I don't know how much of a fuss there was about the whole atheist airplane thing, but I am friends with American Atheists on face book, and they posted quite a few little comments on it. The scoop is that AA attempted to hire planes in all 50 states on the 4th of July to carry banners that say "GodLESS America" and "Atheism is patriotic." A few states proved impossible because they could not find a pilot who did not fear retribution, either in the form of the loss of a job or the loss of a life.
For a second I would like to leave aside the virtues of the campaign itself and marvel at the sort of person who is offended by atheism, and who would be sufficiently offended to be driven to violence.
As for the virtues of the campaign, it should first be noted that if nothing else AA has done some work to let people know that atheists are not rare. In Seattle, where I live for now, one might be inclined to look at these flying banners as a waste of money and fuel, since here, as in many urban environments, we meet with very little oppression. Even as nearby as Spokane, however (where I wish they had flown the plane instead), the A-word is not so welcome, and, especially if I were a budding atheist teenager, a symbol of community might do quite a bit of good.
There are, I'm sure, a few other ways to look at this awareness-raising that might not be as optimistic as all this, but I honestly haven't given it a great deal of thought. I've been thinking about another side of things that will tie in with a post I've been thinking of making for a while.
I can dig what they mean when they say "Atheism is patriotic," so what follows here is not really meant to be a retort. I recognize that (some) theists use "atheism" as a thought-stopping abstraction, implying or openly stating that "these people" are outsiders with an alien or non-existent moral compass, whose very existence jeopardizes America's fragile capitalist utopia. So when AA says "Atheism is patriotic," clearly they are normalizing the reality of an atheist voice in the political landscape.
This is where Empire comes in. (I had hoped to return to reading this book again, but alas it was not meant to be. What follows is from months-old memory; I will not be able to return to this book until October, looks like.) For Hardt and Negri--who in this respect follow almost directly Deleuze and Guattari--the most important political and ethical achievement of post-medieval European thought is atheism. Indeed, the bulk of what is often referred to by the short-hand of Enlightenment thinking has been, by H&N's account, a strategic, covertly theistic revision of the advances made by humanistic philosophers since Duns Scotus.
I have to digress a bit here, because H&N's terminology is a bit problematic (and basically has to be). When H&N say "humanism," they are referring to a specific strain of post-medieval thought that really only includes some of those we are accustomed to thinking of as humanists. Sketched briefly, this line begins with the aforementioned Duns Scotus, and includes Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. What distinguishes these thinkers from the much broader field of philosophers normally assembled under the general banner of humanism is what Deleuze calls a philosophy of immanence. These are philosophers whose primary ethical/political program is a theory of humanity without transcendence. They observe first that there is nothing in the human experience that is not directly sensible (that is, experienced by the senses); they observe second that recourse to transcendental, divine, or mediating forces is both unmotivated by observation and (this is the important bit) enables bad ethical/political reasoning.
Now part of the confusion here is due to the fact that this had been similarly observed prior to both H&N and Deleuze in the works of Althusser and Foucault. In "The Humanist Controversy," which I may have mentioned here before, Althusser argues emphatically that Marx was not a humanist on exactly the grounds that humanism as Althusser understands it is essentially if covertly theistic. The humanism from which Althusser is defending our memory of Marx is Feuerbach's humanism, which operates through transposing onto "man" those qualities of autonomy etc. which we had previously assigned to "God." H&N push this analysis even further, ascribing to all those philosophers of mediation and transcendence, including (crucially) Kant and Hegel, this same form of covert theism. What is at stake here first is the political refusal on the part of those "state" philosophers (in Deleuze's terms) to acknowledge the extent of existence. In every domain, when faced with the reality of immanence, these philosophers turn instead to mediation or transcendence, both denying the vitality of unmediated reality and manufacturing a false world that lays claim to the achievements and qualities of reality.
This brings us to the second, more important stake. Wrapped up in the Enlightenment insistence on mediation and transcendence is an implicit mandate for sovereign rule. The logic of theism--which I have been using as a short-hand for a belief in some extra-human force or authority--transfers to and supports the logic of the authoritative state. It is by this logic that we find ourselves, even in post-monarchical society, constantly returning to centralized models of the state, and particularly models of the state that centralize power on a single person. For H&N, and for D&G before them, the escape from state oppression must coincide with the escape from theological repression. In an alternative formulation, the acceptance of humanity as being capable of collective self-rule (which we should not confuse with anarchy) coincides with the acceptance of humans as parts of a fully immanent, rhyzomatic system, which is not overcoded or dismissed by pointing at "god" or even at "mankind."
In this sense, in an extreme, ethically and politically focused form, atheism cannot be patriotic, for the simple reason that the concept of patriotism relies on the sovereignty of the nation-state, which itself is a theocratic concept.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Friday, May 20, 2011
More like "Boresmopolitanism"...
I have, until about a week ago, been reading an excellent book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri called Empire, and I was looking forward to writing a little on their association of theology with governmental sovereignty. Regrettably I have to put that off--I will hopefully remember to get to it--since I've been distracted by a book I just finished reading for seminar. I'd like to talk about this book for a moment in stead.
The book is one I have recommended, prematurely, to at least one of you, and though it's not a bad book, I must rescind my recommendation. It is not a waste of time, but it is also not time particularly well spent. The book is Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism.
The gist of this book is that as citizens of the world we are all responsible to one another, and that we therefore must do the best we can to be good to one another. The banality of this position is the main reason I no longer recommend the book. (My growing impression is that American philosophy busies itself only with tackling such challenging questions as this.)
Rather than issuing a full-fledged critique of the book, which would waste all of our time, I'd like to rehash a discussion from class. Toward the end of his book, Appiah reviews a prominent American philosopher's claim regarding moral obligations. If you were walking down a country lane dressed in your finest and saw a child drowning in a pond just off the path, would you dive in to save it, ruining your expensive cloths? The obvious answer--few would disagree--is yes; the life of an innocent is more important than the finest of finery. Would you stop and pick up an injured hitch-hiker, knowing both that if you did not, he would lose his foot, and that if you did he would bleed all over the leather interior of your brand-new Jaguar? (Nevermind this question: would you kill a cow to make your car comfortable?) Here more people would equivocate, but most surely would save the man's foot at the expense of the car. So then, if you could donate $300 to save 10 starving African children, would you? What if you just did; would you again? (Surely the second 10 children are as important as the first 10.) When would you stop? When would you be ethically permitted to stop?
The philosopher Appiah cites claims that you stop donating money when your life is at risk. Appiah finds some faults in this problem. The strongest sticking point is the: would you save the drowning child from the first example if you knew you could sell your suit and save 100 more children?
Now, in our class discussion of this, I asserted that it is patently obvious that the ethical decision, given perfect information, is to live in poverty so that others--many many others--needn't. I further asserted that this truth was evident to anyone with access to perfect information. My philosophy colleagues were eager to provide contradictory evidence from their experience teaching ethics to undergrads: it is apparently common that undergrads are willing to sacrifice a stranger's life for a latte. Overwhelmed by the urgency of my colleagues' rejoinder, I returned that this is an error based on incomplete information: the student doesn't really know what is at stake, because s/he does not know suffering.
I think this response was correct within the framework of our discussion, but it is incorrect in terms of a pragmatic ethics. The problem none of us addressed, and the problem that plague's both Appiah's book and all of the American academic philosophy I've read so far (which is admittedly not very much) is one that many continental philosophers have incorporated fully into their epistemology at least since Adorno, and more likely since Marx. We are trying here to address a question of ethics solely from the perspective of exchange value.
The question Would you exchange a latte for a person? is the wrong question, and it always leads to the followup quesiton, How many lattes is a person worth? (Or how many people is a latte worth?) The undergrad above didn't cling to his/her latte because it was more valuable than a stranger, nor because s/he didn't understand fully the concept of suffering (though this too is true, no doubt. Isn't it always true?) We have to conceive first of the starving person as something other than an object of exchange, and second (this is even more difficult but in this case no less crucial) we must conceive of the latte as something other than an object of exchange.
We have the vocabulary readily at our disposal to talk about humans as unique and unexchangeable, and I won't rehears this step here; surely it is still abhorrent to most people to consider people in terms of their dollar value (hence in part the success of "Fight Club"). What about the latte?
I submit that the reason we have a difficult time thinking of the latte outside of the system of exchange (aside from the fact that we are very used to exchanging money for lattes) is that we tend to think of human identity in terms of bodily coherence. A person, common sense tells us, is that which is that person's body. We know from psychology however that our brains don't really work that way. Mirror and "Gandhi" neurons obscure this ostensibly clean boundary (which is why, in part, maybe only in small part, local violence is much more distressing than distant violence). We also know that when a person drives a car or uses a tool, that tool becomes a part of the person's body image; we literally conceive of these objects like parts of our body. Why would the latte be any different?
The argument here is that the latte, though it may seem to have an exchangeable dollar value (it does not: try selling your latte to the next person in line) actually constitutes a part of the undergrad's identity. Now, we can still expect, ethically, that a person be willing to sacrifice a part of his or her identity for the safety and comfort of another, but talking about this in terms of monetary value misses the point; it is founded in capital, and essentially does not value the human life it argues we must support. We should expect the undergrad, whose identity is more or less constantly under pressure from peers and parents and others (though surely not so intensely as it was in high school or before) to cling more ardently to their identity than a more confident and safe adult--though certainly many many adults are also constantly anxious about the safety of their identity.
For a concluding remark, I would like to follow this thread quite far afield from the previous topic. Now most reasonable people, it seems, do not like our compatriots in the tea party. We call them stupid, racist, selfish, short-sighted, and we tend to think of them as a group that deliberately tries to hurt our country (and in particular women and the urban poor). What we typically refer to as identity politics is extremely important to the tea party phenomenon: its base is conservative white Americans who organized in response to the election of a black president, they ardently oppose gay- and women's-rights, they are vociferously and inhumanely anti-immigrant. From the progressive perspective, it is easy to think of them as simply evil (or to think of them simply as evil), and while their political agenda is surely, obviously, patently harmful, it does us no good--it gets us nowhere--to call them evil. When we conceive of their political position in terms of anxiety--misplaced anxiety, I would suggest--about identity, we are in a better position to redirect their power positively. I do not have any idea how we would actually do this on anything other than a person-to-person scale. :/
The book is one I have recommended, prematurely, to at least one of you, and though it's not a bad book, I must rescind my recommendation. It is not a waste of time, but it is also not time particularly well spent. The book is Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism.
The gist of this book is that as citizens of the world we are all responsible to one another, and that we therefore must do the best we can to be good to one another. The banality of this position is the main reason I no longer recommend the book. (My growing impression is that American philosophy busies itself only with tackling such challenging questions as this.)
Rather than issuing a full-fledged critique of the book, which would waste all of our time, I'd like to rehash a discussion from class. Toward the end of his book, Appiah reviews a prominent American philosopher's claim regarding moral obligations. If you were walking down a country lane dressed in your finest and saw a child drowning in a pond just off the path, would you dive in to save it, ruining your expensive cloths? The obvious answer--few would disagree--is yes; the life of an innocent is more important than the finest of finery. Would you stop and pick up an injured hitch-hiker, knowing both that if you did not, he would lose his foot, and that if you did he would bleed all over the leather interior of your brand-new Jaguar? (Nevermind this question: would you kill a cow to make your car comfortable?) Here more people would equivocate, but most surely would save the man's foot at the expense of the car. So then, if you could donate $300 to save 10 starving African children, would you? What if you just did; would you again? (Surely the second 10 children are as important as the first 10.) When would you stop? When would you be ethically permitted to stop?
The philosopher Appiah cites claims that you stop donating money when your life is at risk. Appiah finds some faults in this problem. The strongest sticking point is the: would you save the drowning child from the first example if you knew you could sell your suit and save 100 more children?
Now, in our class discussion of this, I asserted that it is patently obvious that the ethical decision, given perfect information, is to live in poverty so that others--many many others--needn't. I further asserted that this truth was evident to anyone with access to perfect information. My philosophy colleagues were eager to provide contradictory evidence from their experience teaching ethics to undergrads: it is apparently common that undergrads are willing to sacrifice a stranger's life for a latte. Overwhelmed by the urgency of my colleagues' rejoinder, I returned that this is an error based on incomplete information: the student doesn't really know what is at stake, because s/he does not know suffering.
I think this response was correct within the framework of our discussion, but it is incorrect in terms of a pragmatic ethics. The problem none of us addressed, and the problem that plague's both Appiah's book and all of the American academic philosophy I've read so far (which is admittedly not very much) is one that many continental philosophers have incorporated fully into their epistemology at least since Adorno, and more likely since Marx. We are trying here to address a question of ethics solely from the perspective of exchange value.
The question Would you exchange a latte for a person? is the wrong question, and it always leads to the followup quesiton, How many lattes is a person worth? (Or how many people is a latte worth?) The undergrad above didn't cling to his/her latte because it was more valuable than a stranger, nor because s/he didn't understand fully the concept of suffering (though this too is true, no doubt. Isn't it always true?) We have to conceive first of the starving person as something other than an object of exchange, and second (this is even more difficult but in this case no less crucial) we must conceive of the latte as something other than an object of exchange.
We have the vocabulary readily at our disposal to talk about humans as unique and unexchangeable, and I won't rehears this step here; surely it is still abhorrent to most people to consider people in terms of their dollar value (hence in part the success of "Fight Club"). What about the latte?
I submit that the reason we have a difficult time thinking of the latte outside of the system of exchange (aside from the fact that we are very used to exchanging money for lattes) is that we tend to think of human identity in terms of bodily coherence. A person, common sense tells us, is that which is that person's body. We know from psychology however that our brains don't really work that way. Mirror and "Gandhi" neurons obscure this ostensibly clean boundary (which is why, in part, maybe only in small part, local violence is much more distressing than distant violence). We also know that when a person drives a car or uses a tool, that tool becomes a part of the person's body image; we literally conceive of these objects like parts of our body. Why would the latte be any different?
The argument here is that the latte, though it may seem to have an exchangeable dollar value (it does not: try selling your latte to the next person in line) actually constitutes a part of the undergrad's identity. Now, we can still expect, ethically, that a person be willing to sacrifice a part of his or her identity for the safety and comfort of another, but talking about this in terms of monetary value misses the point; it is founded in capital, and essentially does not value the human life it argues we must support. We should expect the undergrad, whose identity is more or less constantly under pressure from peers and parents and others (though surely not so intensely as it was in high school or before) to cling more ardently to their identity than a more confident and safe adult--though certainly many many adults are also constantly anxious about the safety of their identity.
