eye of the storm

so i'll be in hartford this weekend, giving a (brief) talk at the north american anarchist studies network inaugural conference at the charter oak cultural center, 3:15ish saturday afternoon. i'll give a version of my interpretation of american anarchism as emerging from radical protestantism and embodying an anti-capitalist individualism. here's a handout.

American Anarchism 1830-1850: Quotations

Our surrounding institutions, customs and public opinion call for conformity: they require us to act in masses like herds of cattle: they do not recognize the fact that we think and feel individually and ought to be at liberty to act individually. But this liberty cannot be enjoyed in combinations, masses and connections in which one cannot move without affecting another. Nothing is more common than such remarks as the following. "No two things are alike." "There can be no rules without exceptions" &c. Yet, we are constantly called upon to conform to rules that do not suit our case, to acquiesce in numerous different opinions all at the same moment, and no laws in the world preserve the liberty of the governed to make exceptions to the rules which they are required to obey. To give others the power to construe laws and make exceptions is equivalent to giving them the power to govern without laws. A little observation will disclose an individuality in persons, times, and circumstances which has suggested the idea that one of our most fatal errors has been the laying down rules, laws, and principles without preserving the liberty of each person to apply them according to the individuality of his views, and the circumstances of different cases. In other words, our error, like that of all the world that has gone before us has been, the violation of individual liberty.
Josiah Warren, The Peaceful Revolutionist (1833)

[W]hoever feels unable or unwilling to forgive all manner of injuries, and the worst of enemies, has no right to rank himself among the followers of Christ; the attempt of men to govern themselves by external rules and physical penalties is and ever must be futile; and from the assumption, that man has the right to exercise oppression over his brother, has proceeded every form of injustice and oppression with which the earth has been afflicted. No one who professes to have the spirit of Christ, can consistently sue a man at law for redress of injuries, or thrust any evil-doer in prison, or fill any office in which he would come under obligation to execute penal enactments - or take any part in military service - or acknowledge allegiance to any human government. The governments of this world are all Anti-Christ; they cannot be maintained, except by military power; all their penal enactments being a dead letter without military power to carry them into effect, are virtually written in human blood.
William Lloyd Garrison, Constitution of the New England Non-Resistance Society (1838)

Political action is of one spirit and intent with military. The weapons of both are violence, and the instrumentalities of both, bloodshed and murder. What is government, after which all political action is aiming, but an armed battery? What is its voice, but the report of cannon - its sanctions, but the bayonet and the halter? . . . It is immoral to strike a man a man, or threaten him, or to ask the sheriff to do it for you - or the militia officer, or the governor as such - or the penal law-maker - or the voter. Moral action is addressed to the moral qualities of a moral being - and does not act physically on the body and animal senses. There is nothing reformatory in animal action. A politician is but a man driver, a human teamster. His business is to control men by the whip and the goad. His occupation would be unlawful and inexpedient toward even the cattle.
Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, "Politics," Herald of Freedom (1843)

Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together for a time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he, that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption: it must be executed by a practical lie, namely, by force.... The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.... A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion, if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions: nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Politics" (1844)

Men are morally responsible for all constitutions, institutions, laws, processes and usages which they have pledged themselves to support, or in which they acquiesce without positive remonstrance and disfellowship. Thus if a political compact, a civil or military league, covenant or constitution, requires, authorizes, provides for or tolerates war, bloodshed, capital punishment, slavery, or any kind of absolute injury, the man who swears, affirms, or otherwise pledges himself to support it, is just as responsible for every act of injury done in conformity thereto, as if he himself personally committed it. The army is his army, the gallows his gallows, the whipping post his whipping post, the prison his prison, the slaveholding his slaveholding. When the constitutional majority declares war, it is his war. All the slaughter, rapine, ravages, robbery are his. There is no escape from this terrible moral responsibility but by a conscientious withdrawal from such government, and an uncompromising protest against its fundamental creed and law.
Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance (1846)

If, for instance, a man asserts the value of individual liberty over the merely political commonweal, his neighbor still tolerates him, that is he who is living near him, sometimes even sustains him, but never the State. Its officer, as a living man, may have human virtues and a thought in his brain, but as the tool of an institution, he is not a whit superior to his prison key or his staff. Herein is the tragedy; that men doing outrage to their proper natures, even those called wise and good, lend themselves to perform the offices of inferior and brutal ones. hence come war and slavery in; and what else may not come in by this opening?
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

