The three line refutation of the claim that the war in Iraq, if meant to achieve something by showing an example, was also terrorism by straightforward definition.
1) All politics means to send messages to general publics of one sort or another through example.
2) All terrorism is certainly politics, but all politics is certainly not terrorism.
3) The war in Iraq was meant to demonstrate power. Which is not terroristic, since terrorism intends to seed panic by a chain of gut reactions, not to demonstrate anything through
the rational means of example. The war in Iraq was also meant to secure commercial interests. Which is not terroristic, since terrorism is by definition a deformation of the political landscape by violent means which cannot be expected to predict its own consequences by anybody who doesn't believe in a peculiarly methodical and precise form of politico-historical prophesy. Thus it cannot be a rational attempt to secure any interests, but only to bring down a status quo. The goal of our era's terrorism is to bring down the American world order, which is commonly held to be the cause of the contemporary form of capitalism. This, by the way, I consider the fallacy of presuming the chief proponent of an action to be the cause of its existence and success in the situation he/she/it acts upon. It is at least as sensible, and far more scientific, to hypothesize that the situation elects the leading country, not the leading country the situation.
In other words, the comparison is a simple case of confusion of a sub-class with the class to which it belongs. Now the people making this comparison are not all incapable of seeing that. Instead, they have a stubborn will to take their discernment as far as the observation of parrallels between oneself and others, which is indeed the first step of all good reasoning, and not a centimeter further. This is manifest in their relative level of demosntrated sophistication and the sheer unlikelihood of such numbers of people committing so great an error. No self-selection process is precise enough to facilitate that, and by the same token group error is not individual error writ large, the thought of the group not a mere aggregate.
Why would anyone have such will? I hypothesize that it has something to do with the two forms of universalism; universalism in consideration of one fellow man, or the abolition of in-groups based on any criterion at all and universalism of logical method. The dirty truth is that, beyond the first step of drawing parrallels between what one sees from within and what one sees from without, this universalism of logical method fails miserably. Every science, every branch of knowledge has its method, its own epistemology. The only thing uniting all good thinking is the ability to overcome one's initial subjective bias, whether one calls it self-interest, ignorance, or perspective, to arrive at objectivity that includes a human element derived from one's own experience. Beyond that, to think you must actually think through a situation, not apply a method. But it is individuals who think, not collectivities. Therefore, the public belief represents only that fraction of thought that is mere application of an algorithm, that is impersonal, that is brainless, and that is hence UNIVERSAL. Therefore, towards such simplistic ideas as all the 'us'es really being like all the 'thems' does group-think or mob think tend. The two forms of universalism are united in democratic discourse with no framework. Universalism of interpersonal consideration leads for purely technical reasons to logical universalism, the thought process that always terminates one step into the game and hence tries to make it a giant step.
Deomocracy must deal with the so-called paradox of having a universal voting procedure without a universalist mentality, or perish. It is not actually a paradox of any sort; democratic institutions are statistical decision procedures that relies on no particular psychological condition, as everybody knows. Only the claim that it takes a democratic, that is a universalist, mentality for the democracy to long endure makes the idea of stable democratic regimes with in-groups an impossibility. But where is the proof of this claim? Away with the revivalists and their demand for the real, that is pornographic, version of democracy. It will lead only to the big death of democracy after everybody has had their little deaths watching mentalities appear to mirror the political procedures they are constrained by.
So, then, what do I personally think of the Iraq war? That expression contains two words, Iraq, and war. Of the war, I think that it was exemplary action demonstrating that the United States would not tolerate local dictators speaking for populations, calling themselves the stewards of culture, monopolizing industries against foreign competition to gain the support of the populace, and, yes, standing in the way of our interests securitary and other. That it would not allow the wills of individuals to become obscure and illegible under the cover of archaic group mentality. That it would export individualism, the only true form of humanism, at any cost in lives. Of the choice of battlegrounds? Clearly, the war had to be (a) diplomatically justified by overt roguery, not quiet oppression alone. (b) partially reimbursed by something or other, (c) in Muslim territory, (d) waged against an actual country, (e) waged in a place wealthy enough for the example of democratization, individualism, and capitalism to be good advertisement. This leaves essentially one country, which happened to be Iraq.
It was a war of choice. Which means a distinction has to be made between the cause of the war being waged at all and the cause of the choice of battleground. There is really no doubt that the latter was inspired by commercial interests. But there is considerable doubt that a trillion dollar war effort jeopardizing the United States's diplomatic security in myriad ways could have been thought by anybody at any time to be profitable. It just isn't, and wasn't ever reasonably so considered. Now there are two other claims, which though incompatible, are frequently associated to the overall profit claim. 1) The particular profit claim, in two variants (a) the war was waged for the profits of a few with indifference to the well-being of the many. (b) the war was waged for the profit and economic status of the few, with deliberate intention of lowering the welfare of the many for the stroking of the comparative ego of the few. These claims are inherently more difficult to refute, because nobody really knows at this point, if they ever will, who was who, who stood to profit, and who actually has. But they defy common sense, because nobody knows better than the rich few that the effects of war are unpredictable for the distribution of wealth (claim B) and if anything tend to shake it up rather than fossilize it. And since it is unpredictable, claim A amounts to a variant of the general American welfare explanation.
Then there is the considerably more serious allegation of a bid for political power by a party, from re-elecion to far beyond. Well, yes, that's grim, and difficult to prove or disprove. It is also life. People wage war for the gain of their faction. Always have. Always will. Anybody who tells you whatever side or faction isn't doing it now just plain would never do it hasn't thought through the grim and inescapable nature of power. But, alongside this 'explanation', there is that other fact that no war or other political action, the work of power to maintain power all of them, is without it's official justification; which is written down; which is passed along; which outlives every instance of the power principle, each of them necessarily excessively ephemeral; and which is believed in by future generations, who only have their parents' words, not their always illegible motivations. And consequently, there is nothing deluded about paying attention to stated motivations, to justifications, which are in the end what persists, the stuff that history is made of. It's judgement, if we may so speak, will be very different from that of the global multitude.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
A Very Brief Critique of Judgement, aka Patriarchy
The best way to ensure that your opinion is received is to present it as an assumption underlying both sides of a debate which is heard loudly enough to be considered definitory of the issues of a day. Because people's ideas of the options they have concerning aspirations, ideals, beliefs about the world, etc. are largely defined by debate, what both sides agree on seems to bootstrap itself into the status of a fact. Therefore, there is no more powerful weapon in the world than fake debate. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, but beware of it.
This is exactly what happens in the suddenly renewed debate about which class should rule. Anyone who believes in liberal capitalism should answer very loud and clear; none. You should be able to compete with your dollars, and there should be no ruling class whose presumably coherent vision defines reality. Shared virtue and shared facts are both enemies of a real open society. Therefore, the sides in the debate, since debate we will, should not understand each other, should not share symbols they both wish to appropriate, and should not even share a common language in any way shape or form. What they should share is law, and law alone; the precise opposite of the new narrative and new unified ideals of a certain sitting president.
The only way for the battle never to be won is for no one to agree what it is about. Blood is not spilt at the battle of Waterloo without the enemies being in the same place, and likewise, the only way of ensuring peace in this world is for there to be no conceptual Waterloo. No Kingdom of heaven, no true democratic paradise, no real America. It is bad enough to have to deal with physical wars that kill people only to result in the punitive rule of one party. We should not make sure we all understand each other, and in addition subject ourselves to ideological war that results in the victory and ossification of one group that deems it right and just to pass necessarily ignorant judgement on the substance of another. When historians look back at how exactly America functioned internally in that confusing twentieth-century, they will say something analogous to what today's historians say now about how exactly medieval peasants managed to live under a nonsensical ontology; they didn't think about it. Americans back in the twentieth century didn't think about whether their group really fit in in the country. They did not secretly hate each other, however lacking the medium to express it openly and battle it out. They just didn't think about those things any more than a peasant in the middle ages thought about whether the priest really was a representative of God or whether that transubstantiation really happened.
