The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: The Destruction of the Idols

{The widespread hatred of Karl Marx—in America, at least—is due primarily to the fact that people don’t know the first thing about him.}

Erich Fromm, from “Marx's Concept of Socialism”:

Marx's concept of socialism follows from his concept of man. According to this concept, socialism is not a society of regimented, automatized individuals, regardless of whether there is equality of income or not, and regardless of whether they are well fed and well clad. It is not a society in which the individual is subordinated to the state, to the machine, to the bureaucracy. Even if the state as an "abstract capitalist" were the employer, even if "the entire social capital were united in the hands either of a single capitalist or a single capitalist corporation," this would not be socialism. In fact, as Marx says quite clearly in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "communism as such is not the aim of human development." What, then, is the aim?

The aim of socialism is man. It is to create a form of production and an organization of society in which man can overcome alienation from his product, from his work, from his fellow man, from himself and from nature; in which he can return to himself and grasp the world with his own powers, thus becoming one with the world. Socialism for Marx was, as Paul Tillich put it, "a resistance movement against the destruction of love in social reality." 

Marx expressed the aim of socialism with great clarity at the end of the third volume of Capital: "In fact, the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. In the very nature of things, it lies beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and reproduce it, so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized men regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis." 

Marx expresses here all essential elements of socialism. First, man produces in an associated, not competitive way; he produces rationally and in an unalienated way, which means that he brings production under his control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power. This clearly excludes a concept of socialism in which man is manipulated by a bureaucracy, even if this bureaucracy rules the whole state economy, rather than only a big corporation. It means that the individual participates actively in the planning and in the execution of the plans; it means, in short, the realization of political and industrial democracy. Marx expected that by this new form of an unalienated society man would become independent, stand on his own feet, and would no longer be crippled by the alienated mode of production and consumption; that he would truly be the master and the creator of his life, and hence that he could begin to make living his main business, rather than producing the means for living. Socialism, for Marx, was never as such the fulfillment of life, but the condition for such fulfillment. When man has built a rational, nonalienated form of society, he will have the chance to begin with what is the aim of life: the "development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom." Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad "welfare" or "workers' " state. Man, in Marx's view, has created in the course of history a culture which he will be free to make his own when he is freed from the chains, not only of economic poverty, but of the spiritual poverty created by alienation. Marx's vision is based on his faith in man, in the inherent and real potentialities of the essence of man which have developed in history. He looked at socialism as the condition of human freedom and creativity, not as in itself constituting the goal of man's life.

For Marx, socialism (or communism) is not flight or abstraction from, or loss of the objective world which men have created by the objectification of their faculties. It is not an impoverished return to unnatural, primitive simplicity. It is rather the first real emergence, the genuine actualization of man's nature as something real. Socialism, for Marx, is a society which permits the actualization of man's essence, by overcoming his alienation. It is nothing less than creating the conditions for the truly free, rational, active, and independent man; it is the fulfillment of the prophetic aim: the destruction of the idols.

Speaking of Idols

Wednesday with Pascal: The Impotent Sovereign

{Pascal the existential Russian cat has graciously agreed to continue the discussion (which I began in yesterday’s post) of Bruno Latour’s thought.}

In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour compared the situation in which modernity has placed itself with the governmental “separation of powers,” i.e., the executive is separate from the legislature, and both are separate from the judiciary—in theory. In fact, as Latour points out, “This [separation of powers] is powerless to account for the multiple links, the intersecting influences, the continual negotiations between judges and politicians. Yet it would be a mistake to deny the effectiveness of the separation.” The Supreme Court, for example, is said to follow the election returns; the executive and legislative branches take turns vying for influence; legislators curry favor and seek to become executives (Presidents or cabinet officials), etc. The three branches are separate but equal in theory; in practice, they are neither.

Latour’s thesis regarding modernity was this:

“The modern divide between the natural world and the social world has the same constitutional character, with one difference: up to now, no one has taken on the task of studying scientists and politicians in tandem, since no central vantage point has seemed to exist. In one sense, the fundamental articles of faith pertaining to the double separation have been so well drawn up that this separation has been viewed as a double ontological distinction. As soon as one reestablishes the common understanding that organizes the separation of natural and political powers, one ceases to be modern.”

If science assumes the legislative function (that is, it declares to us the laws of nature) and politics the executive function (it decides how our society is organized and how social priorities are ordered), who or what assumes the judicial function? Where is the judge or the judiciary to confirm or disconfirm scientific claims, e.g., does the earth orbit the sun or vice-versa? Where is the judge to evaluate political schemes and rule at least some of them unacceptable, or to declare a culture degenerate and beyond redemption?

Since Christianity came to power in the 4^th century CE, the Christian God had been the judge and arbiter of all things—logically enough, as he was also the creator and sustainer of all things. The modern project (the beginnings of which Latour chose to locate in the 17^th century experimental science of Robert Boyle and in the political theories of Thomas Hobbes) did not require such a God; more to the point, it positively required the Christian God’s withdrawal, absence, or even death.

The crowning achievement of modernity, claimed Latour, is to have dispensed with the divine presence:

Boyle’s and Hobbes's followers succeeded in carrying out this task, the former by ridding Nature of any divine presence, the latter by ridding Society of any divine origin. Scientific power 'no longer needed this hypothesis'; as for statesmen, they could fabricate the 'mortal god' of the Leviathan without troubling themselves further about the immortal God whose Scripture was now interpreted only figuratively.