How can man have the right to dictate law to his equal brother, and kill him if he disobeys? for all human government must fall back on death for execution. Death is personified in every legislature, judge and ruler; the government is but an embodiment of death. No man can be under obligation to do anything because human governments tell him to do it. If they require what is right, we are to do it; not because they require, but because it is right, and not because congress of parliament commands it. . . . As well say, that the only way to make men love us is to hate them, as to say that governments of violence ever did or ever can protect life. They exist by death, and they make of earth a charnel house. The history of all attempts of man to rule over man, to dictate to him a rule of life, and to punish him if he disobeys, demonstrates that an assumption of such power is opposed to nature and to nature's God. They have made earth a scene of blood and carnage.
Henry Clarke Wright, Anthropology or the Science of Man in its Bearing on War and Slavery, by Henry C. Wright (1850)

gene robinson, making the good argument vs the krauthammer etc, somehow got all messed up this morning:

In the enemy's version of history, the West -- meaning the United States, Israel, Britain and what used to be called Christendom -- has a long history of exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves. In this warped worldview, we deserve any atrocities that jihadist "warriors" might commit against us.

Protesting that all this is absurd and obscene does not make it go away. And our troops' military success actually helps to further the jihadist narrative about a "crusade" against Islam.

wait. is he saying that it's absurd and obscene to assert that the west has a long history of exploiting and occupying the muslim world? or that we never install corrupt lackeys, like we did this week in afghanistan? i guess the kind interpretation would be that what is absurd and obscene is the claim that these things justify atrocities (well, it is absurd to claim of anything that it justifies atrocities), but it certainly appears to say that it is absurd and obscene to assert what is obviously true.

i think now that the beatles are on every third television ad, they're finally getting their due. consider the following, heard on television at all times:

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy.
There's nothing you can make that can't be made.

No one you can save that can't be saved.

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time - It's easy.

etc. in my best stab at interpretation of this goop, i would say that that it is a series of tautologies: that is, if you can do it, it can be done, which would be hard to quibble with. or to put it into first-order predicate calculus with modal operators, it is not the case that there exists a thing such that someone can do it and it is not possible to do it. or, simplifying: (x)(y)(Sxy -> ^Sxy) (where the little upside-down v is the possibility operator; should be a diamond): that is, for anything x and anything y, if x sings y then it is possible for x to sing y. or cutting to the chase, p -> ^p: if p then it is possible that p. or if p is actual then it is not impossible. love is good. but it's probably not all you need.

correction, 11.20: actually, i guess there is modality on both sides of the conditional, so maybe it just says ^p -> ~~^p: if it's possible, then it's not impossible. or ~(Ex)(Ey)( ^Dyx & ~^Dyx): there is nothing such that it's possible for someone to do it and it's not possible for someone to do it.

perhaps you remember this, among many other ways i dealt with palin before.

ok i worked pretty hard on palin back in the day. i'm a sucker for the common touch: palin's is not simulated, and you can't have it both ways: i.e. she's an ignorant fool and a super-clever manipulator. i like her life, which i think has a lot to do with america, more or less: her parenthood (she has babies along with her on her book tour; i'm ready to be ruled by mom); her faith (which offhand i say is more sincere than that of 90% of conservatives); even the hunting and guns. she's amazingly plain-spoken, all in all; there's a reason that the mccain campaign couldn't control her rhetoric.

whatever the racial and other content of this - which is a problem - i agree with teapartiers etc that we are losing (have lost) america, understood in terms of individualism, self-reliance, frontier can-do attitude, liberty, and so on. all we really want now is to be controlled and coddled by the infinitely-large state, by a horde of besuited bureaucrats who are indistinguishable from one another, who all say the same. sarah actually knows this.

she's no less intelligent or less truthful than joe biden, say, or than the average american politician, but her educational road was more of a struggle, and her rhetoric/syntx is not all that polished. it's charming, though, and effective.

she's a perfect foil to obama precisely in her extreme roughness and imperfection: superman vs. everywoman.

she's cute as a button.

i have many substantive policy disagreements. but her basic small-gov conservatism has plenty to recommend it at this point. don't worry: i'll roll hard left during sarah's presidency.

just to be clear: i still think sarah palin is america's best politician.

great moments in advertising: michelin: "the right tire changes everything."

