eye of the storm

really the various political positions in the u.s. are only inflections of squishy totalitarianism, one reason why political participation is illusory. people like mccain and bush emphasize security state/safety from terrorists, obama economic safety. both are guaranteeing your life. on both, state and economy merge and grow and grow. and each also basically embraces the goals of the other with minor qualifications.

if squishy  totalitarianism needs its locke or marx, i might nominate al gore or tom friedman: their vision is "global": the merger not only of polity and economy, but of each distinct unit into a single world regulatory regime. the cult of information technology and fetishization of education (a zone of uplift, consciousness formation, and authority) are central ideologies of squishy totalitarianism. as are, as i say, the notion that direct authority is an anachronism and there is the zone of privacy that shouldn't usually be disturbed. the political theory is world welfare/education state in identity with a global economy, with the undertow of fear: what it takes to keep us all from drowning under polar melt or succumbing to bizarre attacks of the irrational, animal past=terrorism. it takes, in short, the merger of state and economy and the merger of state-economies into a single world-devouring blob: the infinite tub of goo.

however, i would not assume that this is some directedness of history: somehow, this idea too will collapse. the very gigantism is unsustainable: nothing, no matter or particularly how big, can fend off the chaos that evelopes us and is us. one little problem: human beings basically can't be educated.

define: squishy totalitarianism. alright. it's totalitarian in that the state permeates the lives of people to an ever-greater degree. so, for example, we need pre-k programs and assured retirement, cradle-to-grave healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing. sort of gently, it shapes consciousnesses: gently in comparison to a roomful of chinese children chanting maoist slogans or rallies of hitler youth (though of course our kids do inhabit rooms with patriotic symbols and chant slogans in unison). the state regulates media, and at the broad level helps keep it in the hands of large corporations. what is constantly emphasized is the dependence of people on the state. the bush administration jacked this up amazingly, and tried to make the only issue who could keep americans safe, as though the only human emotion was fear and we self-evidently live in a nation of cowards. the obama admin has taken this over seamlessly. so squishy totalitarianism has a militaristic edge and the domestic policing that goes with it.

the major feature, however, is the erasure of distinction between state and economy: the merger of the state and corporation in a way that makes corporations providers of basic public services and the state a for-profit enterprise. privitization and government purchases/bailouts of, say the financial system in a way amount to the same thing: blackwater merges with the pentagon; the fed with citigroup etc. this is theseemingly (at the moment) inevitable condition being approached in one direction or another by the u.s., china, venezuela, the eu, india, and russia: it's communism. or it's state capitalism. there is no distinction.

now why is it squishy? it doesn't usually involve straight-up crackdowns, where you have tanks in the streets of new york or beijing, or where we raid newspapers, round up dissidents into camps and so on, though of course such things still happen here and there. it has to deal, for example, with the constant proliferation of communication technologies, with the basic fact that the state/corporation cannot really control the flow of information, and actually depends on those same technologies in myriad ways. it respects some sort of zone of privacy around individuals and families and small affinity groups, because breaking into that zone is expensive and counter-productive. but it disables what goes on in that zone from constituting any serious subversion.

the political/economic/military systems are gargantuan: the largest human organizations ever known. revolution, like the straight crackdown, is obsolete, ridiculous. squishy totalitarianism absorbs dissent because it is a huge mound of goo: there's no real center: it's everywhere all the time: the only conceivable revolution would be to destroy...everything.

the era of revolution is over, just as is the era of the police state. in many ways, indeed, the concept of liberty is anachronistic, and means little except that we can still blog. concepts like "citizenship" are anachronistic: you still produce the signs of participation, but the systems are so gigantic and the consciousness so formed within them that your participation is meaningless.

at the end of bill kristol's column today, the nyt blandly remarks that it is his last. one wonders what happened. i greeted it as a good appointment (here  and here); i thought we'd get a lively and actually-right voice. but i have been disappointed. the columns were unaccountably bland, much more so than much of bk's writing in other contexts; perhaps he was too aware of defusing a hostile audience. and it's hard not to see that his style of neo-conservativism, characterized by triumphalist militarism is, at least for moment, well over.

murders by the russian state continue apace, all moving back to the chechen genocide:

here and here.