While this vision of both historical periods mentioned is surely a simplistic exagerration, while there were surely cracks beneath the veneer all along, the principle remains that stable regimes depend not on shared values or their cruder parents selection and interpretation of facts, but on an omission, the omission of certain questions being asked. Since I have little reverence for the good old middle ages, I emphasize that this is an objective hypothesis concerning systematic stability, not a judgement concerning happiness, harmony, equality, or 'fairness.' It just so happens that I do wish to defend the internal order of the late 20th century American scene, its brand of stability being one I think better on than chaos. Many are those who say exploitation abroad underlay this system, and that speaking of it thus its internal order is a futile exercise. This would only be valid in my eye if the system had been more exploitative than other systems with its' particular capabilities of exploitation, or more obsessed with growth and income than others in its technological and international situation. Since for this I find less than no evidence from the history of European colonialism under less tolerant, more patriarchal states, which also functioned on growing income and a range of external practices ranging from exploitative trade to outright theft. And the early evidence on this beginning of a new patriarchal era under the watchful eye of the beloved Obama, who gives you a slogan you can believe in and proceeds to fill in his preferred meaning once he's reeled you, don't seem to indicate any decline in the economic war of all nations against all nations and the use of all weapons available to each nation in the said conflict. In his program of reconciliation, Obama makes exactly those moves that befit a new patriarch; allying himself with the old ones. What we have on our hands is no international peace, but a nefarious reallignment.
....
If a certain oblivion was the secret of a functioning capitalist democracy, which, like every other social system of any stability, depends on the omission of certain otherwise obvious questions, we cannot yet praise it for stability alone. But unlike the others it just so happened to be a pluralistic tolerant system creating wealth and freedoms the likes of which the world had never seen. I propose that questioning everything is not how it got there. There had to be ommited questions for the system to function, among them whether beyond a few superficial symbols, the country really had a culture or was founded on anything at all. If that question had been asked, people would have panicked about the negative answer. Laments of living in an anarchy would have arisen and people would have sacrificed some of their freedoms just to reassure themselves there was law and order, as has been seen throughout history. A set of safeguards of unimaginable complexity I admit I don't begin to understand must have kept these questions ommited in the main. But suspension of disbelief does not last forever in this stagely world.
I cannot reasonably blame one man for the current collapse.
Even without particular care for international exploitation, some might reason that since the above admits that American capitalist democracy was just another system in history which depended on assumptions and omissions just like the others, it was not really an open society at all. Good riddance! they might say. The only trouble is that this supposes that a post-historical utopia is somehow possible. I don't know whether it is or whether it isn't, but unimaginable numbers have died unsucessfully attempting to achieve it and no new ideology whatever can give us any reason to believe that this time everything will be different---at all. Therefore, I side with the democracy as it existed before the events of recent years that culminated in a President who wants to open a 'new dialogue' about issues we didn't use to talk about directly; a debate he intends the faction he represents to win. As the bard said, our means are ours, our ends none of our own. Noone knows who will win, but his actions ensure that the battle will be fought. An ideological battle necessitating a coherent set of assumptions that are agreed to by both sides I sincerely wish didn't have to be fought at all. Again, blogdom, what is the virtue of universally shared virtue?
There is little or no historical grounding for permanent class struggles, no matter how one defines the classes. Furthermore, there are strong logical reasons to believe that elements of every socio-economic stratum do not necessarily refuse to band together with those of others against some of 'their own' if it suits their purposes. The Hescher-Ohlin model demonstrates how in an economically rational world, one upper class's interests will be aligned with another lower class's interests, as the capitalist class of one country sees its earnings rise as the laboring class the trading country's earnings also rise, and vice-versa. This model is not only an economic gem; it is politically valuable in showing one obvious and prevalent case where our intuition of class interests just happen to be wrong. I have every reason to believe that in less traceable cases, they are equally like to be wrong. There are factions of individuals who band together in this world. Not only are the alliances no more permanent than military ones, they are not immediately visible as they exist because our a priori intuitions get in the way of seeing bizarre bedfellows.
The left believes a fine collective dictator can be found because it believes judgement works, and that that judgement need only be made unbiased no matter how injurious. A corrolary of this belief is that the facts gradually select themselves to form correct or 'fair' or at least valid values under a regime of open, involved democracy. I hope the preceeding brief and simplistic critique of any patriarchal judgement, no matter who by or how collective, casts in the readers' mind some doubt as to this thesis. The facts do not select themselves under any circumstances, and judgement is always based on certain partly arbitrary criteria that know not what they do. It is never 'correct'. We know we do not need collective judgement sizing us up to proceed in this life. What we need health, wealth, and the biological capacity for reproduction. Therefore do I argue, that as the second law of thermodynamics ensures the scientific truth of Wallace Stevens' statement that 'a great disorder is an order', intellectual chaos is the secret of political stability. May it live longer than Barack Obama's shared national pride of a particular stripe under the mantle of previously empty slogans.
This is exactly what happens in the suddenly renewed debate about which class should rule. Anyone who believes in liberal capitalism should answer very loud and clear; none. You should be able to compete with your dollars, and there should be no ruling class whose presumably coherent vision defines reality. Shared virtue and shared facts are both enemies of a real open society. Therefore, the sides in the debate, since debate we will, should not understand each other, should not share symbols they both wish to appropriate, and should not even share a common language in any way shape or form. What they should share is law, and law alone; the precise opposite of the new narrative and new unified ideals of a certain sitting president.
The only way for the battle never to be won is for no one to agree what it is about. Blood is not spilt at the battle of Waterloo without the enemies being in the same place, and likewise, the only way of ensuring peace in this world is for there to be no conceptual Waterloo. No Kingdom of heaven, no true democratic paradise, no real America. It is bad enough to have to deal with physical wars that kill people only to result in the punitive rule of one party. We should not make sure we all understand each other, and in addition subject ourselves to ideological war that results in the victory and ossification of one group that deems it right and just to pass necessarily ignorant judgement on the substance of another. When historians look back at how exactly America functioned internally in that confusing twentieth-century, they will say something analogous to what today's historians say now about how exactly medieval peasants managed to live under a nonsensical ontology; they didn't think about it. Americans back in the twentieth century didn't think about whether their group really fit in in the country. They did not secretly hate each other, however lacking the medium to express it openly and battle it out. They just didn't think about those things any more than a peasant in the middle ages thought about whether the priest really was a representative of God or whether that transubstantiation really happened.
While this vision of both historical periods mentioned is surely a simplistic exagerration, while there were surely cracks beneath the veneer all along, the principle remains that stable regimes depend not on shared values or their cruder parents selection and interpretation of facts, but on an omission, the omission of certain questions being asked. Since I have little reverence for the good old middle ages, I emphasize that this is an objective hypothesis concerning systematic stability, not a judgement concerning happiness, harmony, equality, or 'fairness.' It just so happens that I do wish to defend the internal order of the late 20th century American scene, its brand of stability being one I think better on than chaos. Many are those who say exploitation abroad underlay this system, and that speaking of it thus its internal order is a futile exercise. This would only be valid in my eye if the system had been more exploitative than other systems with its' particular capabilities of exploitation, or more obsessed with growth and income than others in its technological and international situation. Since for this I find less than no evidence from the history of European colonialism under less tolerant, more patriarchal states, which also functioned on growing income and a range of external practices ranging from exploitative trade to outright theft. And the early evidence on this beginning of a new patriarchal era under the watchful eye of the beloved Obama, who gives you a slogan you can believe in and proceeds to fill in his preferred meaning once he's reeled you, don't seem to indicate any decline in the economic war of all nations against all nations and the use of all weapons available to each nation in the said conflict. In his program of reconciliation, Obama makes exactly those moves that befit a new patriarch; allying himself with the old ones. What we have on our hands is no international peace, but a nefarious reallignment.
....
If a certain oblivion was the secret of a functioning capitalist democracy, which, like every other social system of any stability, depends on the omission of certain otherwise obvious questions, we cannot yet praise it for stability alone. But unlike the others it just so happened to be a pluralistic tolerant system creating wealth and freedoms the likes of which the world had never seen. I propose that questioning everything is not how it got there. There had to be ommited questions for the system to function, among them whether beyond a few superficial symbols, the country really had a culture or was founded on anything at all. If that question had been asked, people would have panicked about the negative answer. Laments of living in an anarchy would have arisen and people would have sacrificed some of their freedoms just to reassure themselves there was law and order, as has been seen throughout history. A set of safeguards of unimaginable complexity I admit I don't begin to understand must have kept these questions ommited in the main. But suspension of disbelief does not last forever in this stagely world.
I cannot reasonably blame one man for the current collapse.
