have to overthrow the bourgeois order because it allows blind market forces to shape social life. But once the negation is taken care of what might give them a positive orientation?

The proletariat are to have no ideals, which presumably includes principles of justice. They are to have no vested interests in or attachments to the prevailing order: property, savings in pension funds, entitlement to health care, kids in schools that they don't want to disrupt, etc. They must presumably value their identity as proletarians of the world over and above their local identities as family members and neighbours, for instance, implying that local ties lose their value. They must also have lost any deep feeling for nature, partly because urban industrial life has cut them off from it but also because they have learnt that nature is an utterly social and historical category and not something that might be a source of value standing in a critical relationship with the urban industrial order - as it does for the utterly unLukacsian Romantic ramblers.

With no ties to anything and with no feeling for something other than the alienating industrial order, and with no ideals beyond the idea of history at last gathering momentum and sweeping all before it, what is there to fight for?

Lukacs says there will be some quasi-objective historical tendencies that the proletariat will instinctively want to realize. But what will they be if the proletariat has nothing positive to defend?

This is where objectivity becomes a problem. The supposedly identical subject-object of history seems to have no genuine feel for objectivity. Commodification - the only form of objectification that has really come into view - is seen as a living contradiction that must be overcome in practice. Doesn't that overcoming, though, seem as if it would just be an annulment? Doesn't it seem as if the inevitable historical tendency of an authentic Lukacsian subject of history would be to revolt against anything that tried to fix or settle or root that revolutionary subjectivity? And since the proletariat must act as the proletariat to fulfil its historical destiny, must it not turn its revolutionary energies against any expression of eccentric individuality and against anyone who suggests that the claims of the proletarian collectivity need to be balanced against the claims of individuals, families, neighbourhoods, regions and other lesser collectivities?

At the time Lukacs was writing it was still possible to imagine immiserated proletarians with nothing to lose but their chains identifying utterly with their economic class. But why think that this provides a model for the desired reconciliation of the individual and society? And after the revolution when there is no longer the historical force of capital to struggle against and unite against, what forces will have to be put in place to ensure that individuals put aside their individuality and maintain the unity of the new historical subject?

What about our feelings for others and for nature? Do these have no cognitive significance whatsoever? Are they to be dismissed as bourgeois - as reactionary?

The prospect of a global levelling - of, for instance, the disappearance of the last traces of pre-modern, rural communities - is thoroughly unpleasant. Isn't this feeling for the value of difference and variety a source of insight? Of course nature is a social and therefore historical category, but can't certain experiences of nature throw a critical light on other cultural assumptions and practices?

The image of rootless Lukacsian proles with no feeling for anything but the white heat of history is a very disturbing one.

In contrast to this, the great strength of Adorno's work is the way it does justice to the experiences of alterity that call into question not only the bourgeois order but also the kind of revolutionary nihilism that we see in Lukacs.

Man as Ox

2008-09-03T11:27:00.000+03:00

Myth and Enlightenment among the Nuer

A few years before the Dialectic of Enlightenment was published E E Evans-Pritchard brought out his description of the life of the Nuer - a collection of tribes living in the Sudan. It is an interesting reference point in a reconsideration of the mythic pole of the dialectic of the Enlightenment.

Evans-Pritchard, who had spent long periods with the Nuer in the mid 1930s, described a pastoral culture that was remarkable for its obsession with cattle, and when people talk about commodity fetishism or any other modern fetishism it is worth remembering the ox fetishism of the Nuer. He says that the Nuer were often morose, but at the mention of an ox that changed completely and they began speaking with enthusiasm (p38). He also confesses: "I used sometimes to despair that I never discussed anything with the young men but live stock and girls, and even the subject of girls led inevitably to that of cattle." (p19) Although game in the area was abundant, they had little interest in hunting, preferring instead to devote their energies to caring for herds of cattle, leaving the dairy work to women and the responsibility for herding to men. A family's herd was its pride and its treasure and all the significant stages of life were marked by the transfer or sacrifice of cattle. They even preferred to be called by the names of their favorite oxen.

Evans-Pritchard vividly describes what he calls the symbiotic relationship between the Nuer and their cattle and the intimacy of that relationship:

"They build byres, kindle fires and clean kraals (pens) for their animals' comfort; move villages to camps, from camp to camp, and from camps back to villages, for their health; defy wild beasts for their protection; and fashion ornaments for their adornment... and compose songs about them."