adjunct to the below: on why bush never made dictator. first, as i say, he didn't have the personality for it. this might have bummed out the neo-cons, who could have better employed someone oozing charisma. too bad sarah palin showed up late. second, the disastrous conduct of the war in iraq. that's the kind of thing that has doomed many a totalitarian regime: cf. soviets in afghanistan, germans in russia, and so on. and by the end, abrupt economic decline. these are things that, despite their human cost, we should be grateful for, in that the disaster could have been worse if the power had been successfully consolidated.

let me do a little schtick on bush, obama, and totalitarianism. i think that after 9.11, bush (cheney) took an opportunity to move the country in an authoritarian direction, featuring universal surveillance, detention centers, and a national military mobilization (every soldier as an american hero) combined with a romanticized nationalism and militarism well captured in the use of the term "homeland." that is, it was a crypto-fascist expansion of state power. now i think we are actually to be congratulated in that we didn't allow this to happen; the media in particular pierced the veil. and that a variety of other factors led to plummeting public support for the administration was fortunate: you'd need great popular support to actually go fascist. but even if we had, it seems likely that bush would have peacefully relinquished power, that relatively fair elections would continue to be held, and so on: these are fundamental to american self-image, and you can't actually be a nationalist here without doing more than nodding in that direction. but there could have been a continuous administration through elections, and a serious erosion of basic liberties in their defense etc.

on obama: no, he's not going to suddenly be mao, suspend the constitution, move without congress, and so on. but if the public and media adulation continues, the democracy can easily erode in the other direction: government spending and gdp could approach merger. very aggressive federal education/welfare-type programs could produce a pretty credulous and dependent population. obama could continue to emerge into superhuman amazingness, and power continue to consolidate under a single executive, even as military power continues to be exercised globally. indeed the "homeland," "every grunt a hero" flavor will be retained and redeployed: a semi-permanent feature of our culture.

we're dealing with a long-term increase in federal and executive power: continuous really since the founding but certainly since the new deal (left) and cold war (right). and there is no party or significant faction of a party that really resists this: ron paul is, like, the last politician in a major party. what we're getting is a squishy totalitarianism with some democratic elements, such as occasional elections.

one sees china, for example, approaching squishy totalitarianism from the other end: they slowly expand economic and other freedoms, while continuing to control the population through education and welfare programs, and turning the state into a juggernaut by merging it with a sortof capitalist economy.

but obama's particular contribution to this flow is certainly a cult of personality, which reduces scrutiny and dissent and increases state power, though not by a straight crackdown. also, if we participate, we deserve what we get. if bush has one particularly useful quality, it's that a cult of personality around him would be absurd: he's always puncturing his own pretensions, is extremely approachable. he does funny dances. he has no mystique.

this is not to say that one shouldn't admire obama. i think he's the smartest dude to assume the presidency in my lifetime. i like his public persona. that he's black constitutes a great moment in our history. he ran an extremely effective campaign. it's just that we need to realize that the basic posture had always better be: scepticism about the exercise, over us, of power. that's the only thing keeping us free, to the extent we are free.

hey putin: what's the url of your blog?

handout from my philosophy of religion class, also on the handouts page.

Basic Arguments for God's Existence

Each of these basic strategies supports numerous formulations, and there are other strategies as well.

The Ontological Argument (Anselm, e.g.)
The term 'God' refers to the greatest possible being.
A being which exists is greater than a being which does not exist.
Therefore, God exists.

(The ontological argument is a priori, deductive, and has the advantage not only of proving (if it proves anything) that God is morally perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, and so on.)

The Cosmological Argument (Aquinas etc)
Version (a): First Cause
Every motion, event, or object must have a cause.
There cannot be a temporally infinite chain of causation.
Therefore, there must be a first cause that is not itself caused by anything else ("and this all people call God.")

Version (b): from the principle of sufficient reason
For every event and object, there is in principle an adequate reason or explanation.
This is true not only of each specific thing and event but of the whole series or array.
Therefore there must be something in terms of which the whole universe or causal sequence can be explained (say, "the will of God")

(The cosmological argument is a posteriori in the sense that it supposes (from experience) that there things, events, and so on. But it is usually framed deductively.)

The Teleological Argument or The Argument from Design
The universe displays such elements of physical or moral order or purpose that it would be irrational to believe that it was the result of chance rather than intentional design.
This is often framed as an argument from analogy: say we found a watch on the beach; we'd conclude it was the result of someone's purposeful design and manufacture. How much more elaborate and beautiful etc is the world!