For a concluding remark, I would like to follow this thread quite far afield from the previous topic. Now most reasonable people, it seems, do not like our compatriots in the tea party. We call them stupid, racist, selfish, short-sighted, and we tend to think of them as a group that deliberately tries to hurt our country (and in particular women and the urban poor). What we typically refer to as identity politics is extremely important to the tea party phenomenon: its base is conservative white Americans who organized in response to the election of a black president, they ardently oppose gay- and women's-rights, they are vociferously and inhumanely anti-immigrant. From the progressive perspective, it is easy to think of them as simply evil (or to think of them simply as evil), and while their political agenda is surely, obviously, patently harmful, it does us no good--it gets us nowhere--to call them evil. When we conceive of their political position in terms of anxiety--misplaced anxiety, I would suggest--about identity, we are in a better position to redirect their power positively. I do not have any idea how we would actually do this on anything other than a person-to-person scale. :/
Monday, March 14, 2011
Planned Hatred
Being a conscientious participant in the American democratic process, I recently wrote to my congresswoman, Cathy McMorris Rogers. The purpose of my email was to express my dissatisfaction with Ms. McMorris Rogers concerning her decision to stand with the majority of her party in the House of Representatives in voting to eliminate government funding for Planned Parenthood.
The ideological context of funding Planned Parenthood may appear complicated, and I won't go into it here; suffice it to say that regardless of how you feel about abortion (whether you think it's a right or a wrong, if you'll excuse my pun), the fact is that the "planning" portion of Planned Parenthood's budget far surpasses the portion dedicated to abortions, and it is further not unreasonable to theorize that PPH prevents--through education and contraception--far more abortions than it provides. (I, regrettably, have not researched any empirical support for this claim, and I welcome comments with evidence.)
Ms. McMorris Rogers replied to my email with a form letter, replicated below:
Now, one expects that she would avoid supporting her position that 332,278 abortions is "unacceptable." (It seems to me a startlingly low number when compared to any cause of death--driving for example, or smoking, or war. Again, I welcome evidence on this point.) The American debate on abortion is not a debate, after all, but the statement of claims.
What I take issue with, or rather, what I did not expect, was the claim that "the federal government's support for Planned Parenthood has reached billions." Billions of dollars, it is presumed. She does not specify the time period, but since budget numbers are often presented in annual totals, it seems that this is her implication. According to lifenews.com (an anti-choice site), the GAO number is $650 million, but not over one year: $650 million over seven years. (Lifenews.com goes on to tally funding for plan B outside of PPH--which they count as abortion. Taken together, these numbers to total to over $1 billion, though again over seven years. Nevermind, again, that most of this funding--95% in the case of PPH--goes to family planning, not to abortions. And nevermind again that they will not analyze the logic behind their claim that abortion is evil.)
I do not know what percentage of the annual budget PPH funding constitutes (and still does as long as none of these budgets are signed), but I do know it is pathetically small. The federal assault on PPH (as well as PBS and NPR), while couched in terms of deficits, is ideological, but in order to garner wide-spread public support, it is important to deceive the voting public into believing that the dollar amounts dedicated to PPH (as well as PBS and NPR) are far larger than they are.
Many have commented on why this ideological war is being waged, particularly taking note of the odd alliance between the extremely wealthy and the middle and lower classes. The explanation du jour is that Republicans since Reagan are exploiting the socially conservative bias of much of the middle and lower class in order to convince them to vote against their own interests. This explanation is compelling, and surely true, but it doesn't quite get to the heart of the matter, at least not in the present-day setting. In fact, from one perspective, we might suggest that the right has an incentive not to pass thoroughly regressive legislation, since doing so would erode the dedication of their base; why bother to vote if you're agenda has already passed?
I think Naomi Wolf's editorial on feminism in the Middle East revolts, which you can find at al Jazeera, sheds some further light. Wolf argues that one important source for the relative success of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions has been the dramatic increase in the number of educated women in these countries, saying that it is easy to rule a population when over half of them cannot read or write (and therefore organize in a modern world). The success of the ruling class, in other words, is defined in large part by the structured partitioning of its population. Here we find, in clear terms, the core of conservatism, as well as where its name comes from. The business of the ruling class (and this is why business is allied with the right) is to maintain or solidify its strength, and this is achieved through partitioning its subjects.
The attack on PPH, which provides birth control--both in the form of contraception and in the form of education--to millions of women, is an attack on women themselves. But, of course, not all women. Wealthy women are not effected, nor are many rightist Christian women, who see their own bodies as baby machines. Many feminists have commented on the importance of the development of effective and affordable birth control for the emancipation of women. When we dismantle PPH, we revoke the access to birth control, and therefore to relatively unfettered admittance into a society of equals, to countless low-income women.
There is no such childish thing as evil. People do tremendously bad things, and perhaps they sometimes do them for no reason. But the strategic decision to exclude millions of women from a society of equals is not done to hurt those women, it is done to keep society divided and weak. To borrow from Stephen Colbert, these are the least of our brothers and sisters--as are the teachers in Wisconsin, or the "illegal" immigrants in Arizona. They are not being attacked out of bigotry or hatred; they are being attacked in order to cultivate bigotry and hatred.
The ideological context of funding Planned Parenthood may appear complicated, and I won't go into it here; suffice it to say that regardless of how you feel about abortion (whether you think it's a right or a wrong, if you'll excuse my pun), the fact is that the "planning" portion of Planned Parenthood's budget far surpasses the portion dedicated to abortions, and it is further not unreasonable to theorize that PPH prevents--through education and contraception--far more abortions than it provides. (I, regrettably, have not researched any empirical support for this claim, and I welcome comments with evidence.)
Ms. McMorris Rogers replied to my email with a form letter, replicated below:
Dear Peter,
Thank you for contacting me regarding funding for Planned Parenthood. It is an honor to represent the people of Eastern Washington and I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with me.
I do not believe that federal funds should go to Planned Parenthood. Last year, U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) did a study revealing that the federal government's support for Planned Parenthood has reached billions, a large percentage of which go to family planning services. In 2009, according to Planned Parenthood's own records, 332,278 abortions were performed. This is unacceptable. The GAO study and Planned Parenthood's statistics demonstrate that in the last several years, focus has not been on the needs of the county. We need to focus on jobs, balancing the budget, and our national debt. To that end, I supported efforts to eliminate federal funds to Planned Parenthood.
Thank you again for contacting me on this important issue. As your Representative in Congress, I am committed to putting the best interests of Eastern Washington first. I invite you to visit my website at www.mcmorrisrodgers.house.gov for additional information or to sign up for my e-newsletter. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance.
Best Wishes,
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
Member of Congress
Now, one expects that she would avoid supporting her position that 332,278 abortions is "unacceptable." (It seems to me a startlingly low number when compared to any cause of death--driving for example, or smoking, or war. Again, I welcome evidence on this point.) The American debate on abortion is not a debate, after all, but the statement of claims.
What I take issue with, or rather, what I did not expect, was the claim that "the federal government's support for Planned Parenthood has reached billions." Billions of dollars, it is presumed. She does not specify the time period, but since budget numbers are often presented in annual totals, it seems that this is her implication. According to lifenews.com (an anti-choice site), the GAO number is $650 million, but not over one year: $650 million over seven years. (Lifenews.com goes on to tally funding for plan B outside of PPH--which they count as abortion. Taken together, these numbers to total to over $1 billion, though again over seven years. Nevermind, again, that most of this funding--95% in the case of PPH--goes to family planning, not to abortions. And nevermind again that they will not analyze the logic behind their claim that abortion is evil.)
I do not know what percentage of the annual budget PPH funding constitutes (and still does as long as none of these budgets are signed), but I do know it is pathetically small. The federal assault on PPH (as well as PBS and NPR), while couched in terms of deficits, is ideological, but in order to garner wide-spread public support, it is important to deceive the voting public into believing that the dollar amounts dedicated to PPH (as well as PBS and NPR) are far larger than they are.
Many have commented on why this ideological war is being waged, particularly taking note of the odd alliance between the extremely wealthy and the middle and lower classes. The explanation du jour is that Republicans since Reagan are exploiting the socially conservative bias of much of the middle and lower class in order to convince them to vote against their own interests. This explanation is compelling, and surely true, but it doesn't quite get to the heart of the matter, at least not in the present-day setting. In fact, from one perspective, we might suggest that the right has an incentive not to pass thoroughly regressive legislation, since doing so would erode the dedication of their base; why bother to vote if you're agenda has already passed?
I think Naomi Wolf's editorial on feminism in the Middle East revolts, which you can find at al Jazeera, sheds some further light. Wolf argues that one important source for the relative success of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions has been the dramatic increase in the number of educated women in these countries, saying that it is easy to rule a population when over half of them cannot read or write (and therefore organize in a modern world). The success of the ruling class, in other words, is defined in large part by the structured partitioning of its population. Here we find, in clear terms, the core of conservatism, as well as where its name comes from. The business of the ruling class (and this is why business is allied with the right) is to maintain or solidify its strength, and this is achieved through partitioning its subjects.
The attack on PPH, which provides birth control--both in the form of contraception and in the form of education--to millions of women, is an attack on women themselves. But, of course, not all women. Wealthy women are not effected, nor are many rightist Christian women, who see their own bodies as baby machines. Many feminists have commented on the importance of the development of effective and affordable birth control for the emancipation of women. When we dismantle PPH, we revoke the access to birth control, and therefore to relatively unfettered admittance into a society of equals, to countless low-income women.
There is no such childish thing as evil. People do tremendously bad things, and perhaps they sometimes do them for no reason. But the strategic decision to exclude millions of women from a society of equals is not done to hurt those women, it is done to keep society divided and weak. To borrow from Stephen Colbert, these are the least of our brothers and sisters--as are the teachers in Wisconsin, or the "illegal" immigrants in Arizona. They are not being attacked out of bigotry or hatred; they are being attacked in order to cultivate bigotry and hatred.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Caged
The way I was educated I was not given the meaning of discipline. I was told that if I were going to be a composer I should know harmony, counterpoint, and all those things. you are told that you have to study those things, although they are of no use to you ultimately, and that you learn those things in order later to give them up when finally you get around to self-expression. But this isn't the nature of discipline. True discipline is not learned in order to give it up, but rather in order to give oneself up. Now, most people never even learn what discipline is. It is precisely what the Lord meant when he said, give up your father and mother and follow me. It means give up the things closest to you. It means give yourself up, everything, and do what it is you are going to do. At that point, what have you given up? your likes, your dislikes, etc. When it becomes clear, as it now becomes to many people, that the old disciplines need no longer be taken seriously, what is going to provide the path to the giving up of oneself?
(John Cage in Richard Kostelanetz ed., John Cage, an Anthology, 13-14)
I'm putting this quotation here in part so I can find it again easily enough. Quite a bit is made, especially in the arts and humanities, of the perceived shift from the strict disciplinary boundaries of modernism to postmodernism's aspirations of fluidity. (I put little stock in either claim, since in both cases they mistake the example for the rule--compare Greenberg and Adorno, for example.) Especially in feminist literature one comes up against the problems of being disciplined, and how that limits one's epistemological capacity: historians understand things through a different methodological framework than philosophers do, for example. Cage, as he formulates the situation here (through his Zen lens) sheds an liberating light on the problem. I don't think I presently have the vocabulary to remark much further upon this.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
More like "Borientalism" amiright?
The seminar I'm attending is called "The Study of Western Civilization," and that is what it is about--that is, it is about the study, not about Western Civilization. We've been mostly reading texts that draw their argument out of the Western canon (especially by connecting the Greeks to the Romans to etc.) to address the problems of modernity. This fortnight, however, we read Said's Orientalism, a widely read and influential critique of Europe's treatment of the notEurope.
I've been around the block enough times to know that this is a book that evokes strong passions in many readers. One camp is stirred by Said's portrayal of British and French imperialism, which for them feels like a moment of justice after centuries of continued oppression. On the other end of the spectrum, angry readers see in Said a vociferous (and largely unfounded) dismissal of all European political and academic practice, leaving them indignant, presumably with no avenues of action left available. I fall into neither of these camps, though I can see why this (boring) book can lead to both sentiments with equal ease.
In thinking about how to summarize Said's book I am already faced with what I had thought I would save for my conclusion: this book is cripplingly undertheorized, so much so that it is probably impossible to put forward a central thesis on behalf of the book that another close reading couldn't with good cause dismiss. I will propose, in the face of this, that the central thesis of Orientalism is that, when faced with an imbalance of power, those on the privileged side do well to keep track of the effects of their learned prejudice, keeping in mind that, all provisions taken, they will fail to be perfectly neutral, no matter how scholarly and rigorous their work. (The pro-Said camp says "because of this you are guilty of repressing us/them" while the anti-Said camp says "don't call me a racist, I'm not doing anything wrong, and besides you haven't even read my work yet.")
The problem is that Said is woefully uninterested in his own work. Many of the readings he performs of 18th and 19th century Orientalists and novelists seem, to my ignorant mind, perfectly reasonable--and indeed it is, nowadays at least, perfectly commonplace that many, most, 19th century Europeans were terribly racist. The problem is that his criticism of them is that they generalize "the Orient," adopting observations on some few encounters as the rule for the totality of the (expansive) region. (It is worth noting that "the Orient" for most of Said's book is limited to the Middle East and Egypt, though in some examples it extends to India.) The reality of course is that the danger of this sort of generalization harries nearly every discipline in the humanities; Orientalism is peculiar because the geographic and political distance of the object of study from its studying subject, combined with the shear heterogeneity of that same object, has had such disastrous political and humanitarian consequences that it is difficult to imagine that Orientalism as a 19th century practice was at no moment deliberately malicious in its use of generalization.
And though Said himself seems to my recollection to be fairly non-committal on this point (his interest, by my middle-road reading, is in the effects, not the malice), I don't think it is too problematic to argue that many Orientalists deployed their racist tropes in the service of Empire (Napoleon in Egypt is least disputable example). Surely there is no harm in pointing to these authors and discussing the extent and repercussions of their racism; what I have trouble with is the ease with which Said moves on to other authors in search of similar problems, and manages from there to suppose that the racism of disciplined, state-funded orientalists is unavoidable for any European writing on the world outside its immediate geography.