The Nuer "drink the milk and blood of the oxen, sleep on ox hides beside fires of burning ox dung. They cover their bodies, dress their hair and clean their teeth with the ashes of cattle dung, and eat their food with spoons made from their horns." They also "wash their hands and faces in the urine of the cattle." And while the oxen are being milked they will sit contemplating them and admiring them because "no sight fills a Nuer with contentment and pride as his oxen." (p37)

This intimacy begins from the earliest stages of childhood. Children that can still only crawl have the kraal (pen) as their playground "and they are generally smeared with dung in which they roll and tumble."(p38)

Although the oxen were periodically killed for food it was considered shameful to kill one solely to satisfy hunger, unless there was a famine. There had to be a proper excuse to sacrifice an animal - there had to be a ceremony or at least a spirit to be honoured.

And after reading Evans-Pritchard's account of the Nuer in the 1930s I am left wondering how that description could fit into Adorno's dialectic of the Enlightenment. Perhaps the question is: In what sense is this mythic world already Enlightenment? In other words: what is its rational content?

There are many insights that could be grouped together and called the wisdom of the Nuer - things such as the techniques they developed for dealing with the plagues of mosquitoes in the wet season. But this is not something that Adorno would say is of philosophical interest. Instead of particular insights and pieces of wisdom Adorno is more interested in the nature of subjectivity. In relation to this it is the identification between people and animals that is the most interesting. The Nuer subject sees himself in the ox. The wish that his friends call him by the name of his favorite ox is especially significant. Of course there is absolutely no philosophical understanding of what is going on here but it is important that consciousness sees itself in the object.

The identification here is not one that could be summed up by the proposition: "We are all animals." It is an identification that involves the emotions and that puts the individual into an affective relationship with a particular ox, not with oxen or animals in general - with the mere idea of oxen or animals. There is here a unity - a belonging together - of the subject and object that needs to be remembered and juxtaposed to the later rupture.

According to A&H the (unredeemed) Enlightenment denigrated the mythic consiousciousness for its anthropomorphism - the projection onto nature of the subjective.(DofE p6) But for Adorno this critique, while not wrong, ignores the unity of the subject and object in the mythic world, which is a thing of immense value.

Is the Nuer view, though, anthropomorphic? Doubtless it has many anthropomorphic elements, but they standout less than the oxomorphism in their self-understanding. It is not so much that they see the world in terms that are too human, but that they undertand themselves in terms that are so very oxen.

Fear seems to play a significant role in A&H's historical account - a reading of the primitive past that apparently owes something to Vico. Horkheimer had written the following in an earlier work: "According to him [Vico], myth emerged as a reaction of fear to overpowering natural forces. Humans project their own essence onto nature, that is, natural forces appear to them from the beginning as living beings wholly similar to themselves, except that they are stronger..." But in the society described by Evans-Pritchard there is little trace of a fear of overwhelming natural forces even though life in Sudan can hardly have been easy.

Commodification in Marxist Theory #1

2008-08-29T10:16:00.000+03:00

Does it not strike you as a little odd that talk of commodification has been so prominent - so fundamental - in the Marxist tradition? Surely most people who are attracted to Marxism begin with the judgment that working people are being exploited and treated unfairly. But in the works of Marx and Lukacs, for instance, talk about exploitation and unfairness seems less central than talk about commodification. This can certainly seem odd so here we want to go back to Max's writings and later those of Lukacs to look again at what is said about commodification to try to figure out why it is given such prominence.

First we recap what Marx says about commodities in the earliest sections of Capital.

Commodities and their effect on labour

In the first chapter of volume one of Capital Marx describes what a commodity is. It is something which can be exchanged for other things on the market - something which thereby has an exchange value. Marx then distinguishes between the seemingly obvious appearance of that exchange value and its deeper, concealed truth.

At first sight exchange values appear to be completely arbitrary. Marx, however, argues that if we look at the matter more closely we will see that all commodities have a property that explains their particular exchange values: the labour power that has been invested in them.
At first sight, of course, there is no such thing as labour power (in general); there are different forms of work done by people with different skills. But again, if we remain at this level, it seems arbitrary that the labour of the plumber is worth so much more than the labour of the hack writer. Marx, however, insists that appearances are - once again - deceptive. Beneath the superficial differences there is "human labour in the abstract".

Marx isn't simply making a blunt assertion that there is such a thing. Rather he is arguing that there must be such a thing in order to explain the phenomenon of exchange value. If there weren't human labour in the abstract, then exchange values would really be as arbitrary as they first appear. So: whether we realize it or not, when we exhange commodities and think about their exchange value we are necessarily disregarding the fact that the things in question are (also) the products "of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour." (Just so that there is no confusion (because this is a bit confusing): When we exchange so much thread for a wooden stool we necessarily ignore the different kinds of labour expended by the spinner and the joiner, and focus instead on roughly equal quantities of some abstract form of labour that both the spinner and the joiner have expended in producing their goods.)

