eye of the storm

here's a video version of the challenge i am issuing to all comers to formulate a decent argument for the legitimacy of state power. embed it in your blog etc!

i don't really understand how the fuckheads who run burma survive. somebody kill 'em, please.

check this excellent discussion of my anarchy challenge in the fly bottle. (the reference would be to wittgenstein, who characterized the real remaining task of philosophy as letting the fly (meaning?) out of the fly bottle (metaphysics?)

michael kinsley rocks.

do me a favor?: cut and paste this everywhere. it's a...marketing ploy. but it's sincere.

A Philosophical Challenge

My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State (SUNY Press) argues that all the arguments of the great philosophers (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, Nozick, and Habermas, among others), are, putting it kindly, unsound.

The state rests on violence: not the consent of the governed, not utility, not rational decision-making, not justice.
 
Not only are the existing arguments for the legitimacy of state power unsound; they are shockingly fallacious, a scandal, an embarrassment to the Western intellectual tradition.

So I issue a challenge: Give a decent argument for the moral legitimacy of state power, or reconstruct one of the traditional arguments in the face of the refutations in Against the State.

If you can't, you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism.

I'd offer a huge cash prize, but I'm broke.

Henceforward, if you continue to support or observe the authority of government, you are an evil, irrational cultist.

You're an anarchist now, baby, until further notice.

e-mail responses to c.sartwell@verizon.com

Yours in anarchy,
Crispin Sartwell

you can pre-order from amazon, or actually get holt of it from suny press.

from against the state:
The attempt to justify state power ethically has made no substantial progress for centuries. Indeed, for two hundred years, philosophers have rested content with recapitulating Hegel, Locke, or Hume, or constructing collages, such as those of Rawls and Habermas. Of course, probably the best policy is to approach the monuments of the intellectual tradition in a posture of respect, with a presumption that they were produced by smart people thinking hard and so cannot be merely ridiculous. With regard to the arguments that have been offered for the legitimacy of the state, I cannot manage to assume this posture. The arguments themselves are pitiful: riddled with holes, rationalizations, dreams of submission dressed in the leering semblance of rationality.

     The arguments of a Hobbes, of a Hume, of a Rawls are, I want to say, unworthy of human beings. They are arguments that we should all submit, but they are expressions above all of the slavishness of the writer. They are justifications of slavery by slaves, and with regard to any such argument, you must question its sincerity and sample its stench of self-delusion as well as evaluate its logical quality. And whatever you may think of the motivations, the arguments are shockingly fallacious: one strives by any means to justify the central moral fact of one's life: one's destruction as an autonomous human being; one's pervasive use for the purposes of others, one's tininess, impotence, and one's collusion in this tininess and impotence: one's need for it, love of it. One is an insect, by choice, by commitment, by history, by necessity, though hardly by philosophy. And when it comes time to argue, one argues as an insect would argue. One philosophizes like a gnat.

     "Locke," "Rousseau," "Hegel," "Habermas" are sounds that reverberate through human history like the tolling of great big bells. They have their moments: Locke's epistemology, Rousseau's philosophy of education, the very idea of the philosophy of history, the lovely dancing delight that is the prose style of Jurgen Habermas. But their books are also all contained within the still-emerging world-historical destiny of the state, not to speak of its patronage systems and threats of repression. There may be better justifications of the existence of the state than they came up with, but any candidate had better start more skeptically, by feeling actually threatened, undermined, by anarchism. And so we anarchists must do all we can to destroy their arguments and any others that may eventually be put forward. Only thus can we serve the cause to which we are all, ultimately, committed: the destruction of human moral autonomy.

my pro-conservative-studies piece is in the latimes this morning. ungratefully, i'm going to express my dissatisfaction with the edit. to start with, i am aware that you don't endow a professor, but a professorship or a chair. incomprehensibly, they lost the strongest paragraph:

    Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.

anyway, if anyone cares, they can compare it with the submitted text.