The clearest example of this problematic approach to critique--the generalizing approach that critiques generalization--is Said's treatment of Marx. Marx is certainly not immune to the 19th century compulsion to conceptualize the multiplicity of the orient as a unified totality, but Said's specific example does nothing to understand how this functions in Marx. Said draws his example from an essay by Marx on England's role in India. Marx is repulsed by the violence and destruction wrought by the British abroad, showing a perhaps unprecedented regard for Indians as human beings on equal footing with Europeans in terms of their rights to freedom and safety. Marx also regrets the pre-colonial despotic regime under which Indians were oppressed before the English usurped authority for themselves, and he sees in this historical moment--here Said thinks he has him--the possibility for revolutionary change: English colonialism, for Marx, is the crucible in which India's post-capitalist society is forged. To Said this is too close to the popular orientalist belief--popularized by Kipling as "White Man's Burden"--that Europe was in the orient for the benefit of the oriental himself. But Said completely ignores that Marx's reading of European industrialism is completely parallel, and that for Marx violence is the historical prerequisite for a new, post-capitalist society, whether at home or abroad. In short--and examples of this abound in Said's text--the major shortcoming of Orientalism is its refusal to explore the implications of its own analysis on the rest of European thought, or indeed on itself.
My counter thesis to the thesis I attributed above to Said--what I would have written Orientalism about--is the replication of domestic modes of oppression in orientalist literature. Said on some few occasions points out similarities between misogyny and orientalism, but consistently declines to elaborate. To my mind, this is the actual story: the growth of capitalism in the 17th and 18th century was facilitated by the tacit, naturalized oppression of a tremendous portion of the European population; orientalism is the rhetorical/political justification of the application of this matrix of oppression to the entire rest of the world. Orientalism secures the seat of authority for those who have already inherited it. I would propose that critiquing orientalist texts in the 19th century from this perspective would lend Said the ability to move beyond mere observation--which ultimately is all Orientalism is. We could see, in this light, what these texts do rather than merely what they say. Further, such a perspective would allow a more dynamic reading of authors like Flaubert, whose work is much more literary than literal.
But I suspect that had Said conceived of his project from this point of view we scarcely would be reading it today. The unreasonable popularity of such a lazy, repetitive book is imaginable only under the conditions in which it was written: the conditions of a complete disinterest in theory. Said's book is easy to read, both in terms of the simplicity of the text itself and--this is the important point--in terms of its malleability. It is this last problem which prohibits me from unequivocably endorsing a single statement of the books thesis. Even when Said explicitly states that all Europeans writing on the Orient are "racist" (204) the claim is so loosely formulated that he could as easily be condemning all of Europe as dismissing "racism" as a meaningless word. ( I think, particularly given the rest of his work, that he is doing neither.) The book is fraught with ideological, theoretical, and epistemological inconsistencies, but instead of thwarting the extraction of any meaning or implication from the text, this litany of problems has enabled any given reader, without much effort, to derive support for whatever reading is most convenient to her or his momentary agenda.
That said, I can only conclude that I am glad this book was written (even if I'm not glad I had to read it). Thirty-three years after the fact, the procession of diligent scholars working on themes of racism and colonialism, capitalism and empire have constructed wonderful and useful scholarly edifices through critique and appropriation of Said's work, and it is difficult to imagine them having been successful without Said's help. One can--and I think must--regret the reactionary, uncritical anti-canonism that Said also helped spawn, but in the historical scope of things, one must suppose these reactions to be but a swing of the pendulum, and a swing that would seem to have reversed direction. So while it is a poor, boring, and nowadays uninteresting book, it is one of those problems that almost has to happen for there to be growth; Said's book is almost like Britain in India (in Marx's mind): borish, stupid, destructive, but necessary for growth.
I've been around the block enough times to know that this is a book that evokes strong passions in many readers. One camp is stirred by Said's portrayal of British and French imperialism, which for them feels like a moment of justice after centuries of continued oppression. On the other end of the spectrum, angry readers see in Said a vociferous (and largely unfounded) dismissal of all European political and academic practice, leaving them indignant, presumably with no avenues of action left available. I fall into neither of these camps, though I can see why this (boring) book can lead to both sentiments with equal ease.
In thinking about how to summarize Said's book I am already faced with what I had thought I would save for my conclusion: this book is cripplingly undertheorized, so much so that it is probably impossible to put forward a central thesis on behalf of the book that another close reading couldn't with good cause dismiss. I will propose, in the face of this, that the central thesis of Orientalism is that, when faced with an imbalance of power, those on the privileged side do well to keep track of the effects of their learned prejudice, keeping in mind that, all provisions taken, they will fail to be perfectly neutral, no matter how scholarly and rigorous their work. (The pro-Said camp says "because of this you are guilty of repressing us/them" while the anti-Said camp says "don't call me a racist, I'm not doing anything wrong, and besides you haven't even read my work yet.")
The problem is that Said is woefully uninterested in his own work. Many of the readings he performs of 18th and 19th century Orientalists and novelists seem, to my ignorant mind, perfectly reasonable--and indeed it is, nowadays at least, perfectly commonplace that many, most, 19th century Europeans were terribly racist. The problem is that his criticism of them is that they generalize "the Orient," adopting observations on some few encounters as the rule for the totality of the (expansive) region. (It is worth noting that "the Orient" for most of Said's book is limited to the Middle East and Egypt, though in some examples it extends to India.) The reality of course is that the danger of this sort of generalization harries nearly every discipline in the humanities; Orientalism is peculiar because the geographic and political distance of the object of study from its studying subject, combined with the shear heterogeneity of that same object, has had such disastrous political and humanitarian consequences that it is difficult to imagine that Orientalism as a 19th century practice was at no moment deliberately malicious in its use of generalization.
And though Said himself seems to my recollection to be fairly non-committal on this point (his interest, by my middle-road reading, is in the effects, not the malice), I don't think it is too problematic to argue that many Orientalists deployed their racist tropes in the service of Empire (Napoleon in Egypt is least disputable example). Surely there is no harm in pointing to these authors and discussing the extent and repercussions of their racism; what I have trouble with is the ease with which Said moves on to other authors in search of similar problems, and manages from there to suppose that the racism of disciplined, state-funded orientalists is unavoidable for any European writing on the world outside its immediate geography.
The clearest example of this problematic approach to critique--the generalizing approach that critiques generalization--is Said's treatment of Marx. Marx is certainly not immune to the 19th century compulsion to conceptualize the multiplicity of the orient as a unified totality, but Said's specific example does nothing to understand how this functions in Marx. Said draws his example from an essay by Marx on England's role in India. Marx is repulsed by the violence and destruction wrought by the British abroad, showing a perhaps unprecedented regard for Indians as human beings on equal footing with Europeans in terms of their rights to freedom and safety. Marx also regrets the pre-colonial despotic regime under which Indians were oppressed before the English usurped authority for themselves, and he sees in this historical moment--here Said thinks he has him--the possibility for revolutionary change: English colonialism, for Marx, is the crucible in which India's post-capitalist society is forged. To Said this is too close to the popular orientalist belief--popularized by Kipling as "White Man's Burden"--that Europe was in the orient for the benefit of the oriental himself. But Said completely ignores that Marx's reading of European industrialism is completely parallel, and that for Marx violence is the historical prerequisite for a new, post-capitalist society, whether at home or abroad. In short--and examples of this abound in Said's text--the major shortcoming of Orientalism is its refusal to explore the implications of its own analysis on the rest of European thought, or indeed on itself.
My counter thesis to the thesis I attributed above to Said--what I would have written Orientalism about--is the replication of domestic modes of oppression in orientalist literature. Said on some few occasions points out similarities between misogyny and orientalism, but consistently declines to elaborate. To my mind, this is the actual story: the growth of capitalism in the 17th and 18th century was facilitated by the tacit, naturalized oppression of a tremendous portion of the European population; orientalism is the rhetorical/political justification of the application of this matrix of oppression to the entire rest of the world. Orientalism secures the seat of authority for those who have already inherited it. I would propose that critiquing orientalist texts in the 19th century from this perspective would lend Said the ability to move beyond mere observation--which ultimately is all Orientalism is. We could see, in this light, what these texts do rather than merely what they say. Further, such a perspective would allow a more dynamic reading of authors like Flaubert, whose work is much more literary than literal.
But I suspect that had Said conceived of his project from this point of view we scarcely would be reading it today. The unreasonable popularity of such a lazy, repetitive book is imaginable only under the conditions in which it was written: the conditions of a complete disinterest in theory. Said's book is easy to read, both in terms of the simplicity of the text itself and--this is the important point--in terms of its malleability. It is this last problem which prohibits me from unequivocably endorsing a single statement of the books thesis. Even when Said explicitly states that all Europeans writing on the Orient are "racist" (204) the claim is so loosely formulated that he could as easily be condemning all of Europe as dismissing "racism" as a meaningless word. ( I think, particularly given the rest of his work, that he is doing neither.) The book is fraught with ideological, theoretical, and epistemological inconsistencies, but instead of thwarting the extraction of any meaning or implication from the text, this litany of problems has enabled any given reader, without much effort, to derive support for whatever reading is most convenient to her or his momentary agenda.
That said, I can only conclude that I am glad this book was written (even if I'm not glad I had to read it). Thirty-three years after the fact, the procession of diligent scholars working on themes of racism and colonialism, capitalism and empire have constructed wonderful and useful scholarly edifices through critique and appropriation of Said's work, and it is difficult to imagine them having been successful without Said's help. One can--and I think must--regret the reactionary, uncritical anti-canonism that Said also helped spawn, but in the historical scope of things, one must suppose these reactions to be but a swing of the pendulum, and a swing that would seem to have reversed direction. So while it is a poor, boring, and nowadays uninteresting book, it is one of those problems that almost has to happen for there to be growth; Said's book is almost like Britain in India (in Marx's mind): borish, stupid, destructive, but necessary for growth.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Laboring over Anti-Oedipus again.
“Let us return to the dualism of money, to the two boards, the two inscriptions, the one going into account of the wage earner, the other into the balance sheet of the enterprise. Measuring the two orders of magnitude in terms of the same analytical unit is a pure fiction, a cosmic swindle, as if one were to measure intergalactic or intra-atomic distances in meter and centimeters. There is no common measure between the value of the enterprises and that of the labor capacity of wage earners.” (230)
I'm going back through my notes on Anti-Oedipus in preparation for a paper I need to write pretty soon, and came across this gem. People often have a hard time understanding the importance of Marxism after the rather catastrophic and brutally inhumane failures of Stalin and Mao (whom some consider to be "proof" of communism's impossibility), and in the face of the seeming and likely impossibility of a global economic revolution that would benefit the poor. Indeed, the failure of Mao and Stalin can be to some extent understood in light of the instability of revolution, and the ease with which the powerful can disenfranchise the weak.
But quotations like the above remind us of Marx's continued importance, and of the importance of reading Marx and Marxists critically. Why do we call the gains of the capitalist by the same name as the wages earned by the laborer? We can understand the why when we examine the consequences. The wages of labor insert the laborer into a system of exchange, and the dollar value of labor is the conceptual means of exchanging. Labor, and laborers, become a good to be purchased, and the surplus value of labor is appropriated by the capitalist. To call capital gains and wages by the same names puts surplus labor value under erasure, and permits or even impels wage laborers to invest desire in the class that oppresses them, to wish and work for their own oppression. Further, it creates the appearance that higher incomes correspond to more or better labor, as if the capitalist labored in the same sense that the factory worker does.
And since an increased wage for a laborer would likely lead to an increase in spending (since there is so often not enough to make ends meet as it is), and since laborers also conceptualize capitalists as both wage earners and wage payers, it is not to much work to understand from this why so many Americans are demanding that high-income tax cuts be left in place.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
owe-riginal sin
So I'm reading Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in preparation for a paper I'm writing (which will maybe be published!), and I've come across an interesting insight that will likely not make it into my paper, so I'm preserving it here for now. Much of the book, I'm sorry to say, won't have much of an impact on my paper, not because it is a bad book (it is excellent) but because it is so focused on its subject matter (capitalism and schizophrenia). The twin institutions of psychoanalysis and capitalism are subject to rigorous critique, but most of the discussion is a technical analysis of psychoanalysis that is both outside my discipline and unconnected to my topic.
The chapter I'm looking at now partitions human history into three phases: the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized man. These terms are to be understood in relation to the tradition of anthropology and ethnography; while "savage" and "barbarian" are heavily prejudicial terms, their technical use, however problematic, is meant merely to apply to specific cultural epochs. I am taking their use in D+G's book to be a strategic necessity without which they could not communicate and engage with anthropology as it intersects both psychoanalysis and the study of capitalism.
But I am in danger of digressing beyond rescue. The point that caught my eye was an argument concerning what they are calling primitive society. Primitive society is placed at the beginning of this tripartite progression, as the phase of civilization characterized by the structure of filiation and the extension of filiation through family alliances. (I think...The model seems to be that pre-savage societies have family lines but no structure of relation between lines. Alliances--marriages--intervene to code and extend filiation, establishing social taboos, for example against incest. Their discussion of this, which of course involve Oedipus rather a lot, is very interesting and a topic for another time.) At this stage capitalism doesn't exist in any useful sense. There is barter, there is production of goods, but there is no system of exchange. This last point is emphasized by D+G because some anthropologists refute it. To demonstrate why exchange doesn't exist in savage society, they draw a distinction between exchange and debt, which they imply are confused by those who read savage society as capitalist. This is the point that is interesting to me.
Drawing on Nietzsche, they argue for debt as a regulating mechanism in society. Debt is incurred whenever we benefit from society (always) and the cohesion of society depends on debt's enforcement. The purpose of debt is "to breed man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him within the debtor-creditor relation..." (190) We cannot confuse debt then with owing money, or with the levying of a fine (though these can be forms of debt). "Far from being an appearance assumed by exchange, debt is the immediate effect or the direct means of the territorial and corporal inscription process." (190) It is not revenge, not ressentiment. (191)
And to a large degree, I think we "know" this to be true--and I mean know in the same way one knows there is a god, for example. If debt operated under exchange, there would be a much smaller prison system. That debt and exchange are fundamentally separate is evinced by the fact that one cannot pay a fine for murder, or, in the opposite direction, that we know it to be unjust for a rich man to be charged some small fine for committing a crime. I suspect that they will soon go on to explain that in a post-savage society such as our own, a society which has passed through and incorporated despotic barbarism, these debts are linked to religion, through the face of the despot (who ruled through his own divine authority). And through capitalism, religious despotism is recoded into new forms of repression (Oedipus, presumably).
The chapter I'm looking at now partitions human history into three phases: the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized man. These terms are to be understood in relation to the tradition of anthropology and ethnography; while "savage" and "barbarian" are heavily prejudicial terms, their technical use, however problematic, is meant merely to apply to specific cultural epochs. I am taking their use in D+G's book to be a strategic necessity without which they could not communicate and engage with anthropology as it intersects both psychoanalysis and the study of capitalism.