No one is truly modern who does not agree to keep God from interfering with Natural Law as well as with the laws of the Republic. God becomes the crossed-out God of metaphysics, as different from the premodern God of the Christians as the Nature constructed in the laboratory is from the ancient ‘physis’ or the Society invented by sociologists from the old anthropological collective. ¹

The project of de-divinizing (as opposed to “disenchanting”) the world had its dangers, of course:

An overly thorough distancing [from God] would have deprived the moderns of a critical resource they needed to complete their project. Nature and Society would have been left hanging in the void, and no one would have been able to decide, in case of conflict between them, which one should win out over the other.

An ingenious sleight-of-hand saved the day:

God’s transcendence distanced Him infinitely, so that He disturbed neither the free play of nature nor that of society, but the right was nevertheless reserved to appeal to that transcendence in case of conflict between the laws of Nature and those of Society. Modern men and women could thus be atheists even while remaining religious. They could invade the material world and freely re-create the social world, but without experiencing the feeling of an orphaned demiurge abandoned by all.

Reinterpretation of the ancient Christian theological themes made it possible to bring God's transcendence and His immanence into play simultaneously. In the seventeenth century, along with the conjoined invention of scientific facts and individual citizens, spirituality too was reinvented: the all-powerful God could descend into men's heart of hearts without intervening in any way in their external affairs. A wholly individual and wholly spiritual religion made it possible to criticize both the ascendancy of science and that of society, without needing to bring God into either. ² The moderns could now be both secular and pious at the same time given, worshiping not a supreme God but an absent God whose absence did not prevent people from calling on Him at will in the privacy of their own hearts. He would no longer interfere in any way with the development of the moderns, but He remained effective and helpful within the spirit of humans alone.

Inhabitants of the modern West had somehow managed to have their cake and eat it too; they had stacked the deck and loaded the dice. “This,” wrote Latour, “is where I locate the power of the moderns. They have not made Nature, but they make Society; they do make Nature, but they have not made Society; they have not made either, God has made everything; or God has made nothing, and humans have made everything.” The game was rigged; heads, humans would win, and tails, God would lose. There was nothing to do, Latour admitted, but to admire the ingenuity of it all:

There is no way we can understand the moderns if we do not see that the [assertions] serve as checks and balances for one another. The first two make it possible to alternate the sources of power by moving directly from pure natural force to pure political force, and vice versa. The third rules out any contamination between what belongs to Nature and what belongs to politics. Might the contradiction between the third, which separates, and the first two, which alternate, be too obvious? No, because the last assertion establishes as arbiter an infinitely remote God who is simultaneously totally impotent and the sovereign judge.

As Latour understood it, modernity treats God's sovereignty the way President Andrew Jackson once treated the U.S. Supreme Court: "God has made His decisions," modernity says. "Now let Him enforce them." The question, however, remains: how long can a system of "checks and balances" function when one of its constituent parts has no effective power or authority?   

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¹ The birth of Cancel Culture: when God was cancelled by 17^th-century theorists!

² Modern notions of “spirit” as something nebulous, comforting, and (vaguely) inspiring could not be more different from ancient notions, as shown in the Christian gospels and the letters of Paul. For the ancients, Christian and non-Christian alike, Spirit was a force, a power, an element of the divine; although dangerous, it was desirable, and although unpredictable, it could sometimes be usefully summoned. Annie Dillard was right when she wrote that modern Christians have no idea what forces they are dealing with: “I often think of set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have addressed to God without getting killed.” She could have added, “yet.”  

"A Parliament of Things"

{Bruno Latour, writing in 1991, reflected on the seemingly world-historical events that had transpired in 1991 His conclusion: despite the triumph of the West in the Cold War, we find ourselves baffled, individually and collectively, as perhaps never before. It is almost as if everything heretofore solid has melted into air, as if all our modern accomplishments are revealed to have been—what? Faustian bargains? Pipe dreams?}  

Bruno Latour (from We Have Never Been Modern):

Whether we are antimodern, modern or postmodern, we are all called into question by the double debacle of the miraculous year 1989.

All dates are conventional, but 1989 is a little less so than some. For everyone today, the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizes the fall of socialism. 'The triumph of liberalism, of capitalism, of the Western democracies over the vain hopes of Marxism': such is the victory communique issued by those who escaped Leninism by the skin of their teeth. While seeking to abolish man's exploitation of man, socialism had magnified that exploitation immeasurably. It is a strange dialectic that brings the exploiter back to life and buries the gravedigger, having given the world lessons in large-scale civil war. The repressed returns, and with a vengeance: the exploited people, in whose name the avant-garde of the proletariat had reigned, becomes a people once again; the voracious elites that were to have been dispensed with return at full strength to take up their old work of exploitation in banks, businesses and factories. The liberal West can hardly contain itself for joy. It has won the Cold War.

But the triumph is short-lived. In Paris, London and Amsterdam, this same glorious year 1989 witnesses the first conferences on the global state of the planet: for some observers they symbolize the end of capitalism and its vain hopes of unlimited conquest and total dominion over nature. By seeking to reorient man's exploitation of man toward an exploitation of nature by man, capitalism magnified both beyond measure. The repressed returns, and with a vengeance: the multitudes that were supposed to be saved from death fall back into poverty by the hundreds of millions; nature, over which we were supposed to gain absolute mastery, dominates us in an equally global fashion, and threatens us all. It is a strange dialectic that turns the slave into man's owner and master, and that suddenly informs us that we have invented ecocides as well as large-scale famine.

