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.

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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.