Since exchange value is numerical there has to be a way of quantifying the abstract human labour that accounts for it. And, says Marx, there is: the duration of the labour expended. So: commodities that can be produced using the same number of labour hours (not Marx's term) will have the same exchange value.

A qualification Marx makes: In practice, this can be very different from the time it actually took the labourer to make something because what counts in the market is the number of socially necessary labour hours. As an example Marx mentions the introduction of power looms after which the value of the cloth produced by hand looms dropped dramatically. Mechanisation had lowered the amount of socially necessary labour time and so lowered the exchange value of the product regardless of the fact that some producers were still expending a heck of a lot more time without any added reward.

Marx is laying the groundwork here for a scientific study of the economy. If exchange values are functions of socially necessary abstract human labour measured in hours and minutes, then beneath the apparently chaotic market is a system determined by an interplay of quantifiable factors, which is what the object of a science must be.

An aside: Is it just my imagination or is there a real tension in Marx's work between railing against a fragmented society and being seduced by science so that the greater intellectual challenge seems to be to push forward the boundaries of the science of economics?

Does Marx not ignore the role of judgement?

Back to Marx's description of the scientific basis of exchange value: What if crucial estimations of value require acts of judgement? Take the art market as an example. Buyers are not even implicitly weighing up the length of time expended on the production of a work of art. In the first instance they are making judgements about how good the work of art is, and for this the amount of labour involved is really irrelevant. The question is: Is this an exception that can be ignored or is this an example of a general phenomenon on the market? Given the right marketing (which effectively alters the criteria in terms of which people judge things) brands, designer labels and the design of products generally add to their value regardless of whether or not more labour time has been expended. The same is true of organic groceries, which people are prepared to pay a premium for simply because they are judged to be better, not because the farmer must work harder when he chooses not to spray his crops.

A clarification: Marx's talk of abstract human labour only applies to commodity producing economies. The reality of human labour in commodity production is the reality of an abstraction whereas in fuedal society (which Marx refers to by way of contrast) social labour invoves a direct personal relation between lord and master.

Marx keeps referring to the way commodification conceals or mystifies the true nature of economic activity. What, though, is being concealed and why does the concealment matter?

Commodity fetishism

Marx refers to the fetishism of commodities but he isn't referring to the aura certain commodities have perhaps because they are commonly taken as status symbols. So what does he mean by commodity fetishism?

In the section entitled "The Fetishism of Commodities" Marx begins by eferring to the "mysterious" quality of commodities, which he also calls their "mystical character". The mystery is the ground of their exchange value. The reason why commodities have use values is obvious; the reason why commodities have particular exchange values is not. That is the mystery - a mystery solved finally (to Marx's satisfaction) by the "discovery" of abstract socially necessary labour time.

Marx draws an analogy between the commodity and "the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life." The fetish is something in which a thing is thought to have powers which really belong to people. The commodity is a fetish insofar as it is thought to have a quality (exchange value) which seems to have a life of its own while in truth it is really a product of the equivalence between qualitatively different forms of human labour.

In Marx's explanation of why he calls this fetishism he initially highlights the mystery of exchange value and the failure of those without the right scientific understanding to see the connection with (abstract) human labour. However, without making this crystal clear there is another aspect to the analogy. Just as religious fetishism erects a power over the believers, commodity fetishism allows the market "to rule the producers instead of being ruled by them," or as he puts it later on: "the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him."

But before we move on, what exactly did Marx mean by saying that "the relation between men assumes the form of a relation between things"? At the point where this appears (four sentences before Marx first uses the term "fetishism" in the text) he is simply reiterating the point that exchange value (which is an equivalence of things) conceals its ground in the equivalence between the different forms of labour of the two producers.

The social character of labour: the obvious and the hidden

Clearly Marx wants to say that a market economy is a form of social life at odds with itself and so he wants to highlight the conflict between individual goals and the life of the social whole. What is not clear, however, is why he goes to such lengths to identify the social character of private labour in the most obscure place: hidden beneath the quantitative form of exchange value. Wasn't it obvious from the beginning that except in the simplest societies producers labour to satisfy the wants of others in the wider society? Why rely on such a non-obvious analysis of exchange value to identify the social character of labour? In Marx's early writings he felt able to refer directly to our "species being" but now it seems we have to go on a long detour through the obscure workings of exchange value in order to appreciate our species being in a market economy. Why?