The perfect symmetry between the dismantling of the wall of shame and the end of limitless Nature is invisible only to the rich Western democracies. The various manifestations of socialism destroyed both their peoples and their ecosystems, whereas the powers of the North and the West have been able to save their peoples and some of their countrysides by destroying the rest of the world and reducing its peoples to abject poverty. Hence a double tragedy: the former socialist societies think they can solve both their problems by imitating the West; the West thinks it has escaped both problems and believes it has lessons for others even as it leaves the Earth and its people to die. The West thinks it is the sole possessor of the clever trick that will allow it to keep on winning indefinitely, whereas it has perhaps already lost everything.

After seeing the best of intentions go doubly awry, we moderns from the Western world seem to have lost some of our self-confidence. Should we not have tried to put an end to man's exploitation of man? Should we not have tried to become nature's masters and owners? Our noblest virtues were enlisted in the service of these twin missions, one in the political arena and the other in the domain of science and technology. Yet we are prepared to look back on our enthusiastic and right-thinking youth as young Germans look to their greying parents and ask: 'What criminal orders did we follow?' 'Will we say that we didn't know?'

This doubt about the well-foundedness of the best of intentions pushes some of us to become reactionaries, in one of two ways. We must no longer try to put an end to man's domination of man, say some; we must no longer try to dominate nature, say others. Let us be resolutely antimodern, they all say.

From a different vantage point, the vague expression of postmodernism aptly sums up the incomplete skepticism of those who reject both reactions. Unable to believe the dual promises of socialism and 'naturalism', the postmoderns are also careful not to reject them totally. They remain suspended between belief and doubt, waiting for the end of the millennium.

Finally, those who reject ecological obscurantism or antisocialist obscurantism, and are unable to settle for the skepticism of the postmoderns, decide to carry on as if nothing had changed: they intend to remain resolutely modern. They continue to believe in the promises of the sciences, or in those of emancipation, or both. Yet their faith in modernization no longer rings quite true in art, or economics, or politics, or science, or technology. In art galleries and concert halls, along the facades of apartment buildings and inside international organizations, you can feel that the heart is gone. The will to be modern seems hesitant, sometimes even outmoded.

Latour believed that the modern West had disconnected (in theory, at least) the social world and the natural world, even though humans inhabit and must learn to be at home in both. Specialized disciplines—natural sciences, social sciences, liberal arts—had led to specialists increasingly unable to communicate across or outside of disciplinary boundaries or to consider problems from a holistic perspective. Latour’s modest proposal for dealing with the dilemma was, to quote Wikipedia the Great and Powerful: “we must rework our thinking to conceive of a ‘Parliament of Things’ wherein natural phenomena, social phenomena, and the discourse about them are not seen as separate objects to be studied by specialists, but as hybrids made and scrutinized by the public interaction of people, things and concepts.”

I think Latour was correct. Whatever there was to be gained from the modern project—that is, from putting nature, society, people, and ideas under microscopes and under interrogation—has been gained, albeit at considerable cost. What we need to do now, as Latour proposed, is step out of the labs and the halls of academe and re-establish ourselves as creatures sharing complex and intertwined ecosystems of nature, society, culture, and history.

Taking things apart worked for a while; it’s time to start putting them, and us, back together.

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Bruno Latour - Wikipedia

We Have Never Been Modern - Wikipedia

 

Sunday Sermon: "Won't Get Fooled Again"

{This Sixties’ classic was given new life by President George W. Bush when he said, “There’s an old saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me…you can’t get fooled again.’” I would say that Pete Townshend turned over in his grave at that one, but I’m pretty sure Townshend is still alive.}

Won’t Get Fooled Again (by The Who)

We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again

A change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the last war

I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again, no, no

I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half-alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie

Do you?

Yeah

There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are effaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Is now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again, no, no

Yeah
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

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Lyrics for Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who - Songfacts

The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (Shepperton Studios / 1978) - YouTube

Oops, We Got Fooled Again

The Great Refusal: "An outrage in the womb of Nothingness"

{Gnosticism has always inspired in me a weird and paradoxical passion. I find myself sympathetic to the Gnostic temperament even though I reject it, and I will defend the merit of Gnostic thought despite disagreeing with almost all of it. Moreover, I have made no secret of my annoyance at how Gnosticism, which invented an entire metaphysics in its quest for spiritual salvation, has more recently been identified with the Promethean materialism of Communism and of Modernity itself. Immanentizing the eschaton was (and is) a pastime of Christians obsessed with Jesus’ return. Gnostics wanted nothing to do with redeeming or remaking this world; they believed they were in a pit, and they simply wanted to climb out.}      

In Western history, foremost among the great refusers were the Gnostics, bizarre heretics of the early centuries of the Common Era who refused—well, everything. The Gnostics, wrote Jacques Lacarriere, “see the whole of material creation as the product of a god who is the enemy of man. Viscerally, imperiously, irremissibly, the Gnostic feels life, thought, human and planetary destiny to be a failed work, limited and vitiated in its most fundamental structures. Everything, from the distant stars to the nuclei of our body-cells, carries the materially demonstrable trace of an original imperfection which only Gnosticism and the means it proposes can combat.”