Even without particular care for international exploitation, some might reason that since the above admits that American capitalist democracy was just another system in history which depended on assumptions and omissions just like the others, it was not really an open society at all. Good riddance! they might say. The only trouble is that this supposes that a post-historical utopia is somehow possible. I don't know whether it is or whether it isn't, but unimaginable numbers have died unsucessfully attempting to achieve it and no new ideology whatever can give us any reason to believe that this time everything will be different---at all. Therefore, I side with the democracy as it existed before the events of recent years that culminated in a President who wants to open a 'new dialogue' about issues we didn't use to talk about directly; a debate he intends the faction he represents to win. As the bard said, our means are ours, our ends none of our own. Noone knows who will win, but his actions ensure that the battle will be fought. An ideological battle necessitating a coherent set of assumptions that are agreed to by both sides I sincerely wish didn't have to be fought at all. Again, blogdom, what is the virtue of universally shared virtue?
There is little or no historical grounding for permanent class struggles, no matter how one defines the classes. Furthermore, there are strong logical reasons to believe that elements of every socio-economic stratum do not necessarily refuse to band together with those of others against some of 'their own' if it suits their purposes. The Hescher-Ohlin model demonstrates how in an economically rational world, one upper class's interests will be aligned with another lower class's interests, as the capitalist class of one country sees its earnings rise as the laboring class the trading country's earnings also rise, and vice-versa. This model is not only an economic gem; it is politically valuable in showing one obvious and prevalent case where our intuition of class interests just happen to be wrong. I have every reason to believe that in less traceable cases, they are equally like to be wrong. There are factions of individuals who band together in this world. Not only are the alliances no more permanent than military ones, they are not immediately visible as they exist because our a priori intuitions get in the way of seeing bizarre bedfellows.
The left believes a fine collective dictator can be found because it believes judgement works, and that that judgement need only be made unbiased no matter how injurious. A corrolary of this belief is that the facts gradually select themselves to form correct or 'fair' or at least valid values under a regime of open, involved democracy. I hope the preceeding brief and simplistic critique of any patriarchal judgement, no matter who by or how collective, casts in the readers' mind some doubt as to this thesis. The facts do not select themselves under any circumstances, and judgement is always based on certain partly arbitrary criteria that know not what they do. It is never 'correct'. We know we do not need collective judgement sizing us up to proceed in this life. What we need health, wealth, and the biological capacity for reproduction. Therefore do I argue, that as the second law of thermodynamics ensures the scientific truth of Wallace Stevens' statement that 'a great disorder is an order', intellectual chaos is the secret of political stability. May it live longer than Barack Obama's shared national pride of a particular stripe under the mantle of previously empty slogans.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Broadening the resource curse: a note on grain imperialism
Internautes,
This blog does not use the term imperialism lightly. But what else do you call the trend highlighted in this week's economists consisting of nouveau-riche nations buying up the best land in less-developed but better-endowed nations to establish their food security beyond the level world markets provide? This is first of all an affront to the principle of market competition for all that is the only real alternative to various styles of empire in an interconnected world. It is secondly an insult to the idea that democracy might just provide benefits to the citizens of less-affluent nations. Those who would argue that this is the only way to get green revolution productivity out of the land just aren't thinking. They may be calculating things such as the low probability that democratic regimes capable of providing the land reform and research into methods of locally implementing green revolution techniques, and creating functioning markets in commodities and labor capable of getting that land productivity for the rest of us will arise. But their assumptions are wrong, especially if they are based on the econometric methodology of calculating future probabilities based on the past course of a variable alone. This may be rather valid for the US stock market, but for the probability of enough information spreading to the global poor for them to demand better, in the middle of an internet revolution, it is dead wrong? Have not statistical expectations of people's abilities to implement self-determinacy been rather trumped in the past ten years? Peaceful elections in several African countries are but the happiest example. Calculating is not thought about politics. Thought about politics involves continual revision of assumptions after the natural fashion of any thought.
But there are better reasons to oppose this trend than just a better calculation of how likely the green revolution is to get implemented under the policy as opposed to without the policy; and note that the policy does not guarantee any sort of success at this goal. This latest episode in the periodic starvation due to overpopulation scare of post-Malthusian history is essentially communistic. Governments decide what they need and get others to grow it for them. Those of us who think the market allocates resources better than government should be weary of being told just how much rice China or Qatar 'needs' for its ill-defined security or why grain is 'more important' than rubber or coffee or tobacco or some other apparent luxury. If these nations want to contribute to our food security, why don't they work on annual-perrenial hybrids? That is one of the promising avenues of American research into dealing with land-exhaustion, fertilizer-depletion, and behind it all the need for organized energy. (Current-day fertilizer is made largely of petroleum). Why, might it just be because these nations are not actually internally capitalistic by lack of well-functioning internal markets? This blogger thinks so. The disaster of state-thought is upon us once more, and looking beyond its' own borders once more. That is what statist regimes do, point blank and simple.
The Economist is wrong to talk of this episode as at least a possible broadening of the benefits of efficient capitalism to places that don't have it. Efficient capitalism cannot be imported, as even the Bush administration acknowledged. I have outlined the inefficiency of the current method. Now I must say a word about the real method as it was employed from England to Thailand (hey, they both have neolithic tin mines too). In the real method, land to which property rights were previously vague is put in the hands of a definite owner. That much , I acknowlege, is being done under this new form of imperialism. However, the definite owner is not brought in by the government. He or she wins a land battle through ordinary legal means by virtue of local citizenship, or perhaps high legal status; no one ever said capitalism was an ethical advent in and of itself. In the real method, furthermore, 'security' in a single good for some entity is not the aim. The aim is the enrichment of the person who wins the battle, and they will grow a particular crop on it with market aims in mind. As it has actually happened, it took place when a local capital system was in place. And probably some other stuff I am missing, which also just illustrates a little law of human development; what is deliberately crafted to look exactly like a thing from the outside is as unlikely to be that thing as the Pygmalion method is to create artificial life.
When countries' reproducable resources are treated like money in the bag for the grabber just like irreproduceable subterranean cachets, the resource curse is extended beyond its natural bounds. It would be difficult to provide precise accounting of how exactly this will happen, but the idea is simple. If a foreigner starts buying up the land and paying taxes on it, those taxes become as oil revenues. The jobs on the land, if they are available by virtue of the foreign government hireing local workers rather than their own, are likely not to be part of a competitive labor market, if none outside the system is allowed to exist, and will thus their landing becomes a favor to cultivated from the foreigners. All this is exactly what the resource-cursed third world doesn't need.
But what else could one really expect a bunch of nouveau-riche nations to do than act just like the nouveau riche England and France of times past? The world is not an economically rational place, but that is no reason not to find policies to oppose this sort of historical repetition, to which mere knowledge of the thing will not yield a medicine. I'm with the left on this one. Let's start talking about human rights and international legality for displaced farmers, and stop using those terms to decry only the actions of nations of long-established wealth, whose violations are much less egregious than those of rising stars for simple, acultural reasons involving the universal historical pattern of development.
This blog does not use the term imperialism lightly. But what else do you call the trend highlighted in this week's economists consisting of nouveau-riche nations buying up the best land in less-developed but better-endowed nations to establish their food security beyond the level world markets provide? This is first of all an affront to the principle of market competition for all that is the only real alternative to various styles of empire in an interconnected world. It is secondly an insult to the idea that democracy might just provide benefits to the citizens of less-affluent nations. Those who would argue that this is the only way to get green revolution productivity out of the land just aren't thinking. They may be calculating things such as the low probability that democratic regimes capable of providing the land reform and research into methods of locally implementing green revolution techniques, and creating functioning markets in commodities and labor capable of getting that land productivity for the rest of us will arise. But their assumptions are wrong, especially if they are based on the econometric methodology of calculating future probabilities based on the past course of a variable alone. This may be rather valid for the US stock market, but for the probability of enough information spreading to the global poor for them to demand better, in the middle of an internet revolution, it is dead wrong? Have not statistical expectations of people's abilities to implement self-determinacy been rather trumped in the past ten years? Peaceful elections in several African countries are but the happiest example. Calculating is not thought about politics. Thought about politics involves continual revision of assumptions after the natural fashion of any thought.
But there are better reasons to oppose this trend than just a better calculation of how likely the green revolution is to get implemented under the policy as opposed to without the policy; and note that the policy does not guarantee any sort of success at this goal. This latest episode in the periodic starvation due to overpopulation scare of post-Malthusian history is essentially communistic. Governments decide what they need and get others to grow it for them. Those of us who think the market allocates resources better than government should be weary of being told just how much rice China or Qatar 'needs' for its ill-defined security or why grain is 'more important' than rubber or coffee or tobacco or some other apparent luxury. If these nations want to contribute to our food security, why don't they work on annual-perrenial hybrids? That is one of the promising avenues of American research into dealing with land-exhaustion, fertilizer-depletion, and behind it all the need for organized energy. (Current-day fertilizer is made largely of petroleum). Why, might it just be because these nations are not actually internally capitalistic by lack of well-functioning internal markets? This blogger thinks so. The disaster of state-thought is upon us once more, and looking beyond its' own borders once more. That is what statist regimes do, point blank and simple.