i sort of came to this conclusion a long time ago, but i'll repeat it: this gen-x gen-y generational trend thing is horseshit. it's bizarrely general and useless. so read that piece and then tell me: is it empirical? is it interesting? what does it mean? first off what, really, is the ground for the divisions? let's say that you did, specifically, show demographic trends within each group, or polling etc. ok why not 1969-1991 or whatever? you can declare a generation at any moment you feel like it, and get equally interesting and totally incompatible results. in other words the problem, as always, is that the results actually follow from the problematic initial taxonomy. but this case is basically worse because the taxonomy is so obviously arbitrary. really it all follows from the idea of the baby bom and the arbitrary declaration of its end etc.

as a lifelong redskins fan, i am kind of relieved about this, not to mention this. 'redskins' might kind of be a racial epithet, or maybe there's no 'kinda'; on the other hand, people name sports teams after things/people/beasts because they admire those things for their ferocity etc.

perhaps the most monstrous, or at least puzzling crime of all in the local wave, which always seems to start at wal-mart. sometimes you wonder just why we have so many bodily fluids, and what we might use them all for.

A Codorus Township woman threw a sweatshirt soaked with urine, saliva and mucous in a state trooper's face after he arrested her for retail theft Saturday, according to state police.

so let me "weigh in" on khalid sheik mohammed. now first of all the legal approach to these cases has been an insane tissue of contradictions. so: the opponents of a civilian trial say: 9.11 was an act of war, not a crime. well then, he is a prisoner of war or an alleged war criminal and must under treaty be treated as a prisoner of war or an alleged war criminal: treated according to the geneva conventions and tried in the hague, for example. but no: he's not a soldier, not a general: terror is not war (these same people say during a different three-minute slice): he's not in uniform; does not represent a state. now this combination of assertions (for short, p and not-p) is why we can do exactly anything we feel like to him at any time, for example, waterboard him hundreds of times over a period of months, or torture him continuously for years. that is, as any logician will tell you, anything follows from a contradiction.

now one of many reasons why you don't want to produce him in open court is because he can reveal highly sensitive national security info. after someone says that, see what they adduce. for example: he can reveal interrogation techniques that we use on (alleged) terrorists. now when someone makes that argument, be clear. they are saying that he will reveal the war crimes of the bush administration. that is, he possesses sensitive classified info  because he was tortured, whatever his crimes may or may not be. and obviusly, you can't introduce evidence obtained under torture, for extremely good reasons.

but really when republicans make the classified info argument they are foreseeing the trials of their own (former) leaders on war crimes charges, or at least a series of investigations. that if nothing else is why the status and the facts and the reasoning have to be utterly obscured under layers of contradictory claptrap.

at any rate. yes, try him in court. try to restore some semblance of sanity, legality, and consistency. but a million problems are going to arise. that much is right.

me on texting and driving in today's phily inquirer.

how not to write an opinion piece, cont'd:

For this past weekend saw not only the political sleight of hand that stripped millions of women’s abortion coverage from the House’s health care reform bill; it also brought the season finale of AMC’s highly popular pre-Roe-era series, which concluded with the unhappy housewife heroine Betty Draper leaving her philandering husband, Don, for the promise of marriage to another man she barely knows.

an astonishing coincidence of reactionary backlashes! to which the only real response is: so, judith, which do you think is worse?

happy day after veterans day. a couple of assertions: no one is a hero in virtue merely of belonging to a big organization, even a vast configuration dedicated to violence. if everybody in the military is a hero, then nidal hasan is a hero. if you are a hero you are a hero in virtue of actually taking heroic action, perfectly possible in the military context, but probably not all that frequent there or anywhere else. second, no one is fighting for our freedom unless they are actually doing things that actively preserve or expand our freedom. so if the conflict in iraq or afghanistan actually preserves or expands our freedom, then the people who are fighting in those conflicts are fighting for our freedom. if not, not. it's not a matter of what you or we can convince yourself or ourselves that you are doing, but what you are, actually, doing.

treating mere enlistment as an act of heroism or a defense of freedom is just disingenuous; all you're really trying to do is recruit.

our greatest nightmare is that terrorists might obtain nuclear weapons, perhaps when the government of pakistan collapses into an incomprehensible heap of slag, though it might actually be difficult to tell when or whether that has occurred. i don't negotiate with terrorists! but if i couldn't stop them anyway and if they would accept hostess twinkies in exchange for some input on the target list, i'd nudge them toward the department of "education."

seems like nietzsche and hitler is a question, so let me have a crack at that too. if it gets really hairy, i will start posting quotes.