Setting aside (for now) the more positive aspects of the Gnostic vision—redemption from the “failed work” of a deficient creator was possible if one followed the Gnostic way—we should recognize that Gnosticism constituted “a radical teaching which held almost all the systems and religions of former times to be null and void. In spite of its links with some philosophies of the time, and apart from minor reservations—since they borrowed certain beliefs indiscriminately from various systems, prophets or sacred books—one can say that Gnosticism is a profoundly original thought, a mutant thought.”

Gnosticism, in short, amounted to a Great Refusal, a refusal not just of doctrines and dogma but of earthly existence itself. “Stop the world, I want to get off” could have been a Gnostic slogan, as Lacarriere explains:

This rejection of all systems, and of a world governed not by men but by shadows or semblances of men, forced Gnostics to live on the fringes of all established society, and to preach a refusal to compromise with false institutions, a refusal to procreate, to marry, to live in families, or to obey temporal powers, whether pagan or Christian.

To sum up the essential position of the Gnostics in still simpler terms, let us say that in their eyes the evil which taints the whole of creation and alienates man in body, mind, and soul, deprives him of the awareness necessary for his own salvation. Man, the shadow of man, possesses only a shadow of consciousness. And it is to this one task that the Gnostics of the first centuries CE deliberately devoted themselves, choosing paths which were not only unorthodox but which, moreover, greatly scandalized their contemporaries: to create in man a true consciousness, which would permit him to impart to his thoughts and deeds the permanence and the rigor necessary to cast off the shackles of this world.

Gnostics did not believe the world was redeemable; it was wrong from the beginning, as was all of material existence.

“What haunts the Gnostics above all else, when confronted by matter — by its opacity, its density, its compactness, its weight (and they felt this weight, this materiality, in those states that seem most subtle: the trembling of water, the wind of the desert, the shimmering of the stars) — what haunts them is the intolerable awareness that this inhibiting matter is the result of an error, a deviation in cosmic order; that it is nothing but a poor imitation or a caricature of the original matter of the hyper-world. The heaviness, the sluggishness imparted to everything - from the air to a stone, from an insect to a man - is an unbearable constraint, an intolerable curse. And its consequences are multiple. For, added to the weight of matter and of living bodies, there is the inevitable heaviness of the spirit. Our thinking is bound by the same constraints as are our bodies; it collides against the same barriers and is dragged down by the weight of the same contingencies.”

In his book A Short History of Decay, the Romanian essayist Emil Cioran reflects the Gnostic spirit: “Injustice governs the universe. All that is made and all that is unmade therein carries the imprint of a corrupt fragility, as if matter were the fruit of an outrage in the womb of nothingness.” Given the Gnostics’ utter contempt for matter, they would have scorned Herbert Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” and dismissed it as a meaningless compromise with a world whose only salvation would be its destruction. Since cosmic destruction was not in their power to accomplish, the Gnostics settled for attempts at escape through assorted combinations of ascetism, libertinism, and mysticism—all of which, predictably, failed.

As it happens, most people, despite the suffering that existence entails, want to live. Religions or philosophies that encourage adherents to say No to life tend not to last long.

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Jacques Lacarriere's The Gnostics is the best book I have read on the subject. 

Sunday Sermon: A Cold Despair

{Maxim Gorky was one of Russia’s great writers of the early twentieth century. The following was written in 1917, after the Russian revolution but before the Bolshevik takeover. Europe’s Great War, which Gorky addresses in this essay, was in its third year; Russia’s ‘bloody nightmare,’ however, was just beginning.}

Maxim Gorky (from Untimely Thoughts):

Some tens of millions of the sturdiest and healthiest people have been torn away from the business of life—from the development of the productive forces of the earth—and have been sent to kill one another.

Having dug themselves into the ground, they live in rain and snow, in filth, in cramped conditions; they are being worn out by disease and eaten by vermin; they live like beasts, lying in wait for one another in order to kill.

They kill on land and sea, destroying daily hundreds and hundreds of the best and most cultured people of our planet, people who have created what is most precious on earth, European culture.

Thousands of villages and scores of towns are being destroyed, the centuries-old labor of a great many generations has been undone, forests have been burned out and cut down, roads have been ruined, bridges have been blown up, and the treasures of the earth, created by the persistent and painful labor of man, lie in ashes and dust. The fertile topsoil has been destroyed by the explosions of mines, mortars, and shells and has been gouged with trenches; barren subsoil has been exposed, all the land is churned up and is polluted by the rotting flesh of the guiltless dead. Women are raped and children are killed—there is no infamy that is not permitted by war, there is no crime that is not justified by it.

This is the third year we have been living in a bloody nightmare and we have been brutalized and lost our senses; art arouses a thirst for blood, murder, and destruction; science, violated by militarism, obediently serves the business of the mass annihilation of people.

This war is the suicide of Europe!

Just think how many healthy, splendidly endowed brains have been spilled out on the filthy ground during this war, how many sensitive hearts have stopped beating!

This senseless extermination of man by man and the destruction of the fruits of great human labors are not limited to material damage alone—no! Tens of thousands of maimed soldiers will not forget about their enemies for a long time, until their very death. Through their tales about the war they will pass on their hatred to children, who for three years have been fed on impressions of the daily horror. A great deal of enmity has been sown on earth during these years; this sowing will produce an abundant growth!

And yet for such a long time and so eloquently we have been told about the brotherhood of men, about the unity of mankind’s interests. Who, then, is guilty of this diabolical deceit, of creating this bloody chaos? Let us not search for the guilty ones only among others, let us speak the bitter truth: we are all guilty of this crime, each and every one of us.