The Economist is wrong to talk of this episode as at least a possible broadening of the benefits of efficient capitalism to places that don't have it. Efficient capitalism cannot be imported, as even the Bush administration acknowledged. I have outlined the inefficiency of the current method. Now I must say a word about the real method as it was employed from England to Thailand (hey, they both have neolithic tin mines too). In the real method, land to which property rights were previously vague is put in the hands of a definite owner. That much , I acknowlege, is being done under this new form of imperialism. However, the definite owner is not brought in by the government. He or she wins a land battle through ordinary legal means by virtue of local citizenship, or perhaps high legal status; no one ever said capitalism was an ethical advent in and of itself. In the real method, furthermore, 'security' in a single good for some entity is not the aim. The aim is the enrichment of the person who wins the battle, and they will grow a particular crop on it with market aims in mind. As it has actually happened, it took place when a local capital system was in place. And probably some other stuff I am missing, which also just illustrates a little law of human development; what is deliberately crafted to look exactly like a thing from the outside is as unlikely to be that thing as the Pygmalion method is to create artificial life.
When countries' reproducable resources are treated like money in the bag for the grabber just like irreproduceable subterranean cachets, the resource curse is extended beyond its natural bounds. It would be difficult to provide precise accounting of how exactly this will happen, but the idea is simple. If a foreigner starts buying up the land and paying taxes on it, those taxes become as oil revenues. The jobs on the land, if they are available by virtue of the foreign government hireing local workers rather than their own, are likely not to be part of a competitive labor market, if none outside the system is allowed to exist, and will thus their landing becomes a favor to cultivated from the foreigners. All this is exactly what the resource-cursed third world doesn't need.
But what else could one really expect a bunch of nouveau-riche nations to do than act just like the nouveau riche England and France of times past? The world is not an economically rational place, but that is no reason not to find policies to oppose this sort of historical repetition, to which mere knowledge of the thing will not yield a medicine. I'm with the left on this one. Let's start talking about human rights and international legality for displaced farmers, and stop using those terms to decry only the actions of nations of long-established wealth, whose violations are much less egregious than those of rising stars for simple, acultural reasons involving the universal historical pattern of development.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Why This Blog is Changing its Name
Blogdom,
There will be no new authors on this blog, contrary to the impression the change-of-name may have given you. It will be the same old goofball by pseudonym blogging at this address without authority other than that gained through argument.
But that is exactly why I feel the need for a more descriptive name. Sure, goofball has been, is, and will be going political on your ass on this blog, so the old name had some descriptive power. But the new name has better, since I live in Berkeley, the best city in speech (or argument), that is the one that attempts to found a new perfect society through words, transforming itself first through argument and then trying to spread this argument by its example; which is rather difficult, since the city remains materially a horrendously unequal, ill-kept place with staggering problems, even as it argues its way out of these statistically and economically incontrovertible facts with argument, a truth by another criterion. I disagree with most of the common arguments, the intellectual birth-right to which I am an immigrant heir, but fit in well because I too, by these philosopheme-studded political arguments and other argumentative actions, play my divergent part in founding the best city in speech; I'm just trying to change which best city that might be.
To deserve its new Platonic name, the blog will continue to promote the essentially essentialist, but unabashedly revisionist, mode of political discourse it has so far stood for. As I'm sure my vast array of imaginary readers is perfectly aware.
There will be no new authors on this blog, contrary to the impression the change-of-name may have given you. It will be the same old goofball by pseudonym blogging at this address without authority other than that gained through argument.
But that is exactly why I feel the need for a more descriptive name. Sure, goofball has been, is, and will be going political on your ass on this blog, so the old name had some descriptive power. But the new name has better, since I live in Berkeley, the best city in speech (or argument), that is the one that attempts to found a new perfect society through words, transforming itself first through argument and then trying to spread this argument by its example; which is rather difficult, since the city remains materially a horrendously unequal, ill-kept place with staggering problems, even as it argues its way out of these statistically and economically incontrovertible facts with argument, a truth by another criterion. I disagree with most of the common arguments, the intellectual birth-right to which I am an immigrant heir, but fit in well because I too, by these philosopheme-studded political arguments and other argumentative actions, play my divergent part in founding the best city in speech; I'm just trying to change which best city that might be.
To deserve its new Platonic name, the blog will continue to promote the essentially essentialist, but unabashedly revisionist, mode of political discourse it has so far stood for. As I'm sure my vast array of imaginary readers is perfectly aware.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Equality: the game
Suppose two men, two women, or a man and woman meet as equals, because they are in the same room and convention decrees they cannot use force or consensually recognized symbols of superiority to decide who is boss before either speaks. As we are all perfectly aware, they may or may not end the conversation considering themselves equals. As a matter of fact, equality in such a common situation is rare and difficult; the former fact stemming from the latter. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, we (might) all enter a conversation equals, but we do not all leave it equals.
There are two virtues to starting from this simple situation and build upon it to construct a definition of equality applicable to the human scene rather than analyze its previous uses. First, I thereby rid myself of the historical weight attached to the word and enable myself to think freely. However, I am still performing an analysis of the word as it exists in our language by my sheer use of the letters as they appear on the paper in a fashion that does not set us hunting for what alternate meanings I may be giving it. Like it or not, any analysis changes the meaning of the word it is analyzing just by being an attempted definitory use of it, and we constantly decide whether a word is being 'misused', given new meaning, on a 'know it when you see it' basis. Second, the atomic simplicity is wholly defined in such a fashion that it can be analyzed as a game in the game-theoretical sense. I call it a construction of equality and not a reconstruction because I make no claim that I am going to arrive at the word exactly as it has been used so far, which would be as pointless as trying to engineer a baby within a womb through completely artificial means. I am only trying to come up with a clean definition that passes the 'know it when you see it' litmus. It will however not pass the litmus test of those who use the word as propaganda with pre-fashioned objectives, since, even if their politics agree with mine, propagandists all claim that the meaning of a word is something, that its historical use can be summed up, to arrive at a solid foundation from which to organize fictions. As a social scientist needs the foundations of mathematics more profoundly than a natural scientist, so a propagandist needs essentialism-in-history claims more than an analyst; he doesn't have concrete material to work with.
Returning to the situation, I observe that as a game, equality only means that the definitory rather than strategic rules are the same for everybody. It is a debate as ancient as the hills whether this is 'fair', and that would depend entirely on what you mean. To avoid propaganda, I should disclose the following bias: I find the term 'fairness' to be inapplicable unless the things one is supposed to be fair to are the same in some real sense that includes their history and their likely behavior. Thus there is no fairness among humans, but only among the instruments that they use. For instance, if two men are at a lunch counter and one's dollar is rejected for a purchase while another is accepted, it is technically their dollars that have been treated unfairly. Now, whether the situation is the historically obvious one or not, both you and I, reader, know that there is, in the absence of a further story, an injustice involved. But how do we know this? Only because the two men are only known through their dollars. Instruments create the possibility of fairness. Two people cannot be compared without a situation with respect to which they are to be compared. This consequence follows also from the well-known fact that it is neither humanist nor possible to sum up what a person is, regardless of what evidence one has. What follows more uniquely from the above arguments is that the aspects of context that matter are the very instruments whose sameness the comparison actually rests upon.
But then there is no 'justice as fairness' ala Rawls, and the famed 'veil of ignorance' reproduces certain instrumental situations in our assessment of how people ought to be treated at the expense of others. And this with neither a guarantee nor even a reason to believe that the same instrumental situations are being considered by all; in which case the laws arrived at from Rawls's fair state of nature are an unthought and probably incoherent compromise. I will tackle this contentious point further elsewhere. For now, this sketch of an argument is sufficient to point out why I don't think we can make any simple appeal to what's 'really' fair without dehumanizing ourselves and others by restricting the contexts of possible humanity to certain specific games at the expense of others in a judgement. Fairness is a final condition, fit only for sizing up the dead from what we know of them. For the living, there is an infinity of extant further potential information.