(The teleological argument is a posteriori and inductive or abductive.)

Definitions
a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not based on sensory (empirical) observation. Examples include principles of mathematics and logic.
a posteriori knowledge is emprical knowledge, knowledge based on sensory experience.
deductive arguments are arguments in which it is supposed that if the premises are true, the conclusion cannot be rationally denied. E.g. All men are mortal. Fred is a man. Therefore, Fred is mortal.
inductive arguments rest on enumerating observations. For example, all the crows we have observed are black. Therefore, the next crow we observe will be black. Though the premise lends probability to the conclusion, the premise(s) could be true and the conclusion false.

abductive arguments are arguments from analogy, concluding from the fact that two items are similar in certain respects, they are similar in other respects. For example, since rats are like people (in some respects), if a substance cures cancer in rats, it is likely to cure cancer in people.

while we're on the topic of blogs, i draw your attention (again) to in the libertarian labyrinth. shawn wilbur is the greatest expert on nineteenth-century american anti-authoritarian thought, and what you can find trolling around this site is just amazing. for just one non-american thing, texts by proudhon otherwise unavailable in english.

hey i cleaned up my blogroll for the first time in decades. whom should i add, y'all?

 

the cult of obama - martin luther king with a nuclear arsenal - is going to get real old real fast. the images hanging all over my college campus, for example, might as well be mao or saddam: they give you the whole cult-of-personality totalitarian flavor. the average american liberal would believe or do anything he says. the people with whom i watched the inaugural address - well, the women, anyway - were literally gasping and groaning in ecstasy: the exquisite agony of perfect submission. you know we wondered whether under bush/cheney we were heading toward a totalitarian regime. we better keep on wondering, especially as the power of the state doubles each month in the face of depression.

i particularly like the image on top, now reproduced in many forms: gazing vaguely upward at the limitless future: a conventional pose of the Beloved Leader. of course the shepard fairey image is utterly ubiquitous: explicitly throwing down some socialist realism traditionalism. when you start seeing them on billboards and on the sides of buildings, on banners and televised messages, start digging out the shelter in your back yard.

when i was an undergraduate, though it's kind of mortifying to admit it, i was a poet. perhaps my favorite poem was the following, by w.d. snodgrass, who just died. it juxtaposes a quotation from spinoza's "on the improvement of the understanding" with...something else. the teacher who showed me this was reed whittemore.
 
"After Experience Taught Me"
by W.D. Snograss

After experience taught me that all the ordinary

Surroundings of social life are futile and vain;

         I’m going to show you something very

         Ugly: someday, it might save your life.

Seeing that none of the things I feared contain

In themselves anything either good or bad

         What if you get caught without a knife;

         Nothing—even a loop of piano wire;

Excepting only in the effect they had

Upon my mind, I resolved to inquire

         Take the first two fingers of this hand;

         Fork them out—kind of a “V for Victory”—

Whether there might be something whose discovery

Would grant me supreme, unending happiness.

         And jam them into the eyes of your enemy.

         You have to do this hard. Very hard. Then press

No virtue can be thought to have priority

Over this endeavor to preserve one’s being.

         Both fingers down around the cheekbone

         And setting your foot high into the chest

No man can desire to act rightly, to be blessed,

To live rightly, without simultaneously

         You must call up every strength you own

         And you can rip off the whole facial mask.

Wishing to be, to act, to live. He must ask

First, in other words, to actually exist.

                           And you, whiner, who wastes your time

                              Dawdling over the remorseless earth,

                           What evil, what unspeakable crime

                              Have you made your life worth?

because the pictures from grozny post from so long ago continues to garner comments, i'm creating a chechnya category, so no one is in any doubt what i believe: it was a genocide by the putin regime, latest in a long history of unconscionable brutality directed at the chechens.

watching obama sign a series of executive orders restoring something like legality and decency to our treatment of detainess and closing guantanamo. that is really, really good. likewise the end of the black site. a government operating a secret prison system is not a democracy.

when obama says: "the question isn't whether government is big or small, but whether it works," he's saying it's a matter not of big or small but ginormous or hugantuan: in any case omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient, based on infinite cash. it's a matter of merging the government with the economy. what he said literally was that it's not a matter of big or small, but whether it guarantees the lives of every person in every respect: their careers, their health care, their retirement: cradle to grave. the size of the government will double in the next two years. the era of "the era of big government is over" is over, if it ever actually began.

here's a handout from my republicanism course (also on the handouts page). i'd be interested in responses on this one.