We are expending millions of lives and enormous reserves of working energy on murder and destruction. Great quantities of enormously expensive explosives are being produced; wiping out hundreds of thousands of lives, these explosives vanish into thin air, scattering to the winds the country’s wealth. The question is not one of billions of rubles, but of millions of lives that are being senselessly destroyed by the monster of Greed and Stupidity.

When I think about this, a cold despair grips my heart and I feel like yelling madly to the people: Wretched ones, have pity on yourselves!

It was not only the senseless brutalities of war against which Gorky raged. The day after he wrote the above, he penned the following in response to an incident in St. Petersburg.

The bright wings of our young freedom are bespattered with innocent blood.

I don’t know who shot at the people the day before yesterday on the Nevsky, but whoever these men may be they are evil and stupid, men poisoned by the venoms of the old, rotten regime. It is criminal and vile to kill one another now that we all have the wonderful right to argue honestly and to disagree with one another honestly. Those who think otherwise are incapable of feeling and realizing that they are free people.

Murder and violence are the arguments of despotism; they are base arguments and they are powerless, for to violate somebody else’s will or to kill a man does not mean and never can mean killing an idea, proving a thought wrong or an opinion erroneous. The great happiness of freedom must not be darkened by crimes against the individual; otherwise we will kill freedom with our own hands.

It is time for us to understand, that the most dreadful enemy of freedom and justice is within us; it is our stupidity, our cruelty, and all that chaos of dark, anarchistic feelings, that chaos which has been cultivated in our souls by the monarchy’s shameless oppression, by its cynical cruelty.

Are we capable of understanding this? If not, if we cannot refrain from the most flagrant use of force against man, then we have no freedom. It is simply a word which we do not have the strength to invest with the proper content.

I say that our inherent enemies are stupidity and cruelty. Are we able, are we even trying to combat them? This is not a rhetorical question, but a question of how profoundly and sincerely we understand the new conditions of political life, the new evaluation of man’s significance and of his role in the world.

It is time to cultivate a feeling in ourselves of aversion to murder, a feeling of revulsion towards it. I cannot find harsh enough words to reproach those who try to prove something with bullets, bayonets, or a fist in the face. Were these not the arguments against which we protested, were these not the means of repressing our will, the means by which we were kept in shameful slavery? And now, having freed ourselves from slavery externally, we continue to live dominated by the feelings of slaves.

Our most merciless enemy is our past. We must find within ourselves the strength to get rid of its infection, to throw off its filth, to forget its bloody outrages. A greater maturity, a greater thoughtfulness and wariness with respect to ourselves—this is what we need!

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Maxim Gorky - Wikipedia

What the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin called “the Russian riot, senseless and cruel” eventually destroyed Maxim Gorky, breaking the spirit of a man once known for his fierce independence. The above passages were composed, as I mentioned, in April 1917, just after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas and six months or so before Lenin’s Bolshevik takeover. Even after the October Revolution, however, and in the face of escalating “Red” (Bolshevik) terror, Gorky continued to write, and to publish, denunciations of violence and incipient tyranny, both of which he saw as betrayals of revolutionary promises. His friendship with Lenin pushed to the limit by their disagreements, Gorky eventually left Russia for almost a decade, returning only after Lenin’s death, Trotsky’s exile, and Stalin’s ascendancy. In the end, for reasons that remain unclear, Gorky capitulated and, in his last years, became an apologist for Bolshevik/Stalinist excess, that is, for the same violence and brutality against which he had for decades ceaselessly spoken. 

 

Saturday Lecture: The Only Game in Town

{Among the many variations on the Great Refusal, the wholesale rejection of civilization stands out. One of the more interesting modern critics of ‘the cult of civilization’ was the anthropologist Stanley Diamond, whose ‘In Search of the Primitive’ highlights some of the discontents of civilization. Contrary to my usual practice with the “Saturday Lecture” series, I have added some commentary of my own.}

Stanley Diamond (from In Search of the Primitive):

Civilization has always had to be imposed, not as a psycho-dynamic necessity or a repressive condition of evolved social life, as Freud supposed, and not only in terms of the state’s power securing itself against its own subjects, but also with reference to the barbarian or primitive peoples who moved on the frontiers. Native communities were the ground out of which the earliest class-structured, territorially defined civilizations arose. Internally, these native peoples were transformed into the peasant and proletarian ‘masses’ who supported the apparatus of the state. No matter how ‘necessary’ the political structure of civilization may have been initially, the progressive degradation of the native communities remains a truth of history. No rationalization for the existence of the early state can alter the fact that the majority of the people were always taxed, in goods and labor, far more than they received from the state in the form of protection and services.

Even if we acknowledge the necessity—due to population pressure, scarcity of land, water, and other resources—for political constraints in the earliest stages of state formation, there is no inherent reason for it to have taken the oppressive form that it did—except for the burgeoning anxiety of those removed from direct production about their economic and political security. If we assume that primitive societies were proto-democratic and even communalistic; and that the character of the neolithic communities that immediately preceded the rise of the earliest civilizations could be similarly defined; primitive customs and habits so long in their formulation could hardly have been transformed without very great resistance. The consequent struggle between the state—the civil authority—and the constituent kin or quasi-kin units of society is the basic social struggle in human history. It is still reflected in local attitudes and institutional buffers against the central authority.