Then we can say nothing at all about the 'meaning' of equality. All we can say is that it is a game theory axiom underlying an infinite class of games which nonetheless stand in a one-to-one 'ratio' to all possible games; from the standpoint of cardinality, there is no difference between the class of games that have the axiom and those that don't. Though the latter set may still be richer in possibilities we can actually think up, which is different from cardinality, the former offers no real limits to our imagination. Furthermore, since transfinite mathematics of this sort is completely paradoxical if we apply it to our numeric intuitions, it would be ludicrous to say that restricting the games of life to games with equality of players with respect to definitory rules be limiting or dehumanizing even if those without it were more 'numerous'.
This equality may or may not be a noble condition to impose upon the games we play. To answer that question, I would begin with the literal meaning of the word 'noble' and ask whether its metaphorical meanings really have complete independence from it. But this is a political philosophy post, so I won't go into that here. For me, what matters is that it is not dehumanizing like 'fairness.' This means that equality as a game-theory axiom is under investigation like anything else, but that fairness is not even a proper term for the picture, and is really only mentioned here because of previous uses of it. I am inclined to accept the virtue of equality under this minimal view as an axiom to other political values I may espouse without knowing what other adjectives apply to it.
This minimal view of equality in which it has an uninterpreted definition but no meaning, by the virtue of the infinite class of games it helps define raises many more questions than it answers. But since I happen to think it is also the best view, I will take on these questions in an abstract fashion.
Now what are the 'games' that exist? Since it does not answer the question to say that this class is also infinite, I must pretend it is finite to show it is out there. The games Gi,...,Gn that exist, I claim, and have an equality condition, are the number of 'ways' in which human beings may interact with like instruments that will be treated similarly. An instrument is anything measurable whose likeness can thus be ascertained. Banned from the best city in speech are the soul, the mind, the heart, knowledge, tradition, and the like. There is, then a reason why people complain in one way or another of the soulessness of the modern democratic state. It's supposed to be that way.
The most obvious instrument is the dollar as in the example above. Some people might say there is nothing equal about a man with 10 dollars having those dollars treated the same way as those of a man with an additional 90 dollars. But I maintain that there is, and that any proof to the contrary has to pass through the idea of fairness. Clearly, if the instruments are the relevant aspects of context, and there is an inequality in available instruments of the same type, there is a context of inequality. But since trying to remedy this inequality in practice involves making a massive judgement concerning fairness, based not on partial and limited facts but on no facts whatever, since establishing point equality in a moment would require ignoring the entirety of the past, it is the duty of the person establishing equal situations to remedy them by different means. These do not currently exist on any significant scale but are not difficult to imagine. Imagine, for instance, a city where every store had a sign on its door stating the maximum amount of money that could be spent there in one go, or situation. Those who did not have this maximum sum could not enter, because they could not there be treated as equals in negotiation. If this was all the public business of the city, it would be an equal one.
Some utopia, you may be thinking, and you would be right. This is not yet a description of a minimal implementable view of equality, but only a particular equal game that cannot sustain a society. I need to discuss also how goods are made, how workers are paid, how money is inherited. I will tackle only the last and probably the most sensitive issue. Money can be legally mandated to be inherited by children, by whoever the doner wishes to stipulate in his or her will, by the state, or by some combination thereof. The presently espoused view of equality as game demands only that there be a fair process to determine who inherits it in the sense described in the previous example. This means competition. There cannot be no-brainer inheritance to a legally stipulated party, and the parties must have like instruments. Clearly, then, either the state or individuals are out unless they can be made to yield like instruments. Therefore, if we must keep the estate tax as an economic necessity, which certainly appears to be the case, the state must somehow be represented by an individual with the same rights as everybody else in this process. His goals, though, are different. He is not acting on his own behalf, and this creates a principal-agent problem that is not so immediately solvable. Furthermore, it would be idiotic to introduce the veil of ignorance rejected above for the overall organization of society into a particular game. Society is here only the sum of games, with some of them determining the shape of future rounds of play.
What this example shows is that, if social interaction is to be composed of minimally equal games, some of these games must help shape the rules of future ones. Constitutions are necessary. The contrast in outcome between a constitutionally mandated outcome for inheritance and a locally decided one requires only the total inequality of wealth at the time of drafting and a putting it to a plebescite to be maximal. I suspect that the local versus global distinction is equally drastic in other games. Therefore, anybody who accepts my equality as a condition on games ought to think seriously and creatively about what the constitution of his or her utopia says. But he or she should do so without a 'veil of ignorance'; there is nothing either noble or necessary for equality about remembering only semantic rather than historical reality in proceeding forth, regardless of what the undefined but meaningful term noble may actually imply.
There are two virtues to starting from this simple situation and build upon it to construct a definition of equality applicable to the human scene rather than analyze its previous uses. First, I thereby rid myself of the historical weight attached to the word and enable myself to think freely. However, I am still performing an analysis of the word as it exists in our language by my sheer use of the letters as they appear on the paper in a fashion that does not set us hunting for what alternate meanings I may be giving it. Like it or not, any analysis changes the meaning of the word it is analyzing just by being an attempted definitory use of it, and we constantly decide whether a word is being 'misused', given new meaning, on a 'know it when you see it' basis. Second, the atomic simplicity is wholly defined in such a fashion that it can be analyzed as a game in the game-theoretical sense. I call it a construction of equality and not a reconstruction because I make no claim that I am going to arrive at the word exactly as it has been used so far, which would be as pointless as trying to engineer a baby within a womb through completely artificial means. I am only trying to come up with a clean definition that passes the 'know it when you see it' litmus. It will however not pass the litmus test of those who use the word as propaganda with pre-fashioned objectives, since, even if their politics agree with mine, propagandists all claim that the meaning of a word is something, that its historical use can be summed up, to arrive at a solid foundation from which to organize fictions. As a social scientist needs the foundations of mathematics more profoundly than a natural scientist, so a propagandist needs essentialism-in-history claims more than an analyst; he doesn't have concrete material to work with.
Returning to the situation, I observe that as a game, equality only means that the definitory rather than strategic rules are the same for everybody. It is a debate as ancient as the hills whether this is 'fair', and that would depend entirely on what you mean. To avoid propaganda, I should disclose the following bias: I find the term 'fairness' to be inapplicable unless the things one is supposed to be fair to are the same in some real sense that includes their history and their likely behavior. Thus there is no fairness among humans, but only among the instruments that they use. For instance, if two men are at a lunch counter and one's dollar is rejected for a purchase while another is accepted, it is technically their dollars that have been treated unfairly. Now, whether the situation is the historically obvious one or not, both you and I, reader, know that there is, in the absence of a further story, an injustice involved. But how do we know this? Only because the two men are only known through their dollars. Instruments create the possibility of fairness. Two people cannot be compared without a situation with respect to which they are to be compared. This consequence follows also from the well-known fact that it is neither humanist nor possible to sum up what a person is, regardless of what evidence one has. What follows more uniquely from the above arguments is that the aspects of context that matter are the very instruments whose sameness the comparison actually rests upon.
But then there is no 'justice as fairness' ala Rawls, and the famed 'veil of ignorance' reproduces certain instrumental situations in our assessment of how people ought to be treated at the expense of others. And this with neither a guarantee nor even a reason to believe that the same instrumental situations are being considered by all; in which case the laws arrived at from Rawls's fair state of nature are an unthought and probably incoherent compromise. I will tackle this contentious point further elsewhere. For now, this sketch of an argument is sufficient to point out why I don't think we can make any simple appeal to what's 'really' fair without dehumanizing ourselves and others by restricting the contexts of possible humanity to certain specific games at the expense of others in a judgement. Fairness is a final condition, fit only for sizing up the dead from what we know of them. For the living, there is an infinity of extant further potential information.
Then we can say nothing at all about the 'meaning' of equality. All we can say is that it is a game theory axiom underlying an infinite class of games which nonetheless stand in a one-to-one 'ratio' to all possible games; from the standpoint of cardinality, there is no difference between the class of games that have the axiom and those that don't. Though the latter set may still be richer in possibilities we can actually think up, which is different from cardinality, the former offers no real limits to our imagination. Furthermore, since transfinite mathematics of this sort is completely paradoxical if we apply it to our numeric intuitions, it would be ludicrous to say that restricting the games of life to games with equality of players with respect to definitory rules be limiting or dehumanizing even if those without it were more 'numerous'.