i actually love nietzsche and he got me into philosophy. but i think if you make him into some mellow democrat, you certainly have him all wrong. he loves hierarchies, and thinks they are natural. he condemns egalitarianism in all forms as resentment that hates the world. he celebrates raw power, and admires people who wield it without shame. he praises war. there are many passages where he attacks democracy, socialism, etc. he certainly toys with various general characterizations of races/nations and their characters, including "the jews." he ridicules charity and praises cruelty. he proposes that we are on the edge of the next stage in evolution, which he calls "superman." he talks about how superior and inferior people get bred. etc etc etc.

you can't tell me that all that has nothing to do with fascism. or that it's all elizabeth's doing.

now the defense rests largely on this: he's even more brutal to anti-semites (surely he has his sister's husband in mind, e.g.) than he is to the jews. there are various ironies and reversals in his statements on all these matters to which you've got to be constantly alert. nevertheless, the last thing you want to do is actually live in a nietzschean polity.

it's not that i want to see obama fail, which would be monstrous anti-patriotic racism. but i would kind of like to see the whole damn thing collapse like a house of cards, which i think is the only possibility for a slight, temporary halt in the growth of state power. admittedly, any tiny glitch in the continuous growth of the state would be a bizarre anomaly in our march to a future bright with promise, a march that is inevitable because we americans are a people who dream, indeed who basically only dream.

headline from the guardian: the public must help restore society. see that is what happens when you start conflating actual persons into abstractions of collective consciousness. perhaps, looking at it the other way round, society must help restore the public. or perhaps they are the same thing, or opposites, or not at all. the public has been a terrible drag on society. or not, or the other way round. power to the people, man. but what is society doing to help the masses?

really what i'd like to see is a civil war between the public and society, or maybe they could join forces to  square off against the body politic. only problem is, there'd be nobody there.

it's heidegger was a nazi! time again. and let me say: heidegger was a nazi. the times piece quotes carlin romano (whom i know a bit) from the chronicle of higher education, who calls Heidegger a “Black Forest babbler” and fraud who was “overrated in his prime” and “bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now.”

ok let me have a quick go. i actually think heidegger is a profound and important thinker, though i would also say there is an element of hoohah: a mystical obcurantism.well that's true of all german systematic philosophers, and heidegger was the best the twentieth century had to offer in that vein. even if he kind of encouraged a cult of himself, he's not responsible for the shocking submissiveness and credulity of his followers, whom i've had to live with in philosophy departments now and then.

now let me say that we live inside two centuries of totalitarianism and many philosophers are tainted. hegel is an inyourface state worshiper: he flatly asserts that the state is god. or consider schelling. marx is, i believe, an utterly totalitarian thinker who had a far more direct influence on actual totalitarian regimes and their genocides than did heidegger, who was too obscure to really wield any direct influence on practical politics. there are reasons that hitler loved nietzsche; a fascist reading of nietzsche is not entirely disconnected from what he actually said. well, you might also grab folks like hobbes or rousseau.

and we are, right now, still in the middle of the cult of the state as represented by all these people: essentially no one does not advocate total state power: it taints everyone from rawls to habermas to zizek etc. and in a way this is just the reflection of the reality of our amazing progress. so i more or less hate the political philosophies of all these people. it's a harder question on heidegger than most, because even more than most he does not say: here's my totalitarian system; there is no clear advocacy of any particular politics in heidegger, though it's not wrong to keep feeling a fascist undertow. 

but our intellectual life is unimaginable without hegel, marx, nietzsche. nor would we want to imagine that even if we could. many of the ideas are compelling, and you can't think completely outside them. now you had better keep your critical faculties about you at all times. if you start accepting stuff because marx said it or because hardt and negri said marx said it etc you are not only going to end up accepting totalitarian premises; you are actually enacting the submission that makes totalitarianism possible. most intellectuals do exactly that.

but i think that marx and nietzsche and hedegger, e.g., also can be wielded in a liberatory vein: the ideas are extremely rich, complicated, equivocal. someone like foucault  shows the kind of thing i mean. he's inconceivable without marx and nietzsche and hegel and heidegger. but he also exposes our totalitarian situation profoundly.

heidegger is not going to imperceptibly make you a nazi through some kind of secret mesmeric power in the text. read. read hard. read carefully. stay free in relation to the text. take what you can use and leave the rest. read...as an anarchist, or a radical advocate of direct democracy. read and never knuckle under to what you read. the question really isn't about the dictatorial power of the author; it's about the free resistance of the reader.

so on nov 21 and 22 - at 21 charter oak ave. hartford, connecticut - the north american anarchist studies network will forgather. i'll be talking on saturday afternoon about american anarchism, 1800-1860. it'll be all the anarchist intellectuals on the continent, more or less, and all the agents of the department of homeland security.