From our point of view, it’s easy to assume that civilized life came as a great relief to our uncivilized ancestors; but Diamond is surely correct to note the “very great resistance” that has always accompanied the assaults (which is how they must have been perceived) on settled and satisfactory ways of living.

Diamond continues:

Anxiety about not being self-supporting, along with the anticipation of resistance, seems to constitute the motive for the upper class’s elaborate extortion of wealth from the direct producers. But, again, even if we accept all the above, this does not account for the accelerating inequities in the distribution of wealth. The widening gap between rich and poor as ancient civilizations developed could not have been due simply to scarcity or to the need to support specialists removed from subsistence activity. Rather, it was due to increasing expropriation. As Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, the richer a society, the greater the distance between its classes and the greater the concentration of wealth at the summit.

Claims about a “wealth gap” and about wealth inequality are contentious, not so much because the gap does not exist (it does) but because, in absolute terms, even today’s poor are better off than in the past. If the rising economic tide does indeed lift all boats, then the patched-up dinghy and the spanking new luxury yacht are both beneficiaries; but a dinghy riding higher in the water is a dinghy nonetheless. If trickle-down economics works as advertised, then the poor get to feed off the crumbs dropped from the tables of the rich, and more and better food for the wealthy means more and better crumbs for the poor, who nonetheless ungratefully complain about living off crumbs.  

Nor was the archaic concentration of wealth a function of its presumably rational reinvestment. Not only were the uses of wealth irrational, inflating the tautology of power, but redistribution in the form of public works and services eventually increased, rather than lessened, the gap between classes. The dynamics of archaic civilizations reveal the pathology of wealth—wealth as power, or luxury as ‘well-being’—and the inadequacy of the distribution of wealth. By 3000 BCE in the Middle East, such rationalizations for the state, which also apply to monopoly capitalism, are apparent.

We accept the maxim that “Power corrupts,” but we seem oblivious to the obvious corollary: since wealth is a form of power, then “Wealth corrupts” as well. For whatever reasons, we have chosen to believe otherwise, but the wealth gap is also a “power gap”; the poor have little if any social or political power, especially compared to the rich—and they know it.

The critical question, then, is that of socioeconomic exploitation and the concomitant loss of the cultural creativity and autonomy of the vast majority of human beings. Conspicuous extortion from worker and peasant was a confirmation of power; but power, so reified, not only confirmed social status, it also displaced anxiety about the actual powerlessness of the privileged, which was a result of the loss of their direct command of the environment. The sheer accumulation of wealth, the antithesis of primitive customary usage, was thus compensatory, a sign of the fear of impotence. It is a response of the alienated in pursuit of security; the manipulation of people is substituted for the command of things. As civilization spreads and deepens, it is ultimately man’s self, his species being, which is imperialized.

Modernity’s signal achievement lies in having improved both its “command of things,” via science and technology, and its “manipulation of people,” via Max Weber’s “iron cage” of managerial techniques, bureaucratic structures, and corporate- or state-controlled media. Setting aside the degradation of the planetary environment, the occasional world war, and the development, stockpiling, and sporadic use of weapons of mass destruction: I would say civilization has been, and continues to be, the best deal around.

If it has its way, it will soon be the only game in town.

Sunday Sermon: The Cruelty of Men of Greed

{I admit to having cherry-picked excerpts from this 1891 encyclical, the bulk of which is an argument against socialism. However, even as he condemned socialism’s solutions, Pope Leo XIII did not deny the very real problems inherent in 19^th-century capitalism, nor did he simply consign the working poor either to God’s tender mercies or to the mercies (such as they might be) of the Market.}

Pope Leo XIII, from Rerum Novarum (1891):

We clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. 

It is the business of a well-constituted body politic to see to the provision of those material and external helps "the use of which is necessary to virtuous action." Now, for the provision of such commodities, the labor of the working class - the exercise of their skill, and the employment of their strength, in the cultivation of the land, and in the workshops of trade - is especially responsible and quite indispensable. Indeed, their co-operation is in this respect so important that it may be truly said that it is only by the labor of working men that States grow rich. Justice, therefore, demands that the interests of the working classes should be carefully watched over by the administration, so that they who contribute so largely to the advantage of the community may themselves share in the benefits which they create-that being housed, clothed, and bodily fit, they may find their life less hard and more endurable. It follows that whatever shall appear to prove conducive to the well-being of those who work should obtain favorable consideration. There is no fear that solicitude of this kind will be harmful to any interest; on the contrary, it will be to the advantage of all, for it cannot but be good for the commonwealth to shield from misery those on whom it so largely depends for the things that it needs.

The first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making. It is neither just nor human so to grind men down with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and wear out their bodies. Man's powers, like his general nature, are limited, and beyond these limits he cannot go. His strength is developed and increased by use and exercise, but only on condition of due intermission and proper rest. Daily labor, therefore, should be so regulated as not to be protracted over longer hours than strength admits. How many and how long the intervals of rest should be must depend on the nature of the work, on circumstances of time and place, and on the health and strength of the workman. Those who work in mines and quarries, and extract coal, stone, and metals from the bowels of the earth, should have shorter hours in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health. Then, again, the season of the year should be taken into account; for not infrequently a kind of labor is easy at one time which at another is intolerable or exceedingly difficult.

As a general principle it may be laid down that a workman ought to have leisure and rest proportionate to the wear and tear of his strength, for waste of strength must be repaired by cessation from hard work.

