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.

Perpetual Exceptionalism for Perpetual Normalcy

'American exceptionalism' is a well known ideology. But how does the belief that a nation represents an irrational ontological category actually affect external reality, that cares not for these claims? To answer this is as difficult as answering any question concerning the interface of mythology and reality. When I first attempted to answer this question, once and for all, in the naive fashion that marks any answer to a question one has just thought of, I took a page from my nomadic ancestors and considered mythology by analogy to something more concrete, a possession, a weapon, a contract; whatever the precise analogy, a means of creating utility beyond some given material basis. Being a student of economics at the time, I thought that this made sense, and justified a discrepancy between the confusing observable world, which did not and could not validate the straightforward theory, with the economists' usual tool of hidden variables whose values surprise our intuition when presented with them. A true variable, though, is never always and everywhere hidden until culled from the situation because it explains it. Many variables have surprising values if measured (e.g. 95% of what is said about 95% of people applies to a surprisingly smaller percent of people), and many are sometimes hidden, but some of the variables I made up simply didn't exist except as explanations, like the concept of utility from which they spawned. Variables must be things that were measured at one time, or at least ones that someone has thought of measuring without the hope of explaining the matter at hand. Otherwise, the variables become entirely other to what they are trying to explain, that is arbitrary.

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.

If reality knows of no normalcy, then one must declare a perpetual state of exception to perpetually believe in the normalcy of what is before one's eyes. Something is normal for the exception or a mere exception to the norm; it really doesn't make a difference in practice. They may seem like opposites considered by analogy to material processes, but the forms that hover upon us are not analogous to material processes. I rely on the experience of the reader to verify this.

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.