For Conservative Studies
By Crispin Sartwell

That the University of Colorado would establish a Chair of Conservative Studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It certainly smacks of affirmative action, and casts conservativism in the syntax of whole departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, African-American studies, and so on.
    Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. Women may be oppressed, sort of, but conservatives run whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multi-national corporations. In fact, if women are oppressed, they're oppressed by conservatives, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.
    But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think it's not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. On a faculty of 825, the University of Colorado apparently has 23 registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or phys ed.
    The professoriate is unanimous for Obama. I say that's a problem. It's a problem in a variety of ways, but it's certainly a problem pedagogically: ideological uniformity does a disservice to students, and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge.
    I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backwards to teach texts I hate sympathetically; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Marx - both of whom I regard as totalitarians - compelling.
   But I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as or in the same way as would a professor who found them plausible. On the other hand, with Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," I've immersed myself in the text for years. I've struggled to parse every sentence. I've put it into the context of all Thoreau's work, and that of his friends and contemporaries.
    When I get to the end of the "Communist Manifesto" I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?" I don't - I can't - teach Marx the same way a Marxist would. I think that's fine, but what I'm saying is that even as I try to be neutral (well, even if did try to be neutral) my real opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.
    It's horrendously true in a situation in which academia produces a consensus. Here everything is affected by the real opinions of real professors, from the configuration of departments to the courses on offer within those departments to the texts taught within those courses to the ways those texts are taught. And because there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible.
    Indeed, the academic consensus is of a particularly irritating variety. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a Ph.D. leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing: that no one could disagree with Obamanism without being an idiot. This has been expressed by the continual attack not on the positions of Reagan and Bush, for example, but on their grades and IQs.
  That is, the self-image of the professoriate results in a non-stop ad hominem attack. Furthermore, the claims of the professoriate to independence of mind, actual academic freedom, supposedly nurtured by tenure, are thrown into question by the unanimity. Professors are as herd-like in their opinions as other groups that demographers like to identify - "working-class white men," for example - or indeed far more so.
    That's partially just a result of the charming human tendency to nod along with whoever's sitting next to you. But it's also partially a result of the fact that a professor has been processed, often for a decade or more, by the institutions that harbor this unanimity. The predictable result of "educating" professors for many years in unanimous institutions is that each cohort is a bit more unanimous than the one before.
     Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree, and in which they associate agreement with intelligence and with . . . degrees, jobs, tenure, and so on. If you think conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself richly justifies a decision not to hire or tenure a Ph.D. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.
    Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.
   That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of these institutions is obvious. Higher education is at least as dedicated to the reproduction of Obamanism as it is to conveying information. But it is massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective.
     So as my liberal old professor Richard Rorty said, referring to Allan Bloom, conservative Platonist: "Let a thousand Blooms flower." And if they flower in endowed chairs of conservative studies, that's at least pretty funny.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College In Carlisle, PA. His book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory has just been published.

    

here's stanley fish's argument against the u of colorado's notion of establishing a "chair of conservative studies." 23 of the 825 faculty members describe themselves as republicans. that's actually pretty high. but anyway, fish argues, as he has many times before, that one's ideology is irrelevant to one's teaching, that even a liberal philosophy prof, for example, is obliged to give a fair assessment of conservative texts (plato or burke or adam smith, let's say) to his students. all i can say is that this argument is bizarrely naive. i do myself bend over backwards to give a clear and even sympathetic reading of "the communist manifesto," which i think is interesting but terrifying. but i do not deceive myself into thinking that i've expended as much effort in understanding it as i have on a comparable text i actually sympathize with (maybe "civil disobedience"). i  tell my students: 'well, you know, when marx says that the state must control all the media of communications, that sure seems totalitarian to me; but i don't think if you had a marxist in here, he'd think it was so clear.' but i also can't adequately represent the argument, regarding it as i do as ludicrous. at any rate: if you despise a text or a thinker, you read him differently, emphasize different things, etc, despite all your attempts to be fair. this is a typical and unavoidable human derangement, most clearly seen in the fact that nearly everybody sympathizes with themselves, that their account of their own lives and arguments is partly designed to beef up their self-image. the idea that people can simply drop off their deepest beliefs at the door is silly, even if we want to. and when you've got let's say 802 liberals on the faculty, you've got a pall of interpretation slanted in every possible respect: which texts we teach, and how. and it's even more dangerous if we maintain a fishy claim of impartiality; that doesn't get rid of the prejudices, merely conceals them, which buries the whole process further in self-delusion.

    ask yourself: how is it that all these professors are liberals, are more or less perfectly unanimous for obama? i'm not going to accept the professors' own account: that smart people are liberals and only ignorant idiots are conservatives (say "george bush" and roll your eyes here). even just the sheer self-praise involved in that assertion should give you pause. it has to do with the fact that they're trained in institutions by people for whom liberalism is an unquestionable orthodoxy. it has to do with the texts and classes and curricula and how they're taught. it has to do with the charming enthusiasm of people for believing whatever the person next to them believes, especially if the latter has the appearance of authority or expertise. the longer people inhabit the academic institution, the more unanimous they become, a strange coincidence if fish's characterization of education is true. if you ask me, these things have nothing to do with what education is, and i do think that some effort to achieve ideological diversity is warranted.

   i don't know if inventing the discipline of conservative studies is much of an answer, but it's at least delicious in its ironies: conservatives always hated the idea of "women's studies," "african-american studies," lgbt (or whatever it is) studies. etc. and the implicit portrayal of conservatives as an oppressed minority for whom affirmative action is appropriate is pretty odd considering how powerful conservatism is. on the other hand, in academia, conservatism really does constitute an oppressed minority.