But I am in danger of digressing beyond rescue. The point that caught my eye was an argument concerning what they are calling primitive society. Primitive society is placed at the beginning of this tripartite progression, as the phase of civilization characterized by the structure of filiation and the extension of filiation through family alliances. (I think...The model seems to be that pre-savage societies have family lines but no structure of relation between lines. Alliances--marriages--intervene to code and extend filiation, establishing social taboos, for example against incest. Their discussion of this, which of course involve Oedipus rather a lot, is very interesting and a topic for another time.) At this stage capitalism doesn't exist in any useful sense. There is barter, there is production of goods, but there is no system of exchange. This last point is emphasized by D+G because some anthropologists refute it. To demonstrate why exchange doesn't exist in savage society, they draw a distinction between exchange and debt, which they imply are confused by those who read savage society as capitalist. This is the point that is interesting to me.
Drawing on Nietzsche, they argue for debt as a regulating mechanism in society. Debt is incurred whenever we benefit from society (always) and the cohesion of society depends on debt's enforcement. The purpose of debt is "to breed man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him within the debtor-creditor relation..." (190) We cannot confuse debt then with owing money, or with the levying of a fine (though these can be forms of debt). "Far from being an appearance assumed by exchange, debt is the immediate effect or the direct means of the territorial and corporal inscription process." (190) It is not revenge, not ressentiment. (191)
And to a large degree, I think we "know" this to be true--and I mean know in the same way one knows there is a god, for example. If debt operated under exchange, there would be a much smaller prison system. That debt and exchange are fundamentally separate is evinced by the fact that one cannot pay a fine for murder, or, in the opposite direction, that we know it to be unjust for a rich man to be charged some small fine for committing a crime. I suspect that they will soon go on to explain that in a post-savage society such as our own, a society which has passed through and incorporated despotic barbarism, these debts are linked to religion, through the face of the despot (who ruled through his own divine authority). And through capitalism, religious despotism is recoded into new forms of repression (Oedipus, presumably).
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
My new crush
So I'm on to part six of "Beyond Belief," which I plugged earlier, and it consists of a few interesting talks. The first one, Susan Neiman, is my new crush. Some of her comments make sense only with relation to the talk on Spinoza that is in part 5, but it's still intelligible on it's own if you're in a hurry. My particular interest in it is the attention and respect she grants to religious thinkers; if she were a post-structuralist (and she is clearly not) she would surely remind us that all thinking is constrained by some unverifiable belief, but the next best thing is to present a more realistic picture of the size of the divide between religion, categorically, and science. She also takes the time to distinguish between science and the humanities and arts. Also yay Kant.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Komen after your cash.
Dear Reader,
I've joined a walking team for the Susan G. Komen 3-day walk for the cure, and I'm looking to raise some money to fight breast cancer. Please follow the link below and donate if you can, and pass on the URL to anyone you think might be willing and able to give a little.
http://www.the3day.org/goto/thepeat
-ThePeat
I've joined a walking team for the Susan G. Komen 3-day walk for the cure, and I'm looking to raise some money to fight breast cancer. Please follow the link below and donate if you can, and pass on the URL to anyone you think might be willing and able to give a little.
http://www.the3day.org/goto/thepeat
-ThePeat
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Current events.
It's almost rhythmic, the frequency with which public, polemical homophobes expose themselves as hypocrites. The most recent in this surely endless stream of bigots is a politician who was caught drunkenly driving away form a gay club with another man in my lovely hometown of Sacramento. The narrative is so well established that even moderates have begun to suspect that most outspoken bigots are compensating for their own self-loathing, that they are closet cases.
And there is something appealing about that story, about the source of extreme bigotry being in fact bigotry itself; there is something human about these angry rabble-rousers being the the primary target of their own hatred. It quite neatly gives some meaning to their hatred--they are expressing their own fear of who they are in a society that makes of them something vile--and it allows us to sympathize with and humanize our enemies. Indeed, they may not even know what they do, so deeply can we suppress our unwanted desires.
And perhaps it's true, perhaps it isn't. Clearly it explains some people well enough, and we do well to temper our condemnation of their hatred with sympathy for their situation; after all they more than anyone know how much they are despised by the bigoted for their sexual orientation.
What troubles me is the kind of moral outrage and mockery that accompanies these outings. And I'm concerned not on righteous or ethical grounds, but on pragmatic grounds. What concerns me is how these sorts of events are constituted as wrong. The wrong here, unambiguously, is the rhetoric that brought these individuals into the public arena to begin with. What they have done wrong is established a career as hatemongers and bigots; they have garnered support with homophobia as their platform, and they have incited others to the same violent sort of hatred they themselves have practiced.
What they have not done wrong--from the standpoint of ethical imperatives--is sleep with another man, or hook up in an airport bathroom, or frequent a gay club. Too often these stories focus on the homosexual act itself, which in fact we ought to applaud these repressed, fearful men for committing. Of course, there is the problem of marriage infidelity--and that is a serious problem--but even this issue tends to take a backseat in the press to the homosexual act.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be reported. To some limited extent, events such as Ashburn's arrest serve to undermine the public support of outspoken bigots. But too the type of publicity these stories accumulate does as much to reinforce homophobia as the outing of bigots does to undermine it. Instead of emphasizing the corrosive rhetoric, they focus on the contradicting behavior; homosexuality, or more specifically the homosexual act, becomes the negative element, not the bigotry. Instead of a career of hatred being seen as Ashburn's shame, the story is a fall from grace, into the depravity of gay sex.
We're telling the wrong story, and by doing that we're ensuring that we'll get to tell this story over and over again.
And there is something appealing about that story, about the source of extreme bigotry being in fact bigotry itself; there is something human about these angry rabble-rousers being the the primary target of their own hatred. It quite neatly gives some meaning to their hatred--they are expressing their own fear of who they are in a society that makes of them something vile--and it allows us to sympathize with and humanize our enemies. Indeed, they may not even know what they do, so deeply can we suppress our unwanted desires.
And perhaps it's true, perhaps it isn't. Clearly it explains some people well enough, and we do well to temper our condemnation of their hatred with sympathy for their situation; after all they more than anyone know how much they are despised by the bigoted for their sexual orientation.
What troubles me is the kind of moral outrage and mockery that accompanies these outings. And I'm concerned not on righteous or ethical grounds, but on pragmatic grounds. What concerns me is how these sorts of events are constituted as wrong. The wrong here, unambiguously, is the rhetoric that brought these individuals into the public arena to begin with. What they have done wrong is established a career as hatemongers and bigots; they have garnered support with homophobia as their platform, and they have incited others to the same violent sort of hatred they themselves have practiced.
What they have not done wrong--from the standpoint of ethical imperatives--is sleep with another man, or hook up in an airport bathroom, or frequent a gay club. Too often these stories focus on the homosexual act itself, which in fact we ought to applaud these repressed, fearful men for committing. Of course, there is the problem of marriage infidelity--and that is a serious problem--but even this issue tends to take a backseat in the press to the homosexual act.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be reported. To some limited extent, events such as Ashburn's arrest serve to undermine the public support of outspoken bigots. But too the type of publicity these stories accumulate does as much to reinforce homophobia as the outing of bigots does to undermine it. Instead of emphasizing the corrosive rhetoric, they focus on the contradicting behavior; homosexuality, or more specifically the homosexual act, becomes the negative element, not the bigotry. Instead of a career of hatred being seen as Ashburn's shame, the story is a fall from grace, into the depravity of gay sex.
We're telling the wrong story, and by doing that we're ensuring that we'll get to tell this story over and over again.
Monday, March 1, 2010
TSN: Beyond Belief
So I'll say first that I've been meaning to write a lengthy response to Kai's earlier comment, but have lacked the steam. Instead I'll sum up what have been my idle thoughts on the matter, and I'll do it briefly. Literature suffers from a problem of a peculiar relationship with agency and representation. An individual can make liberated choices (ideally) that still coincide with stereotypes and have but a marginal effect on the relationships of others to stereotypes. (It is when lots and lots of people make these same decisions that they become normative.) In literature this marginal influence on normativity is magnified by the singularity of the protagonist (particularly in classically heterosexual romances such as His Dark Materials). The problem is then not in accurately presenting or participating in free choice but in depicting a healthy protagonist, who, like it or not, becomes something of a model, which is in turn a norm. Now I think Pullman does as good a job of this as can be expected; my criticisms we nits, not full grown lice. (More honestly, I now think whatever criticism can be leveled would be against nits, but since I haven't re-read my earlier post, I'm not sure if that was the case then or not.) (Thanks, Kai, btw, for chatting about this with me on the phone; it was, as always, very pleasant.)
The more pressing issue on my mind is a wonderful link I found in a Reddit comments thread. I've only had time yet to listen through session 3 (it is a very handing addition to crocheting), which concludes with Carolyn Porco's talk on Saturn. (This includes a picture and description of a shot of Saturn eclipsing the sun--taken from the far side of Saturn--which alone is worth the time.) The conference deals with the question of religion and science, and the majority of the speakers thus far suggest that the former interferes with the latter, and that we'd all be happier (and more alive) in the long run if we could just do away with the former.
Two points are underdeveloped so far, though perhaps the second half will redress this: 1) An understanding of the disciplinary element of religion, and 2) The possibility of a fully non-religious morality.
Now I have a hard time keeping track of what thoughts I've taken the time to elaborate on here, so forgive me once again if I repeat.
Point one is particularly conspicuous in Porco's talk, where she partitions the concern of the conference into God on the one hand and religion on the other; but it is introduced much earlier and involves a common counter-atheist argument. Religion offers community, and it is a sign of my privilege--economic, social, historical, educational, sexual, geographical, political--that I can live happily without a religious community. But in many places, religion binds a community together, giving its constituents communality and place. In short, religion provides social comfort.
Of course, the response to this is clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of the Jewish diaspora, though this is not by a long shot the only handy example. The fact is that while religious communities are capable of tremendous good--the example from the conference is the donations to Katrina victims--they operate on what is sometimes called a politics of the same. This is the politics that enables the Salvation Army to threaten to close its soup kitchens if New York doesn't ban gay marriage, for example. It is a politics of defining community by who is excluded and why (think of the inanity of the Bible study groups, where a sub-group--married women, married men, teens--of the church examine famous passages with the intent of reinforcing their received wisdom).
This is not to say that religion is intrinsically or necessarily disciplinary (in the sense that these groups discipline their members to conform, under the threat of exclusion). Nor is it to say that it is exclusively religious organizations that employ this sort of discipline. The question is whether or not this mode of discipline is in fact fundamental to faith (for example, to be christian you must have a common belief in Christ, but how far does that commonality go?), or, perhaps more broadly, whether a method of disciplinary exclusion can be employed without a tangible connection to ethics (that is, can a church exclude homosexuals without denouncing them, for example). (A lot of work, incidentally, has been done in this vein, but it does not often fall under the banner of science.)
The second point came up most clearly in an exchange between Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Joan Roughgarden (the lone open theist thus far). Roughgarden suggests that a viable source of morality is unlikely, and at the least has yet to be demonstrated, without religion--and if I recall correctly, she means specifically a founding religious text.
I was sure that Harris, who apparently has a degree in philosophy, would come back with the rich philosophical tradition of non-theism, starting with the Categorical Imperative, and bringing it up to the recent (comparatively) formulation of groundless solidarity and the politics of difference (though these last two stray a ways form philosophy proper). Because after all one of the primary preoccupations with intellectuals on the left since WWII has been how to talk about ethics when everything--God, religion, progress, humanism--has died or failed.
And this leads me to conclude with a broader concern regarding these talks. It is clear that they don't all mean the same thing when they say science. At one point Lois Althusser, a French Marxist philosopher from the middle of the 20th century, characterizes the history of Marxism as the struggle of science to clear itself of ideology. By this he means that unbiased, open-ended inquiry is science--and can be philosophy as well as it can be genetics--while inquiries with an interest in what can or can't be the answer are ideologies. From this perspective, the contrast between religion and science is apt, and can even be pushed to the point of equating religion with ideology (Harris talks instead of dogma, but means much the same thing).
Adorno, though, and Derrida subsequently (really this could be a very long list), shows us something a little different. It is unrealistic for any of us to ever presume a clear picture; we all always have biases, and these biases will always form "epistemological barriers," as Althusser says. It is naïve to suppose we will ever perform without them, and dangerous and condescending to claim we do. This is not to say that science is a religion, but that all thought, no matter how radical or scrupulous, is partly habitual--which is almost to say partly linguistic.
The more pressing issue on my mind is a wonderful link I found in a Reddit comments thread. I've only had time yet to listen through session 3 (it is a very handing addition to crocheting), which concludes with Carolyn Porco's talk on Saturn. (This includes a picture and description of a shot of Saturn eclipsing the sun--taken from the far side of Saturn--which alone is worth the time.) The conference deals with the question of religion and science, and the majority of the speakers thus far suggest that the former interferes with the latter, and that we'd all be happier (and more alive) in the long run if we could just do away with the former.
Two points are underdeveloped so far, though perhaps the second half will redress this: 1) An understanding of the disciplinary element of religion, and 2) The possibility of a fully non-religious morality.
Now I have a hard time keeping track of what thoughts I've taken the time to elaborate on here, so forgive me once again if I repeat.
Point one is particularly conspicuous in Porco's talk, where she partitions the concern of the conference into God on the one hand and religion on the other; but it is introduced much earlier and involves a common counter-atheist argument. Religion offers community, and it is a sign of my privilege--economic, social, historical, educational, sexual, geographical, political--that I can live happily without a religious community. But in many places, religion binds a community together, giving its constituents communality and place. In short, religion provides social comfort.
Of course, the response to this is clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of the Jewish diaspora, though this is not by a long shot the only handy example. The fact is that while religious communities are capable of tremendous good--the example from the conference is the donations to Katrina victims--they operate on what is sometimes called a politics of the same. This is the politics that enables the Salvation Army to threaten to close its soup kitchens if New York doesn't ban gay marriage, for example. It is a politics of defining community by who is excluded and why (think of the inanity of the Bible study groups, where a sub-group--married women, married men, teens--of the church examine famous passages with the intent of reinforcing their received wisdom).
This is not to say that religion is intrinsically or necessarily disciplinary (in the sense that these groups discipline their members to conform, under the threat of exclusion). Nor is it to say that it is exclusively religious organizations that employ this sort of discipline. The question is whether or not this mode of discipline is in fact fundamental to faith (for example, to be christian you must have a common belief in Christ, but how far does that commonality go?), or, perhaps more broadly, whether a method of disciplinary exclusion can be employed without a tangible connection to ethics (that is, can a church exclude homosexuals without denouncing them, for example). (A lot of work, incidentally, has been done in this vein, but it does not often fall under the banner of science.)