---------

Classical and Modern Political Terms

It is unfortunate that all these words are used in multiple senses (though such is language), but it is important to get as clear as possible.

democracy (classical conception, through the 18th century): rule by the people, majority, poor, or even the mob, usually used in a negative sense, as something to be avoided. In the Athenian democracy, legislative and judicial functions were directly discharged by the citizenry.

democracy (modern): usually refers to a representative system of government, resting on the will of the people or the majority, but filtering it through representative bodies (also incorporates the classical liberal conception of individual rights and the republican conception of the rule of law; also the idea of a written constitution).

classical liberalism: rests on the concept of individual (natural or inherent) rights, and limits state authority to the protection of individual rights or the principle of "non-interference." Associated with free-market capitalism. A similar position is now called libertarianism. Locke, Smith, Mill.

(modern) liberalism: more or less the program of the Democratic Party, for example: welfare state and aggressive government programs in education, redistribution of wealth, regulation of business. Also internationalism. (Uncomfortably) combines a continuing tradition of rights with considerable social engineering, and also possibly with a notion of group rights or identity politics of race, gender, sexuality, and so on.

classical or civic republicanism: emphasizes the public participation of citizens as central to their identity and liberty, unity and virtue of the political unit (polis). Not primarily based on individual rights. "Mixed government" with monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements. Aristotle, Adams.

(modern) republicanism: the ideology of the Republican Party, (uncomfortably) combining traditionalism - including religious values derived from Protestant Christianity, nationalism, and romantic militarism - with classical liberal elements of free market capitalism (a "pro-business" orientation), individual rights, and small government.

conservatism: properly, emphasis on tradition and traditional values as a guide to current action, now identified with the combination of elements characteristic of the Republican Party.

left and right: a current technique for dividing up the political spectrum. the left/right dichotomy does not do a good job of characterizing political ideologies before about 1900. For example, the most radical American political figures of the early nineteenth century (abolitionists, feminists, and so on) were for the most part evangelical Christians. Comes into vogue when Marxist communism is termed "far left," fascism "far right." Makes some kind of sense in the current ideological division between modern liberalism and modern conservativism.

--------------

I might remark on those "uncomfortably"s: I do think that modern liberalism and conservativism are fundamentally incoherent. This is understandable given their status as representing more or less half each of the American political spectrum: they are, for one thing, complicated coalitions. Also they are historical, not, as it were, philosophical. They both appeal to aspects of the American founding. And they have both been mutated by the signal political development of the last century and a half: the inexorable continuous growth of the state. So that even if both appeal fundamentally to freedom and liberty, both enthusiastically wield the state in order to achieve a laundry list of objectives: social control according to religious values, for example; or justice conceived as economic equality. Both avail themselves of the state in order to shape a citizenry amenable to their values, which themselves in each case are semi-coherent congeries.

i will say this: no matter who's getting inaugurated, the extreme pomp and pageantry is little more than hyper-expensive spectacular propaganda for the legitimacy of the state and is, among other things, anti-democratic. obviously the basic model is the coronation of an emperor, or perhaps the installation of a pope. well, this is not a particularly democratic country, when you come down to it.

got to love the obama girls, though brace yourself for the rehab in ten years.

sorry for no bloggin. been away from internet. some thoughts on the obama speech. starting with the acceptance speech, he's been...chastened, subdued. it was not a really soaring speech, and delivered no moment of profundity or poetry that will be remembered. ain't worth much, but here's how i'd have written it. ok. start with this moment of victory: we have overcome. and then: but this is also a moment of struggle, pain, challenge, crisis.and then run through a few historical vignettes in which america survived or indeed achieved greatness. the washington at valley forge thing he used was fine. then a civil war/lincoln vignette. then the depression. ww 2: always pegged on a specific quote/character/leader: always showing that greatness comes only in profound struggle. then the1963 king speech on that very mall. then back to this moment of overcoming and crisis: our moment to show that greatness again. see? *shape* the thing into a whole, a single thing.