i'm disappointed that the libertarian party nominated bob barr, but on the up side there's liable to be a lot of attention and a fair number of votes. and barr more than any of the other candidates is liable to siphon directly from mccain. kinda wish they'd put me in charge of their rhetoric: i'd replace rand with thoreau, to begin with.

well, the libertarian pres debate, currently on c-span, is a bit embarrassing. the moderator, steve pinkerton, seems to be "defective" in some way; he's not making a lot of sense, and he forgot to let the candidates give their opening statements. the mighty bob barr called ayn rand "the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century," i guess after drenching himself thoroughly in russell, wittgenstein, quine, kripke, heidegger, sartre, bataille, foucault, rawls, nozick, baudrillard, habermas, etc. someone did say 'cicero,' but then said "probably none of you have ever heard of him." i think that was jingozian, who then admitted frankly that he had no idea what "the tragedy of the commons" means. whenever steve kubby speaks, a weird alien pinging starts up; perhaps a medical device near his clip-on. wayne root is one of these motivational speaker types whose self-declared youthful energy is enough to make more mellow human beings sob in despair. gravel seems to have what are closest to actual answers, though randian mary ruart keeps talking about "love" and stuff in a sort of inspiring way, and in a way that would make rand herself cringe, which is a good thing.

Religion is Fun
By Crispin Sartwell

Religion is too rarely appreciated for its entertainment value.
    We atheists have to be pretty happy with the presidential campaign, or indeed with the whole contemporary world. We're the only folks with the distance to be truly amused by everyone's hilarious beliefs and wild gesticulations.
    Catholics are angry that John Hagee, erstwhile McCain endorser, in a time-honored tradition, calls the Catholic Church "the Whore of Babylon." Meanwhile the Catholics are busy with the ascension of Mary or the infallibility of the pope or the market for little pieces of the saints' bones.
    They condemn each other for their bizarre, dangerous beliefs. Well they're both right on that. Keep right on, I say. You guys are killing me.
    Everything that happens is a punishment from God, from 9.11 to Katrina to Supreme Court decisions to this very sermon. Haile Selassie is God incarnate. No it's Freddy! Die, blasphemer! God, whoever he is, demands that you marry seven of your teenage nieces. He has twenty-six arms. God told me to hijack your plane. No he didn't! This book is the revealed truth. Nuh-uh! L. Ron Hubbard told me to make a bad sci-fi movie. God demands that we wear funny hats, or this funky hair style.
    Good stuff.
    I'd like to see an American Idol for preachers: Pastor Wright vs. Pastor Hagee vs the Pope vs the Grand Ayatollah vs the Lubovitcher rebbe vs Tom Cruise in a contest to see who can string words together in a more surreal set of arbitrary juxtapositions. Dude. It's psychedelic.
    Human epistemic perversity is an amazing circus of fun! I'm not saying that I have any reasons to believe the stuff I, personally, believe; I'm just saying the stuff you believe is hilarious. Indeed, I think what makes religion compelling is its perversity: you believe it precisely because it's entirely arbitrary, paradoxical, or so deeply profoundly mysterious that it strictly makes no sense at all.
   I'm not in favor of murder, for the most part, but as belief-sets, I adore anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism, the Inquisition, the fact that Muslims hate Hindus, Hindus Sikhs, etc. Hagee vs the Catholic church is good television. All day every day for a couple of weeks; then we'll have to come up with the next cage match of death.
    Hit each other with chairs or something. Or at least keep calling down God's thunderbolts and pronouncing anathemas. Maybe God wrote your book. But one thing's for sure: whoever wrote it was a gifted comedian.
   I want the Nation of Islam squaring off against Scientology, the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints against the Rastas, the Buddha kicking Jesus' butt, if Jesus has a butt. Play-by-play by Christopher Hitchens. Sneering, perhaps, but grinning.
   One thing about American politics: you've got to believe in one God or another. Better find Jesus right now. This means by definition that every American presidential candidate and a fortiori every American president is saddled with the hilarious preachings of some amazingly cool institutionalized psychosis. Without the clash of the gods, American politics would just be boring.
    I want to say, I respect faith. I respect all faiths, equally. I practice universal tolerance. Each religion is an astonishing perverse achievement. And in its sheer comedy, each makes life more fun.
    Today's atheists - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, for example - are way too grim and serious. They're way too apparently reasonable. If they had their way, we wouldn't have near as many grins.
    So keep right on, y'all. I respect your right to practice any religion you like in whatever way you prefer. Hell, do it in the public schools. Do it in Congress.
    Just make sure I get to watch.