I cannot find a clear answer to this in Marx but I suspect that the following is the case: Talk of our species being - when it is intended to spark a sense of overriding solidarity - doesn't cut much ice when the differences and conflicts between individuals and groups are all too evident. However, it we buy into Marx's analysis of exchange value, we come to see that we are all, as labourers, fundamentally identical - we share the same identity as agents who expend different quantities of the same abstract socially necessary labour. Although the market sets us against each other, if we look beneath the surface with the scientific insights that Marx advances we will see that the market etablishes a (deeper?) identity - an identity which (one imagines) gave Marx grounds for hoping that the proletariat could overcome its divisions and unite as an agent of revolution.

The commodification of labour and social fragmentation

As Marx puts it: the "ultimate money form of the world of commodities ... conceals ... the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers." No worker in a factory, however much of a commodity fetishist he may be, can fail to see that labour is something social since he is certainly not alone in the factory, so Marx must have something else in mind. However, when labour is a commodity the individual can think that she works for her own ends. In truth she provides a service to society (producing the goods and services that satisfy other people's needs) but this will be ignored/concealed if what really matters is the wage (the exchange value of the labour). The social character of the labour (the needs that it satisfies and the kind of society that it helps to create/perpetuate) falls away as an irrelevant issue when people have to compete in the labour market to secure the wage that will give them the means of supporting themselves.

When Marx talks about concealment here it can seem as if what matters is that people come to appreciate the social role of their labour. Surely, though, this is not the issue here. Surely what matters here is the split between the individual and the social whole. The labour market forces me to look after number one, especially in an economy where there is a continual threat of unemployment. I might even realize the social role my labour plays when I am lucky enough to find paid work, but I can't afford to pay much attention to it because I must simply do what has to be done to postpone my return to the dole queue. Although the word "contradiction" has long been a terrible cliché amongst Marxists it is tempting to talk here of a contradiction between the private ends I am forced to pursue and the social role that I perform in doing so. Whether or not this deserves to be called a contradiction it certainly indicates an unreconciled relationship between the individual and society.

The fact that this is the real issue here (and not simply tearing through another veil of mystification) is evident in an oddly utopian moment at the end of the first chapter of Capital in which Marx pencils in the barest outline of a society in which the individual and the social whole are reconciled. in this utterly unscientific moment Marx describes "a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community." There are two aspects here. Firstly, individuals are consciously and willingly social: they see their labour as a social service instead of unwittingly doing a social service while only having their private ends in view. Secondly, the organisation of society becomes something that is consciously deliberated and planned. Instead of allowing an unconscious play of forces in the market play a determining role, society gathers itself up and takes charge of its historical development.

A labour theory of equality

Marx clearly had in view a harmonious unification of humanity. This presupposes a strong notion of human equality. What is interesting is that Marx felt this was to be found in the phenomenon of labour. For liberals it is enough to insist that we are born equal and for philosophers it is enough to assume that we are equal bearers of rationality or equal participants in language, but Marx felt he had to look elsewhere. Why?

If the concern from his earliest writings is really the reconciliation of individual and society, then it makes sense for him to devote most of his attention to the sphere of social activity that sets individuals against each other and undermines the basis for a more meaningful social life, and in practice it is not reason or language that sets us against each other but the economy - a market economy in which we are forced, whether we like it or not, to look after number one.
It might have been the case that the market economy is simply a social catastrophe but it seems that Marx saw in it the seeds of what ought to replace it. Hence his rather complicated analysis that claims to find a concealed and more fundamental identity beneath the social antagonism.

Marx's attitude to abstractions

Marx brings out the difference between exchange value and use value and emphasizes the abstract, relational character of exchange values. He also describes the way that (on his account) the market really does reduce qualitatively different forms of labour to comparable quantitites of abstract labour. By comparison he describes a feudal society in which the social relations between individuals are still personal relations (unlike the mystified social relations that are the obscure substratum of exchange value in a market society) and it can sometimes seem as if the mystifying abstractions of the market society are as bad as capitalist exploitation - abstractions that will have to be thrown off in any meanginful revolution so that we can get back to spontaneous relations between individuals in all their particularity.

But is Marx really anti-abstraction? Surely the thrust of the argument is that we ought to be embracing the abstraction and setting aside our differences once and for all. As the market spreads it establishes a real (albeit concealed) equality. Although this is an abstraction it is a real abstraction (not just a figment of our imagination) and one that must be affirmed if we are to make any further progress.