The second point came up most clearly in an exchange between Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Joan Roughgarden (the lone open theist thus far). Roughgarden suggests that a viable source of morality is unlikely, and at the least has yet to be demonstrated, without religion--and if I recall correctly, she means specifically a founding religious text.
I was sure that Harris, who apparently has a degree in philosophy, would come back with the rich philosophical tradition of non-theism, starting with the Categorical Imperative, and bringing it up to the recent (comparatively) formulation of groundless solidarity and the politics of difference (though these last two stray a ways form philosophy proper). Because after all one of the primary preoccupations with intellectuals on the left since WWII has been how to talk about ethics when everything--God, religion, progress, humanism--has died or failed.
And this leads me to conclude with a broader concern regarding these talks. It is clear that they don't all mean the same thing when they say science. At one point Lois Althusser, a French Marxist philosopher from the middle of the 20th century, characterizes the history of Marxism as the struggle of science to clear itself of ideology. By this he means that unbiased, open-ended inquiry is science--and can be philosophy as well as it can be genetics--while inquiries with an interest in what can or can't be the answer are ideologies. From this perspective, the contrast between religion and science is apt, and can even be pushed to the point of equating religion with ideology (Harris talks instead of dogma, but means much the same thing).
Adorno, though, and Derrida subsequently (really this could be a very long list), shows us something a little different. It is unrealistic for any of us to ever presume a clear picture; we all always have biases, and these biases will always form "epistemological barriers," as Althusser says. It is naïve to suppose we will ever perform without them, and dangerous and condescending to claim we do. This is not to say that science is a religion, but that all thought, no matter how radical or scrupulous, is partly habitual--which is almost to say partly linguistic.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Spoiling His Dark Materials
As is becoming my custom, I am now going to write something silly about something I just read/viewed that I don't get to use for school. This time the object is the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (thank you Mike; I'll bring them back to Spokane now that I'm done so they can be passed on to the next reader). As always, I will spoil some plot details.
Now I will always have trouble reading fiction that is both highly recommended and not yet "literature," because I am a pretentious ass. However, I am not so far gone that I cannot recognize a good thing when I see it, even while I may become frustrated with nagging flaws of either style or detail. His Dark Materials is a successful text in a genre that is entirely too small: atheist youth literature. Even in the more secular corners of our large nation, there are great numbers of people who believe that deliberately raising your children to be atheists is dangerous or wrong, even if these same people are often willing to admit that being both atheist and moral as an adult isn't terribly difficult. Because the false link between religion and morality is so forcefully forged, there is a certain unease at the prospect of not teaching children to believe in god from the get-go. (And incidentally, we ought perhaps to be skeptical of any truth that requires years of youthful repetition--not exploration--adequately to take hold. What I mean by this in part is that the strength and beauty of religion is in its absurdity and novelty; habituation robs it of even this.)
So since, from one point of view, the grounding moment of Pullman's trilogy is the disruption of Christianity's claim to moral priority, the books are valuable, even if only for this. However, Pullman's motive is not only negative; there is an affirmative element as well. I think St. Paul is whom he sites when he bases his model for the constitution of the human on a three-part structure. Rather than the normal body/soul dichotomy, it is useful (for the plot particularly) to extend this to a third element: body/soul/spirit. We might distinguish the second from the third through consciousness; by spirit Pullman seems to mean something that includes mind. Regardless, though, of how soul and spirit partition the immaterial aspects of humanity, Pullman makes clear, especially in the third book, where his model for the universe is fully revealed, that the body--the material existence of humans--is the best and most enviable element. (Indeed it is what drives God and his angels to subjugate humanity...though it's not quite clear why they stop there, and leave other material beings to their business.)
This is, to my mind, the most successful aspect of Pullman's books. It is particularly in the treatment of the body that Christianity is problematic, and easily accessible books that challenge this dogma both directly and positively--that is, by offering alternative ethics--are most welcome. (It is worth noting, though, that a great deal of the Christian/Catholic dogma against the body stems as much from Plato and Aristotle as it does from the Bible. There is some very good, if confusing, work done by a number of feminists--and non feminists--on how Plato's philosophy, and later that of Aristotle and Plotinus, has hamstrung our ability to think maternity and womanhood, and by extension humanity generally, in a non-violent way. But I've commented on much of that already, and will avoid the side track for now.)
I do have some problems with these books though, as I hinted at above. Some are trivial (there are abundant flies at the north pole), some are narrative (would you really not spend all your time checking the alethiometer? and why did neither side manage to score some A-10 Warthogs or something?), some are somewhat metaphysical (if Metatron--really? his name is Metatron?--used to be Enoch, which Enoch? did all Christian worlds split off from one another after Enoch dies? Then why are there daemons in the Adam and Eve story? etc.), but there is a looming one that is ethical.
When I got to the end of The Golden Compass, I was excited at the prospect that lay ahead. It seemed clear that Pullman was driving toward a world view where the priority of the church--who was locally stifling research into multi-world science much as it had heliocentricity--would give way to free thinkers, and that the authority from which it derived its dominion would be revealed as false. Pullman did go this direction more or less, but he swerved into the sort of humanism that I find suspect. Instead of the sort of purposeless, beautiful universe we ourselves inhabit, Lyra et al. gradually discover themselves to be traveling through a universe with as much divinity and purpose as supposed by the church; the only difference is what the purpose is.
So it turns out that God is really just an angel, he didn't create the universe, and he is so dreadfully jealous of humanity's flesh that he has waged a thousands years war of oppression and suppression to make us all as miserable as he is. Behind this, forces have been at work to overthrow this Authority--these are the dark materials?--and allow us to love each other in peace. The problem, then, is not that we worshiped a false god, but that we worshiped the wrong god.
Now I don't have a problem with this from certain narrative perspectives. If we accept the proposition that there will always be someone who has some authority over our lives (and there likely will be) it is better for us to expect that person to respect our loves and lusts; then we can fight for having repressor and oppressors replaced. But, from a religious perspective (let's call it that for now), I am uncomfortable with the argument that this authority is metaphysical--that is, above physically observable experience--and universal. So long as we are teaching our children to face the universe bravely, we ought to help them toward imagining a world of purposeless purposiveness. Instead Pullman replaces an autocracy of repression with an autocracy of love. An improvement, surely, but not perfect.
And this is how I feel about the books in general. An improvement. I'm still not perfectly happy with the gender roles (though I LOVE Mary Malone, and I particularly love that at no point does Pullman make her single status seem at all a failure or inadequacy), though again, it is an improvement. The principal protagonist--and for quite a while the principal antagonist as well--is female, and for the most part she avoids stereotypes, though perhaps by unhappy coincidence she is the artful liar, while Will is stalwartly honest. It is also maybe coincidental that she had the enigmatic and endlessly complicated compass while he had the knife. It would be terribly difficult to write a convincing adventure story with a boy and a girl where the girl is the physically dominant one throughout. Like I said, it's an improvement.
Finally, I will say I wish someone else had written these books. In spite of the well-crafted plot and generally agreeable characters, I found that more often then usual, I would grow sleepy and, in the middle of a suspenseful moment, indifferently put the book down and get ready for bed. His prose does not move with much grace, and much like myself he is prone to repeating himself in what he surely thinks is a clarifying gesture, but what is in fact boring and distracting.
But do read these books, if you haven't...I think I've not spoilt them too much here. No more than if you read the back cover (those things should be illegal).
Now I will always have trouble reading fiction that is both highly recommended and not yet "literature," because I am a pretentious ass. However, I am not so far gone that I cannot recognize a good thing when I see it, even while I may become frustrated with nagging flaws of either style or detail. His Dark Materials is a successful text in a genre that is entirely too small: atheist youth literature. Even in the more secular corners of our large nation, there are great numbers of people who believe that deliberately raising your children to be atheists is dangerous or wrong, even if these same people are often willing to admit that being both atheist and moral as an adult isn't terribly difficult. Because the false link between religion and morality is so forcefully forged, there is a certain unease at the prospect of not teaching children to believe in god from the get-go. (And incidentally, we ought perhaps to be skeptical of any truth that requires years of youthful repetition--not exploration--adequately to take hold. What I mean by this in part is that the strength and beauty of religion is in its absurdity and novelty; habituation robs it of even this.)
So since, from one point of view, the grounding moment of Pullman's trilogy is the disruption of Christianity's claim to moral priority, the books are valuable, even if only for this. However, Pullman's motive is not only negative; there is an affirmative element as well. I think St. Paul is whom he sites when he bases his model for the constitution of the human on a three-part structure. Rather than the normal body/soul dichotomy, it is useful (for the plot particularly) to extend this to a third element: body/soul/spirit. We might distinguish the second from the third through consciousness; by spirit Pullman seems to mean something that includes mind. Regardless, though, of how soul and spirit partition the immaterial aspects of humanity, Pullman makes clear, especially in the third book, where his model for the universe is fully revealed, that the body--the material existence of humans--is the best and most enviable element. (Indeed it is what drives God and his angels to subjugate humanity...though it's not quite clear why they stop there, and leave other material beings to their business.)
This is, to my mind, the most successful aspect of Pullman's books. It is particularly in the treatment of the body that Christianity is problematic, and easily accessible books that challenge this dogma both directly and positively--that is, by offering alternative ethics--are most welcome. (It is worth noting, though, that a great deal of the Christian/Catholic dogma against the body stems as much from Plato and Aristotle as it does from the Bible. There is some very good, if confusing, work done by a number of feminists--and non feminists--on how Plato's philosophy, and later that of Aristotle and Plotinus, has hamstrung our ability to think maternity and womanhood, and by extension humanity generally, in a non-violent way. But I've commented on much of that already, and will avoid the side track for now.)
I do have some problems with these books though, as I hinted at above. Some are trivial (there are abundant flies at the north pole), some are narrative (would you really not spend all your time checking the alethiometer? and why did neither side manage to score some A-10 Warthogs or something?), some are somewhat metaphysical (if Metatron--really? his name is Metatron?--used to be Enoch, which Enoch? did all Christian worlds split off from one another after Enoch dies? Then why are there daemons in the Adam and Eve story? etc.), but there is a looming one that is ethical.
When I got to the end of The Golden Compass, I was excited at the prospect that lay ahead. It seemed clear that Pullman was driving toward a world view where the priority of the church--who was locally stifling research into multi-world science much as it had heliocentricity--would give way to free thinkers, and that the authority from which it derived its dominion would be revealed as false. Pullman did go this direction more or less, but he swerved into the sort of humanism that I find suspect. Instead of the sort of purposeless, beautiful universe we ourselves inhabit, Lyra et al. gradually discover themselves to be traveling through a universe with as much divinity and purpose as supposed by the church; the only difference is what the purpose is.
So it turns out that God is really just an angel, he didn't create the universe, and he is so dreadfully jealous of humanity's flesh that he has waged a thousands years war of oppression and suppression to make us all as miserable as he is. Behind this, forces have been at work to overthrow this Authority--these are the dark materials?--and allow us to love each other in peace. The problem, then, is not that we worshiped a false god, but that we worshiped the wrong god.
Now I don't have a problem with this from certain narrative perspectives. If we accept the proposition that there will always be someone who has some authority over our lives (and there likely will be) it is better for us to expect that person to respect our loves and lusts; then we can fight for having repressor and oppressors replaced. But, from a religious perspective (let's call it that for now), I am uncomfortable with the argument that this authority is metaphysical--that is, above physically observable experience--and universal. So long as we are teaching our children to face the universe bravely, we ought to help them toward imagining a world of purposeless purposiveness. Instead Pullman replaces an autocracy of repression with an autocracy of love. An improvement, surely, but not perfect.
And this is how I feel about the books in general. An improvement. I'm still not perfectly happy with the gender roles (though I LOVE Mary Malone, and I particularly love that at no point does Pullman make her single status seem at all a failure or inadequacy), though again, it is an improvement. The principal protagonist--and for quite a while the principal antagonist as well--is female, and for the most part she avoids stereotypes, though perhaps by unhappy coincidence she is the artful liar, while Will is stalwartly honest. It is also maybe coincidental that she had the enigmatic and endlessly complicated compass while he had the knife. It would be terribly difficult to write a convincing adventure story with a boy and a girl where the girl is the physically dominant one throughout. Like I said, it's an improvement.
Finally, I will say I wish someone else had written these books. In spite of the well-crafted plot and generally agreeable characters, I found that more often then usual, I would grow sleepy and, in the middle of a suspenseful moment, indifferently put the book down and get ready for bed. His prose does not move with much grace, and much like myself he is prone to repeating himself in what he surely thinks is a clarifying gesture, but what is in fact boring and distracting.
But do read these books, if you haven't...I think I've not spoilt them too much here. No more than if you read the back cover (those things should be illegal).
Monday, January 4, 2010
Dances with shellfish.
Don't read this if you haven't seen District 9 and Avatar.
* * * * *
Sci-Fi might be lauded as the cinematic genre that lends itself most willingly and transparently to allegory, and District 9 and Avatar are certainly exemplary of this bias. Both films simplify, for the purpose of moralizing, one of the formative moments of the last five hundred or so years: the colonial encounter.
Both movies use non-humans to represent the dehumanization by the colonizer of the colonized. In District 9, the setting is a city dealing with a displaced population (we are led to think of the New World and the African diaspora). Every human we meet harbors some bigoted view of the prawns, ranging from open hatred to patronizing contempt. The journey ok the mentally-challenged protagonist traces the depth of this bigotry, as he is forced to rely upon those he can see only as dangerously incompetent and stupid. Bigotry's irrationality and potency take center stage in what is surely the movie's most irritating scene, where Wikus assaults Christopher Johnson, with the hopes of commandeering his ship and curing himself on his own. Our perspective beyond the screen makes Wikus's decision as abhorrent as it is stupid: Christopher Johnson is the only with any competence in flying, and the only one with any chance at all of knowing how to reverse Wikus's tranformation. Wikus, though, cannot see from this perspective, because he cannot overcome his epistemological barriers. For him, prawns are always inferior. It is not until he embraces his transformation--symbolized by him stepping into the prawn battle suit--that he can understand Christopher Johnson as an equal; until that point, he sees himself as the boss. The movie has an uncharacteristically sad ending; Christopher Johnson escapes, but his time in transit is much too long for cinematic gratification. In the mean time, district 9 is moved into a more efficient concentration camp. And while Wikus has overcome his bigotry, no one else has. (I will say that I enjoy how many technical points, particularly regarding the origin(s) of the prawns, are left unaddressed.)