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Rerum Novarum (May 15, 1891) | LEO XIII (vatican.va)

 

The Great Refusal: Consciousness 'R' Us

{I strongly suggest you pay no attention whatsoever to Donald Hoffman, the subject of this blog. Do not read his books; do not watch any of his many YouTube videos. If, by some chance, you do happen to encounter Hoffman, remain calm—he is, to all appearances, harmless, even pleasant-- but do not, under any circumstances, allow him to discuss his ideas with you; if you do, I guarantee that you will regret it.}

Reality, Heraclitus once opined, may be in the habit of concealing itself. 

Donald Hoffman is a cognitive psychologist who also has a PhD (from MIT) in “computational psychology”. His biggest and brightest idea—WARNING: you might want to stop reading this RIGHT NOW—is that what we think of, naively, as "reality" is instead an elaborate projection designed by "consciousness" to shield us from the knowledge that nothing exists but consciousness itself. At the same time, our faux reality keeps us from being overwhelmed by the infinitude of consciousness; it breaks it up, as it were, into digestible bytes. Hoffman claims that, rather than consciousness being a mysteriously “emergent property” of physical brains, brains emerge, instead, from consciousness. In fact, according to Hoffman, everything that "exists" emerges from consciousness; the entire "physical" world, the sun and the moon and the stars, have no independent physical existence but are simply (!) products of consciousness.

What is the foundational bedrock of reality? It's no longer turtles all the way down; according to Hoffman, it’s consciousness all the way down, free floating and freewheeling and free associating to its heart’s content. Our reality, claims Hoffman, is a “mental construction, a sort of utilitarian fantasy of our own devising.” Consciousness is the brute fact we cannot explain but can only accept; everything else springs from that. As consciousness has evolved, it has learned to construct and to project “an image of the world” that has nothing to do with “objective reality” (there is no such thing) but that protects the survival of consciousness itself. Survival matters more than “truth,” so what Hoffman calls “conscious agents” have developed survival mechanisms based on “fitness payoffs” rather than on “veridical representations” of some existing world; better a lie we can live with than a truth that is more than we can bear.

This, of course, is where Dr. Johnson told Bishop Berkeley to get off; “I refute Berkeley thus,” huffed Johnson, kicking a stone to prove that physical objects are real and not just mental constructions. Berkeley was not dissuaded; he pursued his philosophical Idealism regardless. When Donald Hoffman is asked whether he would care to test his theories by stepping in front of a speeding train or by allowing himself to be bitten by a snake, he doesn’t budge: “Snakes and trains,” he insists, “like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions.” The snake represents something that is dangerous to our survival (that is, to the survival of our consciousness), so we rightly avoid whatever it is—but it’s not really a snake, because there are no snakes.

Moreover, the notion of “consensus reality” is a chimera, an illusion agreed upon. “It’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects.” Instead, says Hoffman, “My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.” It hardly needs to be said that never the mentally constructed snakes and trains shall meet. 

In his book, The Case Against Reality, Hoffman expresses it this way: “Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.” We are not so much living in a simulation as we are creating a simulation, making reality up as we go along, constrained only by the rules which evolved with us to ensure our survival (that is, the survival of our consciousness).

The irony in all this is that, while Hoffman postulates that only consciousness exists, the “conscious agents” themselves—that is, humans and other conscious creatures—are unconscious of that fact; we have deluded ourselves (or we have been tricked by evolution) into believing that reality is, well, real. Again, Hoffman, in his own words:

Perhaps the universe itself is a massive social network of conscious agents that experience, decide, and act. If so, consciousness does not arise from matter; instead, matter and spacetime arise from consciousness—as a perceptual interface. If you can accept that the technology of virtual reality will one day create for you a compelling experience that is nothing like your experience when you take off the headset, then why be so certain that, when you remove the headset, you’re seeing reality as it is?

Donald Hoffman’s intentions are good. His purpose, he says, “is to help you take off the next headset, the one you didn’t know you were wearing all along.” His case against reality, however, suggests that a new branch of psychology will be required—call it “Quantum Psychology,” perhaps— to disabuse patients of the notion that anything exists other than consciousness itself. ¹

Of course, the world, though illusory, will still be dangerous, and the patients will still need to watch out for snakes.   

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We survive because reality may be nothing like we think it is - Big Think

Donald D. Hoffman - Wikipedia

(10) Donald Hoffman | The Case Against Reality - YouTube

Hoffman, Donald D. The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

¹ Unsurprisingly, "quantum psychology" already exists, and Robert Anton Wilson wrote a book about it.

Plato Considers Leaving His Cave

Saturday Lecture: Ciphers of History

Stanley Diamond (from In Search of the Primitive):

“In the modern era, the mission of civilization is simply civilization itself.” (Stanley Diamond)

The question of ‘progress’ is critical. With the rise of industrialism and the related ideology of science, the total conscious transformation of society and nature was, for the first time in human history, considered both possible and desirable. The West does not doubt the superiority of its techniques or its vision; its mission can be ‘objectively’ evaluated. But the fulfillment of the mission requires a universal polity; cultural imperialism is conceived as a leveling—and, at the same time, as a progressive—force. The cultures of societies everywhere are reduced to the common denominators of their respective ‘occupying’ powers; world hegemony becomes the paradigm for world government.