When Marx very briefly sketches his utopia he mentions that in the early stages at least it is likely that "the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence [will be] determined by his labour time." Now this would involve exactly the same kind of abstraction as the one effected by commodification: very different kinds of labour are treated as equal and treated as equal quantities of some uniform, abstract labour power. So it is clearly not abstraction as such that is at issue here for Marx.

Reactionary Thoughts About Marriage

2008-08-27T16:06:00.000+03:00

1 Hindu marriage vowsApparently the Hindu makes a series of vows during the marriage ceremony: one to work to financially support the family, another to have children and a third to treat each other with respect.

All very traditional. All so very quaint.

To the Hindu, though, there must be a reasonably clear answer to the question: What is it to be a good husband?

Is there an answer for the post-modernist? If not, is there not something lacking? Something important.

2 Igbo initiation into manhood
Among the Igbo of Nigeria manhood must involve marriage and this must involve childrearing. Celestine A Obi tells us that the ambition of becoming a father is so essential it is built into some of the Igbo names. One name: Nwabu-uwa apparently means: a child is all the world to me.

Manhood though is something that boys must be initiated into in the right way. Celestine describes the process like this: "As soon as a boy comes to the age of reason, he undergoes a civic juvenile test by which ho is initiated into the juju cult by iba nammuo (the walk to the spirit land). By this ceremony ho is initiated into the secrets of "egwugwu" and told of "ana-be-mmuo". These are secrets which he can never reveal to anyone of the female sex nor to the yet uninitiated of his own sex."

There are secrets one must keep from one's wife. Is there not a great deal of wisdom in this? And is the essence not: a certain distance - a certain sense of propriety - must be maintained. One must be a man for one's wife. One must certainly not lose one's sense of self - one's sense of difference. Is there not something terribly flaccid and unwholesome in the desire to merge, to disappear and have no secrets?
Oh, the wisdom of the Igbo!

3 Igbo womanhood
Celestine has a lovely passage on young Igbo women:

"The girls of the village take particular pains to attract the attention of eligible young men and do not hesitate to advertise their personal charms. On gala days, every available ornament is brought into requisition. The girls revel in dancing and seize every opportunity of displaying their charms deliberately walking upright and chest-out. "Why all this show?" one would be inclined to ask. You would not blame them, if you understood the motive. This is the time for a silent but vigorous campaign for a good husband. This ambition glows fervently inside every girl and restlessly demands an urgent satisfaction before the teeming full and pointing breasts sag and bow to age."

The Igbo (as they were, doubtless) fuse the sex drive, the desire to marry and the desire to raise children. The most primitive drives are still one with the central social roles.
How odd that seems from the perspective of one for whom marriage felt like an empty formality, like some feudal relic, and the thought of having children only arrived at an age at which most Igbo contemporaries would have become grandparents.

What a tremendous fragmentation of passion and social imperatives we now have. Not that there is a lack of social life, of socialising (and the Igbo with their separation of girls and boys were probably not the best at socialising) but the Igbo integration of individual desires and the dictates of the social whole (which, at the very least, needs children for its perpetuation) has been shattered.

It seems that this split is not accompanied by any psychic incision that might be painful and difficult to live with. At most there is, on the one hand, a certain confusion about gender roles (and what does it mean nowadays to be a man now that roles have become either stereotypes or lifestyle choices?) and, on the other hand, an appreciation of the demographic facts of the matter that birth rates in the West are declining and pension and health systems are heading for a crisis.
(Check out Celstine's work at http://codewit.com/igbomarriage.php)

Economics at Gunpoint

2008-08-27T16:03:00.000+03:00

A decade too late, I have just come across a translation of Bourdieu's essay on the essence of neoliberalism first published in Le Monde in which he emphasizes that the neoliberal project, which misleadingly presents itself as a hightened concern for personal freedom, is an attempt to make reality conform to the dictates of science. The free market, where precisely quanitifable factors interact in a predictable way, is a purely theoretical model far removed from any hitherto existing social reality. The hope is, though, that social reality can finally be made to conform to the theoretical construct, thereby validating the theory (although there was never any doubt about its validity) and giving social life the rationality it had always lacked.

Critics of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" insisted that the terrible upheavals she lists were merely accidents of history miss the point that the neoliberal attempt to make reality fit the theory is inevitably violent. Communities will have to be torn apart; the old certainties will have to be discarded; people will have to learn to live without an older sense of security; and people will inevitably be shot as they try to cross international borders illegally in an effort to escape crippling poverty.