Avatar is set much earlier in the history of colonialism, and keeps the relationship simple: the colonizers are landing on alien soil and extracting resources as cheaply as possible. The narrative relies on old fears of ethnic contagion (think Heart of Darkness) but deploys them with the liberal view of the white man as savior (think Dances with Wolves). While District 9 was concerned with the question of how different groups of people can live along side one another, Avatar is concerned with how greed ruins purity--in this view, the allegory of colonialism is an allegory for corporatism, which nowadays amounts to the same thing. The advantage lent by Sci-Fi is that the old liberal trope that mistakes the Indian for nature can be relieved of its racism: here the natives are verifiably connected to their ecosystem. The plot is driven by the blindness on the part of the colonizers, which prevents them from seeing Pandora in terms of anything but exchange value. This forges the epistemological barrier between the native population and the colonizers, with the latter (excepting our wise liberal surrogates) implacably decimating with no regard for efficiency or taste, and the former left unable to act at all. Like District 9, this barrier provides a dramatic climax: the gunships are fast approaching, the warning issued, and yet they do not flee. Why are they so stupid? you ask. Again irrationality signals difference. Unable to comprehend the essential differences between themselves and the human aggressors, the Na'vi cannot, even in the face of all evidence, believe the assault to be real, and still further they cannot conceive of it being successful. Even the choice to flee is not truly theirs to make. A full understanding of the destructive capacity of the human exchange value economy is not arrived at until Jake Sully wrests ownership of his body (his human body) away from corporate control. Once it has been spirited away to the Tree of Souls, he can claim his rightful place as the leader of a society that evidently is incapable of organizing itself against an imminent threat.
This movie ends happily though. The capitalists are run off, and the pure natives can continue to commune with nature. What is the moral we learn from this story? Perhaps that if the Native Americans really could commune with nature, we wouldn't be here to talk about it? Or maybe that Kevin Costner didn't do a good enough job sticking up for them?
* * * * *
Sci-Fi might be lauded as the cinematic genre that lends itself most willingly and transparently to allegory, and District 9 and Avatar are certainly exemplary of this bias. Both films simplify, for the purpose of moralizing, one of the formative moments of the last five hundred or so years: the colonial encounter.
Both movies use non-humans to represent the dehumanization by the colonizer of the colonized. In District 9, the setting is a city dealing with a displaced population (we are led to think of the New World and the African diaspora). Every human we meet harbors some bigoted view of the prawns, ranging from open hatred to patronizing contempt. The journey ok the mentally-challenged protagonist traces the depth of this bigotry, as he is forced to rely upon those he can see only as dangerously incompetent and stupid. Bigotry's irrationality and potency take center stage in what is surely the movie's most irritating scene, where Wikus assaults Christopher Johnson, with the hopes of commandeering his ship and curing himself on his own. Our perspective beyond the screen makes Wikus's decision as abhorrent as it is stupid: Christopher Johnson is the only with any competence in flying, and the only one with any chance at all of knowing how to reverse Wikus's tranformation. Wikus, though, cannot see from this perspective, because he cannot overcome his epistemological barriers. For him, prawns are always inferior. It is not until he embraces his transformation--symbolized by him stepping into the prawn battle suit--that he can understand Christopher Johnson as an equal; until that point, he sees himself as the boss. The movie has an uncharacteristically sad ending; Christopher Johnson escapes, but his time in transit is much too long for cinematic gratification. In the mean time, district 9 is moved into a more efficient concentration camp. And while Wikus has overcome his bigotry, no one else has. (I will say that I enjoy how many technical points, particularly regarding the origin(s) of the prawns, are left unaddressed.)
Avatar is set much earlier in the history of colonialism, and keeps the relationship simple: the colonizers are landing on alien soil and extracting resources as cheaply as possible. The narrative relies on old fears of ethnic contagion (think Heart of Darkness) but deploys them with the liberal view of the white man as savior (think Dances with Wolves). While District 9 was concerned with the question of how different groups of people can live along side one another, Avatar is concerned with how greed ruins purity--in this view, the allegory of colonialism is an allegory for corporatism, which nowadays amounts to the same thing. The advantage lent by Sci-Fi is that the old liberal trope that mistakes the Indian for nature can be relieved of its racism: here the natives are verifiably connected to their ecosystem. The plot is driven by the blindness on the part of the colonizers, which prevents them from seeing Pandora in terms of anything but exchange value. This forges the epistemological barrier between the native population and the colonizers, with the latter (excepting our wise liberal surrogates) implacably decimating with no regard for efficiency or taste, and the former left unable to act at all. Like District 9, this barrier provides a dramatic climax: the gunships are fast approaching, the warning issued, and yet they do not flee. Why are they so stupid? you ask. Again irrationality signals difference. Unable to comprehend the essential differences between themselves and the human aggressors, the Na'vi cannot, even in the face of all evidence, believe the assault to be real, and still further they cannot conceive of it being successful. Even the choice to flee is not truly theirs to make. A full understanding of the destructive capacity of the human exchange value economy is not arrived at until Jake Sully wrests ownership of his body (his human body) away from corporate control. Once it has been spirited away to the Tree of Souls, he can claim his rightful place as the leader of a society that evidently is incapable of organizing itself against an imminent threat.
This movie ends happily though. The capitalists are run off, and the pure natives can continue to commune with nature. What is the moral we learn from this story? Perhaps that if the Native Americans really could commune with nature, we wouldn't be here to talk about it? Or maybe that Kevin Costner didn't do a good enough job sticking up for them?
Monday, December 21, 2009
Writing
I got my first two chapters back from my advisor with annotations today. I'm now grumpy. I knew handing it in that there were some considerable problems. I knew the form was bad, and that the points were not reached with clarity or even always purpose; and I'm trying hard to bear these things in mind while I mull over his recommendations. I cannot help but think I've significantly diminished myself in his eyes. Ultimately that doesn't matter, since the final product will redeem me (or I won't get a degree, I reckon).
But as seems always to be the case lately, I went home and the first thing I read applied directly to my worries. Here is Adorno from the second section of Minima Moralia:
He goes on to make several more good points, and I'm a little happier knowing much of my poor writing is my fault, rather than a result of my faults; that is, I don't think this is a problem of inadequacy but a sort of inattention.
And I didn't say anything nasty in that whole post! :)
But as seems always to be the case lately, I went home and the first thing I read applied directly to my worries. Here is Adorno from the second section of Minima Moralia:
[epigraph:] "Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst." --F.H.Bradley
Memento -- A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, 'in his thoughts', he forgets to say what he wants to say.
No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level.
He goes on to make several more good points, and I'm a little happier knowing much of my poor writing is my fault, rather than a result of my faults; that is, I don't think this is a problem of inadequacy but a sort of inattention.
And I didn't say anything nasty in that whole post! :)
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Goodness, two posts in one day is terribly unfashionable. I should wait an hour and a half.
I was talking to a brilliant friend of mine today about religion and lingering narratives. We talked about the problems with marriage, and the exchange economy that surrounds it, the pressure to conform and perform a gendered role, the appropriation of individuals in the interest of tradition, and, especially, the devaluation of lifestyles that do not involve participation in this sort of economy--whether by judicial force or personal choice. OK we didn't talk about all that, but it's all implicated in what we did discuss.
We talked about the mysterious pleasure of religious ceremony: the reverence of a cathedral, the community of the call to prayer, etc. It made me think of a cute song I had thought of posting without commentary. I initially decided against putting it up because I had little to add to it, and because I get a little trigger happy with the facebook links. With the added context of today's conversation, it seems more worth the time.
Now almost all my friends are non-theists, either because they've thought about it and feel it's the position that best lets them be honest with themselves, or because they have not thought about it and it is simply who they are. My coffee conversation is one of my few Christian friends, which face allows me the delightful opportunity to explore in dialogue experiences that I otherwise overlook. In spite of my recent ramblings on religion, I hadn't thought much of late on what role religion may still play in my life. Because I don't spend any time with Christians in a context that allows faith as an appropriate topic of conversation, I don't get asked why I celebrate Christmas.
Tim Minchin is Australian, so Christmas comes for him in the summer. He is also usually funnier than this:
I think this has something to do with why non-theists still have a stake in marriage, too. The mysterious community of ritual is not merely religious (anthropologically speaking, it casts religion in the light of an accidental appendage). Indeed, in addition to extending beyond the reach of religious discipline, it would too seem to surpass the proprietary structure of the traditional family. The ritual that Minchin sings about is a singularity of support, the bare trace of a religious experience stripped of its judicial baggage. If there is a thread of this in marriage, then there is some hope for divorcing that institution from its sordid past; better put, given this hypothesis, marriage in and of itself needs no help, it simply needs to be let free.
It surely goes without saying that so long as religion remains a negative theology it will not know how to do any good in this arena.
I was talking to a brilliant friend of mine today about religion and lingering narratives. We talked about the problems with marriage, and the exchange economy that surrounds it, the pressure to conform and perform a gendered role, the appropriation of individuals in the interest of tradition, and, especially, the devaluation of lifestyles that do not involve participation in this sort of economy--whether by judicial force or personal choice. OK we didn't talk about all that, but it's all implicated in what we did discuss.
We talked about the mysterious pleasure of religious ceremony: the reverence of a cathedral, the community of the call to prayer, etc. It made me think of a cute song I had thought of posting without commentary. I initially decided against putting it up because I had little to add to it, and because I get a little trigger happy with the facebook links. With the added context of today's conversation, it seems more worth the time.
Now almost all my friends are non-theists, either because they've thought about it and feel it's the position that best lets them be honest with themselves, or because they have not thought about it and it is simply who they are. My coffee conversation is one of my few Christian friends, which face allows me the delightful opportunity to explore in dialogue experiences that I otherwise overlook. In spite of my recent ramblings on religion, I hadn't thought much of late on what role religion may still play in my life. Because I don't spend any time with Christians in a context that allows faith as an appropriate topic of conversation, I don't get asked why I celebrate Christmas.
Tim Minchin is Australian, so Christmas comes for him in the summer. He is also usually funnier than this:
I think this has something to do with why non-theists still have a stake in marriage, too. The mysterious community of ritual is not merely religious (anthropologically speaking, it casts religion in the light of an accidental appendage). Indeed, in addition to extending beyond the reach of religious discipline, it would too seem to surpass the proprietary structure of the traditional family. The ritual that Minchin sings about is a singularity of support, the bare trace of a religious experience stripped of its judicial baggage. If there is a thread of this in marriage, then there is some hope for divorcing that institution from its sordid past; better put, given this hypothesis, marriage in and of itself needs no help, it simply needs to be let free.
It surely goes without saying that so long as religion remains a negative theology it will not know how to do any good in this arena.
Dresden Codak
I cannot adequately express my admiration for this author. No one else leaves me feeling quite so warm, yet I know I will have trouble sleeping tonight because of it. Here is his latest piece:
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/12/16/lantern-season/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rsspect%2FfJur+%28Dresden+Codak%29
The rest of it is also well worth exploring. It is a very good idea to read the entire Hob series.
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/12/16/lantern-season/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rsspect%2FfJur+%28Dresden+Codak%29
The rest of it is also well worth exploring. It is a very good idea to read the entire Hob series.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
OK, so years and years ago, back in my Santa Cruz days, an Indian artist called Panjabi MC had a song on the charts in the US called "Beware of the Boys." Jay-Z got ahold of it and did a few verses over it, and the first time I heard it was when my alarm went off at some obscene hour; I was in one of those hazes where you're half asleep and sorta dreaming whatever you hear.
What I thought I'd heard was Jay-Z blaming Ronald Reagan for September Eleventh (which is a pretty strong political statement, especially for a less political rapper like Hova). I was pretty jazzed, so I told a friend or two about how rad that was. Then when I heard the song later I never found section I'd heard when half asleep. I concluded that I must have completely dreamed it. After all, an NY mc as mainstream as Jay-Z isn't likely to start making aggressive claims about 9/11 only a year after it went down. So from then on I would tell people the funny story about how I dreamed Jay-Z hated Reagan.
Now I'm not sure if I just missed it every other time I heard the Jay-Z version of the song, or if it was censored on American Radio. I never bought the CD, and was never a particularly big Jay-Z fan, so it's possible I just never payed close enough attention at the right time to catch it. Pandora is using the full version, and I was taken aback to find that my dream was a reality. Here's a transcription of verse two found online:
What I thought I'd heard was Jay-Z blaming Ronald Reagan for September Eleventh (which is a pretty strong political statement, especially for a less political rapper like Hova). I was pretty jazzed, so I told a friend or two about how rad that was. Then when I heard the song later I never found section I'd heard when half asleep. I concluded that I must have completely dreamed it. After all, an NY mc as mainstream as Jay-Z isn't likely to start making aggressive claims about 9/11 only a year after it went down. So from then on I would tell people the funny story about how I dreamed Jay-Z hated Reagan.
Now I'm not sure if I just missed it every other time I heard the Jay-Z version of the song, or if it was censored on American Radio. I never bought the CD, and was never a particularly big Jay-Z fan, so it's possible I just never payed close enough attention at the right time to catch it. Pandora is using the full version, and I was taken aback to find that my dream was a reality. Here's a transcription of verse two found online:
Ma, I ain't gotta tell you but it's ya boy Hov
From the U.S., you just, lay down slow
Catch ya boy minglin' in England, nettlin' in the Netherlands
Checkin' in daily under aliases
We rebellious, we back home, screamin' leave Iraq alone
But all my soldiers in the field, I will wish you safe return
But only love kills war when will they learn
It's international Hov, I been havin' the flow
Before Bin Laden got Manhattan to blow
Before Ronald Reagan got Manhattan to blow
Before I was cappin' it then back before
Before we had it all day, poppin' in the hallway
Cop one offa someone to give you more yey
Yea, but that's another stor-ay
But for now mami turn it around and let the boy play (Jay)
Monday, November 23, 2009
A Healing Salve for my Temper
A website that you love as well as I prompted me to read up on the Salvation Army, courtesy of their own website.
Here is what they have to say about homosexuality:
One ought to expect that when an organization begins its commentary on homosexuality by claiming a positive view of sex that the remainder of the commentary will reveal just the opposite. I am confident that the contradictions in the above are clear enough for an attentive reader.