This equality may or may not be a noble condition to impose upon the games we play. To answer that question, I would begin with the literal meaning of the word 'noble' and ask whether its metaphorical meanings really have complete independence from it. But this is a political philosophy post, so I won't go into that here. For me, what matters is that it is not dehumanizing like 'fairness.' This means that equality as a game-theory axiom is under investigation like anything else, but that fairness is not even a proper term for the picture, and is really only mentioned here because of previous uses of it. I am inclined to accept the virtue of equality under this minimal view as an axiom to other political values I may espouse without knowing what other adjectives apply to it.
This minimal view of equality in which it has an uninterpreted definition but no meaning, by the virtue of the infinite class of games it helps define raises many more questions than it answers. But since I happen to think it is also the best view, I will take on these questions in an abstract fashion.
Now what are the 'games' that exist? Since it does not answer the question to say that this class is also infinite, I must pretend it is finite to show it is out there. The games Gi,...,Gn that exist, I claim, and have an equality condition, are the number of 'ways' in which human beings may interact with like instruments that will be treated similarly. An instrument is anything measurable whose likeness can thus be ascertained. Banned from the best city in speech are the soul, the mind, the heart, knowledge, tradition, and the like. There is, then a reason why people complain in one way or another of the soulessness of the modern democratic state. It's supposed to be that way.
The most obvious instrument is the dollar as in the example above. Some people might say there is nothing equal about a man with 10 dollars having those dollars treated the same way as those of a man with an additional 90 dollars. But I maintain that there is, and that any proof to the contrary has to pass through the idea of fairness. Clearly, if the instruments are the relevant aspects of context, and there is an inequality in available instruments of the same type, there is a context of inequality. But since trying to remedy this inequality in practice involves making a massive judgement concerning fairness, based not on partial and limited facts but on no facts whatever, since establishing point equality in a moment would require ignoring the entirety of the past, it is the duty of the person establishing equal situations to remedy them by different means. These do not currently exist on any significant scale but are not difficult to imagine. Imagine, for instance, a city where every store had a sign on its door stating the maximum amount of money that could be spent there in one go, or situation. Those who did not have this maximum sum could not enter, because they could not there be treated as equals in negotiation. If this was all the public business of the city, it would be an equal one.
Some utopia, you may be thinking, and you would be right. This is not yet a description of a minimal implementable view of equality, but only a particular equal game that cannot sustain a society. I need to discuss also how goods are made, how workers are paid, how money is inherited. I will tackle only the last and probably the most sensitive issue. Money can be legally mandated to be inherited by children, by whoever the doner wishes to stipulate in his or her will, by the state, or by some combination thereof. The presently espoused view of equality as game demands only that there be a fair process to determine who inherits it in the sense described in the previous example. This means competition. There cannot be no-brainer inheritance to a legally stipulated party, and the parties must have like instruments. Clearly, then, either the state or individuals are out unless they can be made to yield like instruments. Therefore, if we must keep the estate tax as an economic necessity, which certainly appears to be the case, the state must somehow be represented by an individual with the same rights as everybody else in this process. His goals, though, are different. He is not acting on his own behalf, and this creates a principal-agent problem that is not so immediately solvable. Furthermore, it would be idiotic to introduce the veil of ignorance rejected above for the overall organization of society into a particular game. Society is here only the sum of games, with some of them determining the shape of future rounds of play.
What this example shows is that, if social interaction is to be composed of minimally equal games, some of these games must help shape the rules of future ones. Constitutions are necessary. The contrast in outcome between a constitutionally mandated outcome for inheritance and a locally decided one requires only the total inequality of wealth at the time of drafting and a putting it to a plebescite to be maximal. I suspect that the local versus global distinction is equally drastic in other games. Therefore, anybody who accepts my equality as a condition on games ought to think seriously and creatively about what the constitution of his or her utopia says. But he or she should do so without a 'veil of ignorance'; there is nothing either noble or necessary for equality about remembering only semantic rather than historical reality in proceeding forth, regardless of what the undefined but meaningful term noble may actually imply.
Monday, December 1, 2008
The war we deserve?
So what would Sartre say now? The man who gave existential accounts of occupied Paris, attempting to give some sort of meaning to the horror Europe witnessed, and famously declared that 'each person got the war he deserved' with far greater respect for catharsis than for any notion whatever of historical accuracy, would yet be a better voice from the Cartesian land than the current French intelligensia. So let me take up the challenge and ask whether the non-Muslim world is getting the war it deserves. But first, I will make a slight foray into causal analysis, flawed though it may be, and defend the simple thesis that the global war of reactions against terror has one overwhelming cause, and that it is the obvious one.
It is frequently said that poverty and despair, not Islam, are the causes of terror. This is true; the behavior of the Islamic and non-Islamic people living in similar circumstances are not different in terms of their willingness to resort to violence, their attitude toward human life, in the epistomological and ethical attitudes they reveal. Accounts of the conflict in Sri Lanka I read in an anthropology journal a few years ago, countless reports on African wars, and the known historical record all confirm this beyond the shadow of a doubt. But does this mean that we should treat it similarly? Absolutely not; organization makes all the difference.
Put bluntly, local violence is a much more limited threat than global violence, even if it replicated in just as many places, causes just as much death and suffering, etc. A collection of locales does not the world span. Violence that takes aim at a global order is a threat to our vision of cosmopolitan identity, to a world where it is possible to identify with anything beyond one's immediate physical circumstances and the cultural representations these spawn. It is a threat to the ability of people everywhere to defect geographically and dissent intellectually. It is not bodies and lands which the Islamists are fighting. It is minds.
Whether perverting monotheism or simply laying bare what it does in certain circumstances in its original, unmitigated form, the Islamists attempt to destroy our global order because they have their own, a vision of how everybody everywhere should live that they find imminent. Only it bears no resemblance other than being a global vision to cosmopolitan ethics. The French commentator Baudrillard or his translator, writing in Harper's magazine, called Islamic terror the necessary other of globalization. But as Alain Badiou wrote in an anti-Levinas essay, 'the other must not be too different'. His sarcasm was as unwarranted as Levinas's initial idea of embracing the other would have been if he had been referring to a cultural other, as Badiou pretended to believe. This view is flatly correct; only a global vision is compatible with another global vision and can interact with it in a space. I am not Hegelian enough to think it necessary, although the long and checkered history of global visions since its obscure beginnings in the ancient middle east was in some sense bound to leave behind some traces of its many mutually distrustful selves. I leave it to others to explain to me exactly what the Islamic global vision is, although frankly my concern for its' finer points is limited. Since I believe ethics, the science of discovering the implications of one's actions for the life and liberty of others, can't start from any other basis than self-preservation, and is a logical extension thereof (as Charles Peirce among others wuite brilliantly demonstrated) I have a duty not to stop and ask whether those who would destroy my global vision have one with merits. I don't care, and I hold the particular stream of Islam known as 'Islamic radicalism' completely accountable for its actions. Trying to understand what poverty drives people to regardless of their traditions is an ethical duty. Understanding the Islamic worldview is ethically counterindicated. The duty of verstehende of the universals of poverty can be classified as an application of the cosmopolitan duty to enrich the world by comprehension of its' impersonal laws and to make these part of the personal soul. The interdiction of compatible other comprehension falls under the duty of self-preservation, a pre-ethical requirement for any coherent ethics, cosmopolitan or not. They are not contradictory, but complementary. The cause of terrorism may be poverty, but the cause of the terrorist threat to the world is radical Islam. Noone should feel required to mince words about this; quite the contrary.
There is no war without an internal war. As every empire falls from both within and without, the Western vision of cosmopolitanism has its cowardly dissenters, its enemy sympathizers, and even its collaborators. Many have reacted to the Islamist demands with a belief they must somehow be justified. They are not. Our world visions are not justified by external sources, so there is no way for the Islamist demands to be understood from without. There is only mitigation of its cost in human lives and suffering, and even were intellectual synthesis a possibility, I do not see the reason to believe it would get us any closer to achieving this goal. What I have learned of world history has taught me neither that mutual comprehension stops bloodshed or that mutual incomprehension causes it. Unreconcilable worldviews are perfectly fine, as I see it, and the duty of synthesizing our views and our enemies' is anything but fine. This view does not affect one's degree of hawkishness.
Should we choose to indulge in noble quests beyond self-preservation, we find it necessary to understand what circumstance drives people to, which is to say what we ourselves would do in their shoes. Trying to understand their traditions, a name for that part of their behavior that does not fall within a universal range of reactions, varying no more within tribes than between them, is no ethical or cosmopolitan duty at all. It is without malice that I say to radical Islam that I don't give a damn what it thinks.