The basic apology for any kind of imperialism remains the idea of progress. The brutality of the means of conquest, the erosion of other cultural possibilities, the necessity of political tutelage, even economic exploitation, are all rationalized in that context. Their unintended consequences are conceived as positive; enlightened self-interest, it is fancied, ultimately resolves itself in the universal good. The manifest and ‘scientifically demonstrable’ superiority of the West seems to be the logical denouement of the history of the species; the ideal of Western civilization is projected as no less than the goal of humanity—a goal which all rational men are obliged to share. If Europe is faithful to its own heritage, the rationalization runs, and fully realizes its potential, then it is bound to become the civilization of the world—everyman’s fate.

Faith in progress as the outcome of their techniques and ideas justifies Western civilized men to themselves. That faith is the dominant idea of Western civilization. In its name, Western man rationalizes not only his self-interest, but also his failures; he does not perceive his failures as the result of his goals, nor of his motives, but rather of the means at his disposal, or of his human limitations. He cannot surrender the notion of progress without destroying the rationale for his entire civilization. No matter how critical he may be of the realities of his society, he clings to his progressivism as he would to his sanity. It is the notion of progress that mediates his alienation and makes it possible for him to construct a reality which he does not actually experience.

But his commitment to progress is less of a faith than a compulsion. No matter what aspects of Western culture he assumes to be superior to the cultures of other times and places, the case for such superiority is always weaker than the intensity of his argument. This argument is, therefore, grotesque, a deformation of consciousness, for the idea of progress is not based on a rational analysis of our civilization. It springs instead from the disequilibrium of the system in which Western man finds himself.

The social structure of the United States, for example, limits the uses of technology. Corporate capitalism is misrepresented as ‘free enterprise,’ or as the realization of the revolutionary spirit of the eighteenth century; Thomas Jefferson is linked to General Motors. Modern technology, society, and ideology are always out of joint with each other; and this sensed disjunction generates the idea of progress. Caught in the contradictions of society, Westerners see themselves as ciphers of history; incomplete and always waiting to be completed. Disintegrated by the extreme division of labor, by competition for goods and services and status, they obsessively anticipate integration.

The idea of progress is, above all, the precipitant of unresolved social and personal conflicts in modern civilization, conflicts that feed on themselves. It is the awareness of these conflicts, along with the effort at resolving them, that creates the sense of unresolved movement toward specific goals which are defined as ‘progressive’.

In primitive societies, progress is a reality of personal growth, a progress through society, not of society. The structure of primitive societies is perceived as permanent, while the individual moves from experience to experience on what the Winnebago call ‘the road of life and death’. ‘Progress,’ in such societies, if this Western conception can be applied to them at all, would be a metaphor for spiritual transformation. The contradictions of growth through the various phases of the life cycle are socially recognized, ritually expressed, and dialectically resolved. The person evolves through hierarchies of being, that is, the ‘becoming’ of personal growth is balanced by the ‘being’ of personal realization on all significant levels of existence—our [Western] perception of history is irrelevant.

In our civilization, the person is reduced to a status, a reflex of society; it is society which is supposed to progress. Compelled by their conflicts, Westerners are always trying to find concrete evidence for their superiority; they feel that they represent the West, the logical inheritance of the past, civilization itself. Our culturally compulsive need to believe in progress is one thing, but the rational evidence is quite another; in fact, the evidence is weak.

‘Progress’ means advancement to a better condition, not simply evolution or development. The belief in progress through advanced science or technology is a uniquely Western fallacy. First, science and technology are not necessarily related; man was a technician long before he was a scientist. More pertinently, science and technology, reified and divorced from the human context and from social application, are no more than mechanical fetishes. Western man fantasizes, understandably enough, that he will one day be replaced by the robot or the computer; but this replacement has already begun. Therefore, it is only from the standpoint of the machine, representing the disengaged category of ‘science and technology,’ that progress remains possible. To maintain the fiction of progress, Westerners entertain the notion of negating humanity itself.

This, in turn, is related to the irrational production of commodities over which ordinary people have no control but which they are conditioned to consume. In the joint perspective of the worker and the consumer, commodities take on a life of their own; after all, they have not invented them, and they have no voice in their use or replication. The imperious ring of the telephone, for example, interrupts all other activities. Its trivial, dissociated, and obsessive use reflects both the alienating character of the society that prizes it so highly and the transnational corporations that profit from it. The telephone as ordinarily used becomes a sign, not of communication, but of the lack of communication and of the consequent compelling desire to relate to others, but to relate at a distance.

Anthropologists cite [as evidence of progress] the extension of ‘in-group ethical commands,’ but that, of course, has not occurred. The fact that the great majority of murders in the United States occur within families, or among close friends and acquaintances, denies the logic of this claim. Moreover, the intensity and duration of modern war, enabled by science and technology, is unknown among primitives, for whom murder, rape, and theft are also rare occurrences. Still another criterion [of progress], the increase in the health, safety, and comfort of the individual, is not only impossible to measure ‘objectively,’ but if measurable in the terms stated, would require a bourgeois yardstick.

The anthropologist does not mention transcendence, spiritual growth, or maturation. He overlooks the increase in certain diseases—cancer, schizophrenia, arteriosclerosis. The pollution of the environment, the increased rate of industrial accidents, and the unhealthy character of daily life, all militate against the notion that the species has been improving itself. Progress must be correlated with the possibility of human fulfillment and the understanding of the human condition.

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Stanley Diamond - Wikipedia