Here is an excerpt from their stance on abortion:
Neatly bundled, this passage carries all the apologies of sexism and the dislike for women as intellectual and moral beings. First, "the responsibility of conception": one does not ovulate with premeditation. Given the persistent efforts of christian organizations to limit access to birth control (for example, cutting funding to and protesting Planned Parenthood; and advocating for abstinence-only education), equating conception with responsibility--and limiting this, too, by physiological necessity, to the responsibility of women--is at best patronizing, certainly and flagrantly underestimates the complexity of pregnancy, and at worst constitutes a violent appropriation of the bodies of women by the church. This holds even if the Army does not itself actively discourage birth control; objective political reality denies any scrupulously made argument which equates responsibility to conception.
The second maneuver that acts to cut women off from agency with respect to their bodies is played softly here; while it is true that I may be over-reading, the point I would like to make here is surely applicable to other anti-choice arguments. We may notice that, after patronizing the woman whom they fully intend to speak for, she is directed to be sure to seek first the council of God and her family, pastor and doctor. Two of these people are men, one of whom likely doesn't exist and likelier still will not answer even the most sincere calls for help and advice, and the other is bound already to a dogmatic and unsympathetic refusal of consideration. The other two are surely great resources (I ought not to sell pastors short in advance, but I'm being polemical, so indulge me) and I would of course suggest to anyone considering (and I mean that term strictly) and abortion to turn to just such people for sought-after advice. But to suggest to know that a woman is incapable of deciding for herself what best to do with her body, after you yourself have already told her there is only one legitimate option (bearing the child) reveals the unspoken assumption that women--especially those irresponsible enough to have sex before first offering themselves up as a man's property, I mean getting married oops--lack the capacity for intelligent moral deliberation, and more specifically are stupid enough to hear you say "no never do this" and then take you seriously when you follow that up with "but if you want to anyway, be sure to ask for advice first" (This followup ought more properly to read: but be sure to give me enough time to guilt you into doing what you already have decided is wrong).
I recognize that my tone is a little strong; I'm cranky today and this is a good way to cheer me up. I will happily acknowledge that the Salvation Army has done a great deal to help a great many, and that the policy stated on their website is to aid even those whom they feel behave immorally (like by having sex with the loved ones you won't let them marry). There are surely better targets for my anger and frustration, and I will gladly indulge in being mean to them--I'm looking at you, Mark Driscoll, you misogynist, ignorant tool--and I apologize for making a charitable organization the object of my ridicule...though I'd be much happier if they'd also apologize for being bigots. The ethical dilemma, dear reader, is yours to resolve: do you withhold your funding on the grounds of principle, or do you compromise by funding the good actions of an unethical organization (we all pay taxes after all). I have the advantage of being too poor to worry about whom I give my money to.
Here is what they have to say about homosexuality:
Homosexuality
The Salvation Army holds a positive view of human sexuality. Where a man and a woman love each other, sexual intimacy is understood as a gift of God to be enjoyed within the context of heterosexual marriage. However, in the Christian view, sexual intimacy is not essential to a healthy, full, and rich life. Apart from marriage, the scriptural standard is celibacy.
Sexual attraction to the same sex is a matter of profound complexity. Whatever the causes may be, attempts to deny its reality or to marginalize those of a same-sex orientation have not been helpful. The Salvation Army does not consider same-sex orientation blameworthy in itself. Homosexual conduct, like heterosexual conduct, requires individual responsibility and must be guided by the light of scriptural teaching.
Scripture forbids sexual intimacy between members of the same sex. The Salvation Army believes, therefore, that Christians whose sexual orientation is primarily or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life. There is no scriptural support for same-sex unions as equal to, or as an alternative to, heterosexual marriage.
Likewise, there is no scriptural support for demeaning or mistreating anyone for reason of his or her sexual orientation. The Salvation Army opposes any such abuse.
In keeping with these convictions, the services of The Salvation Army are available to all who qualify, without regard to sexual orientation. The fellowship of Salvation Army worship is open to all sincere seekers of faith in Christ, and membership in The Salvation Army church body is open to all who confess Christ as Savior and who accept and abide by The Salvation Army's doctrine and discipline.
Scriptures: Genesis 2:23-24; Leviticus 18:22; Mark 2:16-17; Romans 1:26-27; Romans 5:8; I Corinthians 6:9-11; I Corinthians 13; Galatians 6:1-2; I Thessalonians 4:1-8; I Thessalonians 5:14-15; I Timothy 1:15-16; Jude 7
One ought to expect that when an organization begins its commentary on homosexuality by claiming a positive view of sex that the remainder of the commentary will reveal just the opposite. I am confident that the contradictions in the above are clear enough for an attentive reader.
Here is an excerpt from their stance on abortion:
It [The Salvation Army] is opposed to abortion as a means of birth control, family planning, sex selection or for any reason of mere convenience to avoid the responsibility for conception. Therefore, when an unwanted pregnancy occurs, The Salvation Army advises that the situation be accepted and that the pregnancy be carried to term, and offers supportive help and assistance with planning.
The Salvation Army recognizes tragic and perplexing circumstances that require difficult decisions regarding a pregnancy. Such decisions should be made only after prayerful and thoughtful consideration, with appropriate involvement of the woman's family and pastoral, medical and other counsel. A woman in these circumstances needs acceptance, love and compassion.
Neatly bundled, this passage carries all the apologies of sexism and the dislike for women as intellectual and moral beings. First, "the responsibility of conception": one does not ovulate with premeditation. Given the persistent efforts of christian organizations to limit access to birth control (for example, cutting funding to and protesting Planned Parenthood; and advocating for abstinence-only education), equating conception with responsibility--and limiting this, too, by physiological necessity, to the responsibility of women--is at best patronizing, certainly and flagrantly underestimates the complexity of pregnancy, and at worst constitutes a violent appropriation of the bodies of women by the church. This holds even if the Army does not itself actively discourage birth control; objective political reality denies any scrupulously made argument which equates responsibility to conception.
The second maneuver that acts to cut women off from agency with respect to their bodies is played softly here; while it is true that I may be over-reading, the point I would like to make here is surely applicable to other anti-choice arguments. We may notice that, after patronizing the woman whom they fully intend to speak for, she is directed to be sure to seek first the council of God and her family, pastor and doctor. Two of these people are men, one of whom likely doesn't exist and likelier still will not answer even the most sincere calls for help and advice, and the other is bound already to a dogmatic and unsympathetic refusal of consideration. The other two are surely great resources (I ought not to sell pastors short in advance, but I'm being polemical, so indulge me) and I would of course suggest to anyone considering (and I mean that term strictly) and abortion to turn to just such people for sought-after advice. But to suggest to know that a woman is incapable of deciding for herself what best to do with her body, after you yourself have already told her there is only one legitimate option (bearing the child) reveals the unspoken assumption that women--especially those irresponsible enough to have sex before first offering themselves up as a man's property, I mean getting married oops--lack the capacity for intelligent moral deliberation, and more specifically are stupid enough to hear you say "no never do this" and then take you seriously when you follow that up with "but if you want to anyway, be sure to ask for advice first" (This followup ought more properly to read: but be sure to give me enough time to guilt you into doing what you already have decided is wrong).
I recognize that my tone is a little strong; I'm cranky today and this is a good way to cheer me up. I will happily acknowledge that the Salvation Army has done a great deal to help a great many, and that the policy stated on their website is to aid even those whom they feel behave immorally (like by having sex with the loved ones you won't let them marry). There are surely better targets for my anger and frustration, and I will gladly indulge in being mean to them--I'm looking at you, Mark Driscoll, you misogynist, ignorant tool--and I apologize for making a charitable organization the object of my ridicule...though I'd be much happier if they'd also apologize for being bigots. The ethical dilemma, dear reader, is yours to resolve: do you withhold your funding on the grounds of principle, or do you compromise by funding the good actions of an unethical organization (we all pay taxes after all). I have the advantage of being too poor to worry about whom I give my money to.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Responding to ethics.
This is sort of about two things that I've been pursuing the last few days.
This morning I read part of a thread on Reddit reminding us of the common place claim on the part of theists that non-theists cannot account for ethics or morality in either their origins nor their content. The leading comment thread at the time disrupts this accusation by pointing out both that it is not the purpose of non-theism to define ethics either historically or structurally, and that a theistic construction of ethics does not itself serve as a defense of theism. Put slightly differently, the validity of a belief in a higher power does not validate the subsequent claims to moral truth, nor does the truth or falsity of a moral claim retroactively validate a belief in a higher power. To claim that God must exist or else we are lost to moral relativism is a sad reflection indeed upon the strength of one's faith, and rather oddly subordinates belief to pragmatics, in a way that one might suppose most theists ought to find repulsive. It seems, contrary to the theistic argument, that if faith indeed is the virtue in question then the question of ethics itself ought not to arise until after the question of God's existence has been resolved; to point to ethics as a reason for belief is to rather greatly discount belief itself, and ought to be regarded more properly as cynical, in the spirit of Pascal's Wager.
This says nothing whatever of the claim itself that religion (and implicitly this is Christianity, at least here in the US), and more specifically God, is the origin of ethics. Now let us even be so bold now to leave aside the fact that any sophisticated and compassionate European/American theory of ethics is inevitably supported by a rich history of writers whose argumentation self-consciously avoids specific recourse to an originary text (read: The Bible). Too, we shall leave behind the question of whether or not these men and women were theists, and whether or not there was even the possibility for them, culturally, of being avowedly non-theistic and heard at the same time. We can instead explore the possibility of deriving ethics from The Bible.
(Now this is a tired point by now, done to sleep if not death, so I will be brief.) Presuming for a moment that The Bible is the (adultered or not) word of God, we are immediately faced with the question of how to resolve a seemingly impossible and lengthy set of contradictions, and not of the merely factual or historical sort, but of the sort pertaining directly to ethics. The often bizarre dictates of Leviticus seem at odds with the terse list of generally pragmatic rules put forth in Exodus, though these, along with Numbers, etc., are superseded when Jesus tells us to put aside complex rules and merely love others as we love ourselves. Why then the earlier books? If God wrote the Book, why put in a passage that tells us not to listen to much of it?
Kierkegaard gives us a troubling answer, and this leads me to the second thing on my mind. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard closely reads the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on the mountain, and at the last second rescinds the order. Kierkegaard remarks, as many others have, that if we ever found a modern-day Abraham, he would at best be shunned from decent society, and more than likely would face charges. His conduct, in short, is unethical.
But K. won't leave this alone; there is something else going on here, and it goes by the name of Faith. Derrida, reading Kierkegaard (in The Gift of Death) points to silence, reminding us that Abraham told no one what he was about, or what God had told him (it is a little unclear in Derrida's text which points are his and which K.'s, and it's been too long since I read Fear and Trembling to sort out the different points, so I'm going to allow these authors to drift together). Abraham's silence (K.'s pseudonym for F+T was Johannes de Silencio) is an indication of the conflicts of two different sorts of responsibility: to the universal and to the absolute.
In Hegelian (and Kantian) ethics, the ethical is determined by one's responsibility to the universal (in Kant this manifests as the categorical imperative): one submits one's actions to the universal collection of humanity for judgement, and when one's choices are disclosed, we, collectively, can see if they are ethical. Further, we can judge their ethicality by determining whether or not the agent behaved responsibly with respect to the universal. Responsibility is meant in all its senses. In order to be responsible, to respond, to the universal, Hegel argues that we must practice full disclosure. Secrecy is anathema to responsibility, and thus to ethics.
And yet Abraham is silent. This is due to the difference between the universal and the absolute. Abraham's responsibility is not to the universal--he is not behaving how he would have everyone act, nor in a way that is "universally intelligible"--his responsibility is to the Absolute, to the divine. And while responsibility to the universal requires full disclosure, responsibility to the absolute precludes it. The absolute is unrepresentable, which places it outside the reach of language. To speak one's responsibility to the absolute is to make it universal (see, for example, Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as Adorno's "Sacred Fragment"). As such, in order to be responsible to the absolute, one cannot be responsible to the universal. In other words, acts of faith, religious acts, are a priori unethical, in the strict sense. For Kiekegaard this amounts to a new category; Abraham was unethical, but not wrong, because his faith superseded the ethical.
Now for a non-theist it is tempting to leave this here. The story of Abraham, for those of us with no faith in God's existence, is rather abhorrent, and a chilling reminder of the length's to which faith can drive people. And if faith is seen as a choice, then Kiekegaard's reasoning would point us rather clearly away from theism. I can say with conviction, however, that my non-theism is not deliberate or optional; I do not believe, and have the option of owning that fact or lying to myself about it. Others do believe, and presumably they are being honest when saying so.
The sticking point is this: if faith is not optional, but if religious behavior (responsibility to the absolute) is unethical, what is the proper stance with relation to theistic behavior? In some senses, this is clear; where religion leads one to oppose gay rights, safe sex practices, and the right to abortion (etc.) its actions must be opposed--the ethical question with respect to these religious organizations is secondary at best; stopping them is the first priority. But in all cases, the question of whether or not those who behave in accordance to a non-optional faith in the divine can properly be said to be wrong is complicated. For Kiekegaard, this is clear (he was a theist): the religious supersedes the ethical. For the non-theist, unethical religious behavior is symptomatic of a non-optional condition of faith, but while the actions themselves may or may not be condemned as unethical, the source of the decision lays outside the realm of choice, and cannot then be the object of ethical judgement: one is not responsible for one's faith, since faith is not a response.
I do not mean this as an apologia for what problems faith has wrought, but more of an exploration of some of the problems of the intersection of faith and ethics, and primarily as an illumination of why it is absurd and unsound for theism to make claims to ethics, particularly when what passes for ethics in religious discourse avoids responsibility itself--that is, responsibility to origins, responsibility to reason, etc.
EDIT: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=798#comic
This morning I read part of a thread on Reddit reminding us of the common place claim on the part of theists that non-theists cannot account for ethics or morality in either their origins nor their content. The leading comment thread at the time disrupts this accusation by pointing out both that it is not the purpose of non-theism to define ethics either historically or structurally, and that a theistic construction of ethics does not itself serve as a defense of theism. Put slightly differently, the validity of a belief in a higher power does not validate the subsequent claims to moral truth, nor does the truth or falsity of a moral claim retroactively validate a belief in a higher power. To claim that God must exist or else we are lost to moral relativism is a sad reflection indeed upon the strength of one's faith, and rather oddly subordinates belief to pragmatics, in a way that one might suppose most theists ought to find repulsive. It seems, contrary to the theistic argument, that if faith indeed is the virtue in question then the question of ethics itself ought not to arise until after the question of God's existence has been resolved; to point to ethics as a reason for belief is to rather greatly discount belief itself, and ought to be regarded more properly as cynical, in the spirit of Pascal's Wager.