So is this the war we deserve? I don't think we can answer that question any more than we ever could or ever will be able to. But it certainly has only a theatric rather than an historical meaning.
It is frequently said that poverty and despair, not Islam, are the causes of terror. This is true; the behavior of the Islamic and non-Islamic people living in similar circumstances are not different in terms of their willingness to resort to violence, their attitude toward human life, in the epistomological and ethical attitudes they reveal. Accounts of the conflict in Sri Lanka I read in an anthropology journal a few years ago, countless reports on African wars, and the known historical record all confirm this beyond the shadow of a doubt. But does this mean that we should treat it similarly? Absolutely not; organization makes all the difference.
Put bluntly, local violence is a much more limited threat than global violence, even if it replicated in just as many places, causes just as much death and suffering, etc. A collection of locales does not the world span. Violence that takes aim at a global order is a threat to our vision of cosmopolitan identity, to a world where it is possible to identify with anything beyond one's immediate physical circumstances and the cultural representations these spawn. It is a threat to the ability of people everywhere to defect geographically and dissent intellectually. It is not bodies and lands which the Islamists are fighting. It is minds.
Whether perverting monotheism or simply laying bare what it does in certain circumstances in its original, unmitigated form, the Islamists attempt to destroy our global order because they have their own, a vision of how everybody everywhere should live that they find imminent. Only it bears no resemblance other than being a global vision to cosmopolitan ethics. The French commentator Baudrillard or his translator, writing in Harper's magazine, called Islamic terror the necessary other of globalization. But as Alain Badiou wrote in an anti-Levinas essay, 'the other must not be too different'. His sarcasm was as unwarranted as Levinas's initial idea of embracing the other would have been if he had been referring to a cultural other, as Badiou pretended to believe. This view is flatly correct; only a global vision is compatible with another global vision and can interact with it in a space. I am not Hegelian enough to think it necessary, although the long and checkered history of global visions since its obscure beginnings in the ancient middle east was in some sense bound to leave behind some traces of its many mutually distrustful selves. I leave it to others to explain to me exactly what the Islamic global vision is, although frankly my concern for its' finer points is limited. Since I believe ethics, the science of discovering the implications of one's actions for the life and liberty of others, can't start from any other basis than self-preservation, and is a logical extension thereof (as Charles Peirce among others wuite brilliantly demonstrated) I have a duty not to stop and ask whether those who would destroy my global vision have one with merits. I don't care, and I hold the particular stream of Islam known as 'Islamic radicalism' completely accountable for its actions. Trying to understand what poverty drives people to regardless of their traditions is an ethical duty. Understanding the Islamic worldview is ethically counterindicated. The duty of verstehende of the universals of poverty can be classified as an application of the cosmopolitan duty to enrich the world by comprehension of its' impersonal laws and to make these part of the personal soul. The interdiction of compatible other comprehension falls under the duty of self-preservation, a pre-ethical requirement for any coherent ethics, cosmopolitan or not. They are not contradictory, but complementary. The cause of terrorism may be poverty, but the cause of the terrorist threat to the world is radical Islam. Noone should feel required to mince words about this; quite the contrary.
There is no war without an internal war. As every empire falls from both within and without, the Western vision of cosmopolitanism has its cowardly dissenters, its enemy sympathizers, and even its collaborators. Many have reacted to the Islamist demands with a belief they must somehow be justified. They are not. Our world visions are not justified by external sources, so there is no way for the Islamist demands to be understood from without. There is only mitigation of its cost in human lives and suffering, and even were intellectual synthesis a possibility, I do not see the reason to believe it would get us any closer to achieving this goal. What I have learned of world history has taught me neither that mutual comprehension stops bloodshed or that mutual incomprehension causes it. Unreconcilable worldviews are perfectly fine, as I see it, and the duty of synthesizing our views and our enemies' is anything but fine. This view does not affect one's degree of hawkishness.
Should we choose to indulge in noble quests beyond self-preservation, we find it necessary to understand what circumstance drives people to, which is to say what we ourselves would do in their shoes. Trying to understand their traditions, a name for that part of their behavior that does not fall within a universal range of reactions, varying no more within tribes than between them, is no ethical or cosmopolitan duty at all. It is without malice that I say to radical Islam that I don't give a damn what it thinks.
So is this the war we deserve? I don't think we can answer that question any more than we ever could or ever will be able to. But it certainly has only a theatric rather than an historical meaning.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Hesparus Unhinged; An Armchair Anthropology of the Election
Blogdom,
Instant history is generally considered garbage. Anthropology is current, and a debate persists over whether it is appropriate to apply the ahistorical methods of anthropology to specific historical events. The author, one goofball by pseudonym, thinks that since it would be a plainly biased choice of evidence and problems to focus the science of man only on those who are reputed by outsiders to have an 'everpresent now' view of time in which specific historical events do not intrude, and who undeniably have no systematic writing, the answer must be that the science of man and proper study of mankind must deal with historical events. If it is to be a study other than history, it must have different criteria. In particular, the criterion of past-ness is abandoned in favor of the criterion of having been there. History is there to correct anthropology, but anthropological speculation being there gives it something to correct it otherwise wouldn't have. If there were no Thucydides, but only political documents, ancient Greek history would be completely other to what it studies; one kind of narrative applied to another. Similarly, if people like me didn't attempt instant anthropology, historians of our lifetime, operating as historians on a shorter time scale than the classical historian, would have nothing formally equivalent to their own texts to correct. So here tis.
Instant history is generally considered garbage. Anthropology is current, and a debate persists over whether it is appropriate to apply the ahistorical methods of anthropology to specific historical events. The author, one goofball by pseudonym, thinks that since it would be a plainly biased choice of evidence and problems to focus the science of man only on those who are reputed by outsiders to have an 'everpresent now' view of time in which specific historical events do not intrude, and who undeniably have no systematic writing, the answer must be that the science of man and proper study of mankind must deal with historical events. If it is to be a study other than history, it must have different criteria. In particular, the criterion of past-ness is abandoned in favor of the criterion of having been there. History is there to correct anthropology, but anthropological speculation being there gives it something to correct it otherwise wouldn't have. If there were no Thucydides, but only political documents, ancient Greek history would be completely other to what it studies; one kind of narrative applied to another. Similarly, if people like me didn't attempt instant anthropology, historians of our lifetime, operating as historians on a shorter time scale than the classical historian, would have nothing formally equivalent to their own texts to correct. So here tis.
Perpetual Exceptionalism for Perpetual Normalcy
I now think the question of this interface as a historical question is metaphysical, a quest after a small piece of the grand causal chain of everything and anything which no piece of can be recovered. All we can do is say the myth is around, and that any reason for what is outside of it to naturally correspond to it would have to be proven by people independently coming up with it from different perspectives. Real facts, or correspondences, should have no lineage in thinkers' minds. I affirm this principle born of applying the standards of science to our understanding of the human world on the grounds that while there is neither hope of replicating controlled experiment in society nor of postulating a specific hypothesis, testable or not, concerning cause and effect in the social world, by the very assumption that the social world is a real entity, I can postulate that our analysis of it should follow those principles that are common to all of science. Therefore, I can say no more about whether the idea arose out of circumstances or was handed down as a meme from generation to generation, locale to locale. My undergraduate attempts were in vain. I can still, however, let the distinction guide both my choice of problems and my choice of cuts, or law of the excluded middle statements brought to bear on a question though they are not logically derived from the statement. These two choices belong not to science but to its necessary background.
For instance, knowing empirically that the exceptionalist view exists widely regardless of whether it is a fact, and knowing this question is undecidable, I may modify my question from 'what is the effect of the myth of American exceptionalism on the actual world?' to 'what is the effect of the belief, true or false?' which is in a different thought-world from the hovering realities previously expounded. That is, a thought-world which does not attempt to recover pieces of the grand causal chain, but only to predict a consequence of an item the evidence before our eyes happens to tell us exists somewhere in that overarching and unknowable morass; a properly social-scientific thought world.