This says nothing whatever of the claim itself that religion (and implicitly this is Christianity, at least here in the US), and more specifically God, is the origin of ethics. Now let us even be so bold now to leave aside the fact that any sophisticated and compassionate European/American theory of ethics is inevitably supported by a rich history of writers whose argumentation self-consciously avoids specific recourse to an originary text (read: The Bible). Too, we shall leave behind the question of whether or not these men and women were theists, and whether or not there was even the possibility for them, culturally, of being avowedly non-theistic and heard at the same time. We can instead explore the possibility of deriving ethics from The Bible.
(Now this is a tired point by now, done to sleep if not death, so I will be brief.) Presuming for a moment that The Bible is the (adultered or not) word of God, we are immediately faced with the question of how to resolve a seemingly impossible and lengthy set of contradictions, and not of the merely factual or historical sort, but of the sort pertaining directly to ethics. The often bizarre dictates of Leviticus seem at odds with the terse list of generally pragmatic rules put forth in Exodus, though these, along with Numbers, etc., are superseded when Jesus tells us to put aside complex rules and merely love others as we love ourselves. Why then the earlier books? If God wrote the Book, why put in a passage that tells us not to listen to much of it?
Kierkegaard gives us a troubling answer, and this leads me to the second thing on my mind. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard closely reads the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on the mountain, and at the last second rescinds the order. Kierkegaard remarks, as many others have, that if we ever found a modern-day Abraham, he would at best be shunned from decent society, and more than likely would face charges. His conduct, in short, is unethical.
But K. won't leave this alone; there is something else going on here, and it goes by the name of Faith. Derrida, reading Kierkegaard (in The Gift of Death) points to silence, reminding us that Abraham told no one what he was about, or what God had told him (it is a little unclear in Derrida's text which points are his and which K.'s, and it's been too long since I read Fear and Trembling to sort out the different points, so I'm going to allow these authors to drift together). Abraham's silence (K.'s pseudonym for F+T was Johannes de Silencio) is an indication of the conflicts of two different sorts of responsibility: to the universal and to the absolute.
In Hegelian (and Kantian) ethics, the ethical is determined by one's responsibility to the universal (in Kant this manifests as the categorical imperative): one submits one's actions to the universal collection of humanity for judgement, and when one's choices are disclosed, we, collectively, can see if they are ethical. Further, we can judge their ethicality by determining whether or not the agent behaved responsibly with respect to the universal. Responsibility is meant in all its senses. In order to be responsible, to respond, to the universal, Hegel argues that we must practice full disclosure. Secrecy is anathema to responsibility, and thus to ethics.
And yet Abraham is silent. This is due to the difference between the universal and the absolute. Abraham's responsibility is not to the universal--he is not behaving how he would have everyone act, nor in a way that is "universally intelligible"--his responsibility is to the Absolute, to the divine. And while responsibility to the universal requires full disclosure, responsibility to the absolute precludes it. The absolute is unrepresentable, which places it outside the reach of language. To speak one's responsibility to the absolute is to make it universal (see, for example, Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as Adorno's "Sacred Fragment"). As such, in order to be responsible to the absolute, one cannot be responsible to the universal. In other words, acts of faith, religious acts, are a priori unethical, in the strict sense. For Kiekegaard this amounts to a new category; Abraham was unethical, but not wrong, because his faith superseded the ethical.
Now for a non-theist it is tempting to leave this here. The story of Abraham, for those of us with no faith in God's existence, is rather abhorrent, and a chilling reminder of the length's to which faith can drive people. And if faith is seen as a choice, then Kiekegaard's reasoning would point us rather clearly away from theism. I can say with conviction, however, that my non-theism is not deliberate or optional; I do not believe, and have the option of owning that fact or lying to myself about it. Others do believe, and presumably they are being honest when saying so.
The sticking point is this: if faith is not optional, but if religious behavior (responsibility to the absolute) is unethical, what is the proper stance with relation to theistic behavior? In some senses, this is clear; where religion leads one to oppose gay rights, safe sex practices, and the right to abortion (etc.) its actions must be opposed--the ethical question with respect to these religious organizations is secondary at best; stopping them is the first priority. But in all cases, the question of whether or not those who behave in accordance to a non-optional faith in the divine can properly be said to be wrong is complicated. For Kiekegaard, this is clear (he was a theist): the religious supersedes the ethical. For the non-theist, unethical religious behavior is symptomatic of a non-optional condition of faith, but while the actions themselves may or may not be condemned as unethical, the source of the decision lays outside the realm of choice, and cannot then be the object of ethical judgement: one is not responsible for one's faith, since faith is not a response.
I do not mean this as an apologia for what problems faith has wrought, but more of an exploration of some of the problems of the intersection of faith and ethics, and primarily as an illumination of why it is absurd and unsound for theism to make claims to ethics, particularly when what passes for ethics in religious discourse avoids responsibility itself--that is, responsibility to origins, responsibility to reason, etc.
EDIT: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=798#comic
Monday, November 2, 2009
Gift Exchange
I've just finished the first section of a book called The Gift of Death, and want to put a few things down on keys before I forget what it's about. Since I've been dealing a bit with religion here, I figure this is as good a place as any.
Derrida hangs his first chapter on a reading of Jan Patočka's Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy. Patocka is telling the story of the journey from the ancient demonic orgiastic, through Platonism, into Christianity. This is the history of responsibility, which is written as identical to freedom (that is, you cannot be responsible for your actions if you are not free, and you cannot be free to choose unless you are made responsible for your choice.) Platonic philosophy incorporates and subordinates the orgiastic by theorizing the "soul" (which we might read as a subject separate from the body, or desubjectified), which is introduced to responsibility by its relation to "the abstract Good," a similarly extra-objective essence. Christianity in turn reverses and represses (and therefore also retains) the Platonic model by introducing the mysterium tremendum, the terrifying mystery of God, whose gaze arrests us, but who is always outside our own vision. The gaze of God (strangely Derrida avoids the term "God") arrests us not from without, but internally, and replaces (incompletely and in excess) Plato's "Good" (it exceeds the Good both in its capacity to elude witness and in its ability to judge).
It is with the Good that we become immortal, or rather that we gain death as a gift. Patocka says "Platonic 'conversion' makes the gaze upon the Good itself possible. This gaze is immutable, eternal like the Good... It is, for the first time in history, an immortality of the individual, since it is interior, since it is inseparable from its own fulfillment. The Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul is the result of a confrontation between the orgiastic and responsibility." (114, 12 in Derrida) Immortality is granted through identification with the Good. Christianity retains immortality, but the direction of the Gaze is reversed: we, our souls, are the objects.
Too, Plato's constitution of the soul, and Christianity's borrowing of this constituted concept, amounts to a new relation to death, a vigilance over and anticipation of death, and as a result the soul, the subject, becomes a philosopher: "Philosophy isn't something that comes to the soul by accident, for it is nothing other than this vigil over death that watches out for death and watches over death, as if over the very life of the soul. The psyche of life, as breath of life, as pneuma, only appears out of this concerned anticipation of dying." (15) This comes as a result of the responsibility/freedom afforded the soul by its new relation to the Good, and later to the gaze of God.
Now for Patocka, the point of this exploration is to uncover the reason for the decline of European civilization. Tacitly taking a cue from postmodernists, Patocka points to WWII, where we lost so much (Patocka was born in 1907, so this means quite a bit more for him than it possibly could for me). The loss Patocka is interested in is the front, the zone of combat where two opposing sides meet and become one: "the loss of the frong [:]...the disappearance of this confrontation which allowed one to identify the enemy and even and especially to identify with the enemy. After the Second World War, as Patocka might say in the manner of Carl Schmitt, one loses the image or face of the enemy, one loses the war and perhaps, from then on, the very possibility of politics." (19)
This is disturbing indeed. On the one hand, I am sympathetic; we can read the above quotation as identifying a change in government technology, in the sense that changes in the manner of conducting war--conducting war without fronts--prevent the domestic population and members of the army from identifying with the enemy (though I suspect this is more a question of creating a mythic history of the front than about identifying a substantive change in our ability to relate to those for whose deaths we vote). On the other hand, this hypothesizes our mode of warfare as determining the moral quality of civilization, rather than supposing that our capacity for war--rather than the style in which we conduct it--indicates an inadequacy in our politics of morality.
Patocka's solution is equally disturbing: he suggests that the decline of European civilization can be stemmed not simply by a return to or resurgence of Christianity, but by a more complete thematization of it, which is to say by actually becoming Christian (which to date, he seems to say, we have not quite yet done). Derrida explores the implications of this call by examining the paradox of responsibility, since Patocka's claim is that Christianity, through the mysterium tremendum, is the ultimate avenue for responsibility. Now on the one hand, responsibility is necessarily a question of knowledge, "For if it is true that the concept of responsibility has, in the most reliable continuity of its history, always implied involvement n action, doing, a praxis, a decision that exceeds simple conscience or simple theoretical understanding, it is also true that the same concept requires a decision or responsible action to answer for itself consciously, that is, with knowledge of a thematics of what is done..." (25) However, because the link between theory and practice is irreducible, responsibility will always function outside of knowledge: "It will have to decide without it, independently from knowledge; that will be the condition of a practical idea of freedom. We should therefore conclude that not only is the thematization of the concept of responsibility always inadequate but that it is always so because it must be so." (26) I'm getting a little muddled down in the text, but we might summarize by saying that responsibility relies on knowledge to function, but must operate independently of knowledge (which is theoretical, not empirical--this is a Kantian distinction, and runs contrary to certain more conventional definitions of knowledge), or else our actions become pre-programmed, a mere result of circumstances and therefore neither free nor responsible in the sense meant by Patocka.
It is bed time, so I won't track down the last bit of this thread--though I expect it would do better to read the next chapter and see if Derrida himself elaborates it further. I will end with a tangentially related quotation that Patocka takes from Durkheim:
Derrida hangs his first chapter on a reading of Jan Patočka's Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy. Patocka is telling the story of the journey from the ancient demonic orgiastic, through Platonism, into Christianity. This is the history of responsibility, which is written as identical to freedom (that is, you cannot be responsible for your actions if you are not free, and you cannot be free to choose unless you are made responsible for your choice.) Platonic philosophy incorporates and subordinates the orgiastic by theorizing the "soul" (which we might read as a subject separate from the body, or desubjectified), which is introduced to responsibility by its relation to "the abstract Good," a similarly extra-objective essence. Christianity in turn reverses and represses (and therefore also retains) the Platonic model by introducing the mysterium tremendum, the terrifying mystery of God, whose gaze arrests us, but who is always outside our own vision. The gaze of God (strangely Derrida avoids the term "God") arrests us not from without, but internally, and replaces (incompletely and in excess) Plato's "Good" (it exceeds the Good both in its capacity to elude witness and in its ability to judge).
It is with the Good that we become immortal, or rather that we gain death as a gift. Patocka says "Platonic 'conversion' makes the gaze upon the Good itself possible. This gaze is immutable, eternal like the Good... It is, for the first time in history, an immortality of the individual, since it is interior, since it is inseparable from its own fulfillment. The Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul is the result of a confrontation between the orgiastic and responsibility." (114, 12 in Derrida) Immortality is granted through identification with the Good. Christianity retains immortality, but the direction of the Gaze is reversed: we, our souls, are the objects.
Too, Plato's constitution of the soul, and Christianity's borrowing of this constituted concept, amounts to a new relation to death, a vigilance over and anticipation of death, and as a result the soul, the subject, becomes a philosopher: "Philosophy isn't something that comes to the soul by accident, for it is nothing other than this vigil over death that watches out for death and watches over death, as if over the very life of the soul. The psyche of life, as breath of life, as pneuma, only appears out of this concerned anticipation of dying." (15) This comes as a result of the responsibility/freedom afforded the soul by its new relation to the Good, and later to the gaze of God.
Now for Patocka, the point of this exploration is to uncover the reason for the decline of European civilization. Tacitly taking a cue from postmodernists, Patocka points to WWII, where we lost so much (Patocka was born in 1907, so this means quite a bit more for him than it possibly could for me). The loss Patocka is interested in is the front, the zone of combat where two opposing sides meet and become one: "the loss of the frong [:]...the disappearance of this confrontation which allowed one to identify the enemy and even and especially to identify with the enemy. After the Second World War, as Patocka might say in the manner of Carl Schmitt, one loses the image or face of the enemy, one loses the war and perhaps, from then on, the very possibility of politics." (19)
This is disturbing indeed. On the one hand, I am sympathetic; we can read the above quotation as identifying a change in government technology, in the sense that changes in the manner of conducting war--conducting war without fronts--prevent the domestic population and members of the army from identifying with the enemy (though I suspect this is more a question of creating a mythic history of the front than about identifying a substantive change in our ability to relate to those for whose deaths we vote). On the other hand, this hypothesizes our mode of warfare as determining the moral quality of civilization, rather than supposing that our capacity for war--rather than the style in which we conduct it--indicates an inadequacy in our politics of morality.
Patocka's solution is equally disturbing: he suggests that the decline of European civilization can be stemmed not simply by a return to or resurgence of Christianity, but by a more complete thematization of it, which is to say by actually becoming Christian (which to date, he seems to say, we have not quite yet done). Derrida explores the implications of this call by examining the paradox of responsibility, since Patocka's claim is that Christianity, through the mysterium tremendum, is the ultimate avenue for responsibility. Now on the one hand, responsibility is necessarily a question of knowledge, "For if it is true that the concept of responsibility has, in the most reliable continuity of its history, always implied involvement n action, doing, a praxis, a decision that exceeds simple conscience or simple theoretical understanding, it is also true that the same concept requires a decision or responsible action to answer for itself consciously, that is, with knowledge of a thematics of what is done..." (25) However, because the link between theory and practice is irreducible, responsibility will always function outside of knowledge: "It will have to decide without it, independently from knowledge; that will be the condition of a practical idea of freedom. We should therefore conclude that not only is the thematization of the concept of responsibility always inadequate but that it is always so because it must be so." (26) I'm getting a little muddled down in the text, but we might summarize by saying that responsibility relies on knowledge to function, but must operate independently of knowledge (which is theoretical, not empirical--this is a Kantian distinction, and runs contrary to certain more conventional definitions of knowledge), or else our actions become pre-programmed, a mere result of circumstances and therefore neither free nor responsible in the sense meant by Patocka.
It is bed time, so I won't track down the last bit of this thread--though I expect it would do better to read the next chapter and see if Derrida himself elaborates it further. I will end with a tangentially related quotation that Patocka takes from Durkheim:
The aptitude of society for setting itself up as a god or for creating gods was never more apparent than during the first years of the French Revolution. At the time, in fact, under the influence of the general enthusiasm, things purely laical by nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: these were the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. (22)
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