Sitting in a room in 2009, knowing the mythology still burns strong, I can look at the latest world event of which I can establish its independence from the mythology and try to predict the consequences of the belief for our reaction to it. According to today's Times, some of the news that is fit to print involves North Korea's launch of (another) rocket and three suicide attacks in 24 hours in Pakistan (which is also not unusual). I have so far looked only at the headlines, being concerned more with American diplomatic moves than the events they are reactions to of late. But that is fine, since empirical evidence shows the headline is the thing that will chiefly stick in the collective mind, and my task here is not to correct factual errors concerning these foreign events. At any rate, I have no special knowledge of them. These events are currently commonplace, regardless of how shocking they may be ethically, and it would not be amiss to imagine that the first reaction of many people to the Pakistani event, in particular will be along the lines of 'why can't these crazies stop killing each other to prove points?' 'why can't democracy seem to function in Pakistan?' etc. Others will ask 'what have we done to make this happen, as the most powerful country in the world?' or 'Did our Musharraf support destabilize the country?' The fact these are questions has no particular relation to American exceptionalism. The first thought of any inquisitive mind out there is to question why things happen. The key ideas are rather a stupendous and willful incomprehension of the different ground-conditions of Pakistan relative to the United States on the one side and a belief that we actually run the world and have unimpeachable responsibility for it on the other. I make no secret of which side I have sympathy for; understanding of ground-conditions can be corrected if a provincial stupor merely be removed from the eye of the public. The ontological errors of the second position, thinking that preeminent influence means causative control, and declining to attach moral responsibility to those who react to this influence, that is absolving them by plea of animalism or insanity, thus making them mere mechanical reactors to our own moves in our moral assessment, cannot be cured by any known means.
The first side seems to take the other villages to be like its own in the medieval fashion. This can be labelled a false sense of normalcy. The latter seems to think the actions of the most powerful are the only ones to attach moral responsibility to simply because they are the more powerful, as if the stronger and the weaker had no other characteristics we might care about. This position strikes many as being internally consistent and properly generic in its assessment, that is according neither privilege nor special ontology to any party. Internally consistent it is, but few Americans are actually willing to follow its dictate to the permanent revolution providing its own sense of justice to which it leads. Neither is this generic maxim adopted at random, that is generically. The position that we ourselves are the root of all evil in the world many sound generic philosophically, but a cursory examination of the times, places, and instances where it is or is not adopted reveal that it is anthropologically exceptionalist. The mythology of American exceptionalism has been turned on its head, but left intact. Truth be told, noone thinks the weak are always right without thinking the strong always have some characteristic, or have so far always been the very same party. To look for this characteristic in history is almost as futile as to validate the blatantly inaccurate second and simpler claim. No sort of evidence could possibly validate it; it is inexorably metaphysical, a maxim by which to look for and organize evidence rather than a fact to which evidence could correspond. I look elsewhere; what makes a maxim look like a fact is a mythologeme. In this particular case, I happen to think the mythologeme of American exceptionalism is a good candidate regardless of the position taken on it; mythologemes do not go away being called lies. It provides the answer to the difference those who happen to be strong have relative to all other parties.
But are the two parties, the normalists and the exceptionalists, who are readily describable as products of different political cultures, products of different cultures, period? This is a question one could look into their surroundings and lineage for clues to. But this is merely an armchair anthropology, so I will take the existence of both positions in any class, millieu, or region, which has been well documented by Morris Fiorina among others, as good evidence that they are not. Further evidence is provided by their largely if by means exclusively similar store of quoted facts. Concerning Pakistan, they all read the same newspapers. Concerning the founding of America, the left reads books such as 'A People's History of the United States' which contains only well-known and undisputed facts with a particular spin. The difference between the parties is one of ethical stance, not culture. The political cultures are then, not cultures in the anthropologists' sense. America happens to be a multicultural society, but, as is well known, cultural differences within it are poorly correlated with political differences.
Then one must look to unite these two terms, normalism and exceptionalism, and show that they are anthropologically related. There is a philosophical justification for doing so.
Philosophical grounds do not establish anthropological truth, but merely exclude impossible items from the list of possible situations. But the anthropological evidence happens to be there. Regional and cultural diversity exist but are more frequently than not ignored; this is what makes a certain cartoon show claiming to show 'middle America' by confounding its different versions funny. We no more know what middle America looks like than we are able to accurately place the Simpson family in a place, class, or grouping. We continually refer to members of other classes, backgrounds, and sometimes ideologies, as adolescents or senescents, so as to place the others within our own life-orbits, where they do not belong. This is the game of perpetual normalcy. And then we think America must be different from the others, regardless of what happens. This is perpetual exceptionalism, that while grounded in certain incontrovertible historical facts, becomes mythological by the must. I claim that the facts they co-exist and that the one can enable the other are grounds for provisionally considering the following hypothesis; the anthropological character of America is strongly defined by the positing of perpetual exceptionalism in the interest of perpetual normalcy.
And when Hesperus happens to be somewhat unhinged
Enter a new historical era, a new form of communication, and a widely reviled conservative regime that unhinges the west, or hesparic world, with frightening speed. Who does the situation elect as candidates and who does the populace select from among their number? The situation selects one candidate who wants to return America to her guiding myths, another who represents an unthought compromise on all issues and a return to something much more recent, and a third who means to change what the guiding myths mean by using the familiar rhetoric of American exceptionalism coupled with actual policies previously unthinkable under the banner of this rhetoric, insofar as thinkable within this country's context at all. Not coincidentally, the unthought compromise goes out the window on the first round. And I say this having voted for her out of overwhelming tactical and ethical objections to both sides of what would turn out to be a more straightforward election than had previously been anticipated. Revolution requires simplification.
That leaves us with the candidate representing conservative preservation on all fronts, and choosing to conserve the most stable vision of the past, ignoring recent fluctuations, and a revolutionary of whom we really know absolutely nothing other than that he is a revolutionary. The old ground for perpetual normalcy is defended by the one party as the guiding light of American exceptionalism, with the subtext that America, used to it as you may be, is not the norm in this world, and that the demagogue on the other side, promising hope through inspiring vision, is an unfortunate global norm you don't want in your living room. Enough to get my vote, despite grave disagreements with specific redistributive economic policies and the apparent lack of an agenda for education and health reform (which is not the same-thing as health-care reform. See my previous post on that subject). I'll take the proven track record and the promise to conserve what's around over the second side, which promises to achieve its particular priorities at any cost whatever, to redefine success for an adminstration in such a fashion that it must achieve it. And does not pretend to promise what the laws of political and diplomatic binding track-record assure it cannot provide; any concrete restraints on what that might mean. And win a landslide that will in retrospect seem all but inevitable.
After the ecstatic world-simulcast party promising the end of history as we know it comes the lame duck of inescapable physical reality, under the continued aegis of the national mythology of perpetual normalcy and perpetual exceptionalism. And after the lame duck comes the new presidency, which it is beyond the scope of this note to comment on and too early to say anything about anyway. But one thing is already clear; longstanding anthropological facts about us will continue to shade our understanding of the world, even as both it and our own behavior change radically. I end on no particular hypothesis, but only the perhaps trite observation that this mythology selected candidates and victor in conjunction with all else, that its role is influential enough to be said to be determinative given the rest, and that revolutions such as the one we just had do not change the anthropological facts.
That leaves us with the candidate representing conservative preservation on all fronts, and choosing to conserve the most stable vision of the past, ignoring recent fluctuations, and a revolutionary of whom we really know absolutely nothing other than that he is a revolutionary. The old ground for perpetual normalcy is defended by the one party as the guiding light of American exceptionalism, with the subtext that America, used to it as you may be, is not the norm in this world, and that the demagogue on the other side, promising hope through inspiring vision, is an unfortunate global norm you don't want in your living room. Enough to get my vote, despite grave disagreements with specific redistributive economic policies and the apparent lack of an agenda for education and health reform (which is not the same-thing as health-care reform. See my previous post on that subject). I'll take the proven track record and the promise to conserve what's around over the second side, which promises to achieve its particular priorities at any cost whatever, to redefine success for an adminstration in such a fashion that it must achieve it. And does not pretend to promise what the laws of political and diplomatic binding track-record assure it cannot provide; any concrete restraints on what that might mean. And win a landslide that will in retrospect seem all but inevitable.
After the ecstatic world-simulcast party promising the end of history as we know it comes the lame duck of inescapable physical reality, under the continued aegis of the national mythology of perpetual normalcy and perpetual exceptionalism. And after the lame duck comes the new presidency, which it is beyond the scope of this note to comment on and too early to say anything about anyway. But one thing is already clear; longstanding anthropological facts about us will continue to shade our understanding of the world, even as both it and our own behavior change radically. I end on no particular hypothesis, but only the perhaps trite observation that this mythology selected candidates and victor in conjunction with all else, that its role is influential enough to be said to be determinative given the rest, and that revolutions such as the one we just had do not change the anthropological facts.
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