cheese it, the cops!

Real, fundamental change or more Progressive "Tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing"

Long before I got to this article, I knew that the Supreme Court had published its ruling on Abortion, and that it was as draconian and out of sync with American society as it is possible to imagine. Justice Thomas (Holy Cross, Class of 72) seldom publishes an opinion but his opinion says that other aspects of life -- contraception, same sex marriage, and anything covered by the concept of privacy -- are now open for re-evaluation. Because if Roe goes, and it is in fact now gone, the modern legal concept of privacy is dead.

I knew all this because my inbox was staggering under the weight of requests, actually demands for my signature; and, probably, demands for $5 or 10 or whatever amount I could send whomever was asking for that signature.

I don't normally sign petitions, and probably won't start doing so again. When Clarence Thomas and I were wandering around Worcester, our daily travels would begin by visiting the campus center to check our mail, and maybe get a cup of coffee. The lobby of the campus center during those years (September 1969 - June 1973) was filled daily with student organizations collecting signatures for worthy causes. Most of them wanted to stop racism, cure poverty, end the war in Vietnam and end sexism. I generally signed most of them, as did all students of good mind and heart. We were imitating the Chaplain in the Animals' number Sky Pilot, being "good holy men" by attesting to values we were doing nothing credible to achieve or promote.

 

Signing petitions doesn't do much of anything, except get lunatics and fanatics on election slates and allow fools, charlatans and other oddities of the left and right a vehicle to make every corner our own American Speakers' corner.

At this point, life is fairly simple. If you want to preserve the rights of women to manage their own bodies and health, if you want to preserve the right to privacy, if you want to preserve equal rights for gay marriage, if you want to preserve the right to be screwed up and gnarly, then you have one choice going forward. The Republicans have won their 50 years of struggle for a third awakening of religious zealots and various fellow travelers. It's going to take a lot to re-establish the rights of women to manage their own health; it's going to take a lot to preserve the rights to gay marriage, to inter-racial marriage, to contraception and on and on and on. Battles we all thought won, fragile victory or not, through Roe and the modern concept of privacy.

It's simple. Vote Democratic. Send money to Democratic campaigns. And do so every election cycle until a more moderate court can re-visit these issues and a more realistic set of legislators are sitting in the halls of Congress.

If you want to distribute, sign and endorse petitioning efforts, great. But if you don't vote straight D long enough to get veto proof and filibuster proof majorities in the Congress, you're going to have the same meaningless impact of those petitions that the future Justice Thomas and First Sergeant and peripatetic thinker Mike Farrell signed almost 60 years ago on Worcester mornings from September to June.

Freedom, Fear and the Knock in the Middle of the Night...

 

FREEDOM

FROMM and ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM are popping up often enough at the moment to think we might have realized that we've had a pretty good working hypothesis about the "end of Liberal Democracy" and "the rise of the New Right." Of course, he figured it out a long time and the fact that we re-discover it whenever freedom is threatened means it's possible to at least remember if not prevent. Fromm left Germany and after a year in Geneva, accepted a teaching position at Columbia University in 1935. His approach to psychoanalysis was informed by his early academic work in law and graduate work in sociology and philosophical psychology. Escape From Freedom jumps up the university reading lists whenever the pendulum in this country moves toward repression and authoritarianism. Approachable and crisp, his work provides a great working model for understanding we're doing to ourselves and why. I've been meaning to revisit it for a while, and this piece in the The Guardian will make me wander in to my stacks and find my copy. From the Guardian article by Dr. Michele Gelfand, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland:

"The philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm first identified this predicament in his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom. The gist of it is this: when people perceive an increase in disorder, they feel tremendous anxiety. Inevitably, this anxiety leads to a quest for security. To bring a sense of safety back into their lives, they latch on to authoritarianism and conformity. As Fromm noted, this often leads to “a readiness to accept any ideology and any leader if only he offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life”. He had observed this in Germany, which he fled in 1933: “Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds,” he wrote."

Anxiety is probably not the best word today, since we are always anxious about most things in our lives. Probably because the amount of stimulus has increased tremendously over the decades and because some of us recognize the symptoms if not the causes of what we observe around us, the concept I keep hearing is "Existential Dread." From Ari Melber and Hip Hop Artists on MSNBC to music reviews of Dustin Welch's "Amateur Theatre" to George Will, the concept is starting to surface a lot. Worth considering before it gets it's own TV show. Fromm wasn't an Existentialist, although he studied with Karl Jaspers while a doctoral student at Heidelberg in the 1920s. He was certainly influenced by Existentialism, being a contemporary of Hannah Arendt and Sartre. So before the TV show comes out with a theme song about "Here comes the Zeitgeist," Escape From Freedom is available on Amazon and Google and any other place you care to look.

If the ultimate Existential Marxist thinks Existentialists are whining wimps and Marxists are delusional pussies...

The idea that there has to be an author of a joke is properly paranoiac: it means that there has to be an “Other of the Other,” of the anonymous symbolic order, as if the very unfathomable contingent generative power of language has to be personalized, located into an agent who controls it and secretly pulls the strings. This is why, from the theological perspective, God is the ultimate jokester. -- Slavoj Zizek, The role of jokes in becoming-man of the apes,  MIT Press, Cambridge, 2018.

Been on a bit of a hiatus from writing and reading anything other than noir mysteries and Cthulhu...writing and thinking about the what's going on in the world is just too depressing. Maybe Trump will decide to stop the fires in the Amazon by nuking Brazil. Maybe he'll decide to issue bounties on dead migrants trying to "sneak into" the country. Maybe the next time he leaves the White House he will declare himself King and Captain Underpants simultaneously, and drop his pants in front of the press, not remembering that he went commando that day...

Anyway, I was sitting in a restaurant waiting for the steaks to arrive and ignoring my wife while glancing at my smart phone -- which says a lot about me, her and the world in general, I guess, when I say my bi-weekly copy of the highlights from MIT Press. Glancing at the contents I thought, "I ought to read that, and I ought to read that, and...'5 Jokes from Slavoj Zizek?' Zizek wrote 5 jokes? And a book about them..." 

You see, I've been trying to read Zizek for years. I find him incredibly difficult to read...and yet, I continue to read his work. There are just aspects of it that make me want to get what the hell he's talking about and be able to explain it. I've listened to him speak, and it reminds me of the better profs I took philosophy from -- humor, subtlety, madness, commitment, a bit of gentleness and a lot of passion. Then, he gets involved with Kant for 200 pages about 2 pages about 15 or so words. This is why I find it hard to read him. Yet I keep reading.

 

Well, actually, that's academic philosophy in a nutshell. Crispin disagrees, (as he should, being a tenured professor of philosophy at a school that tried to fire him for complaining about being plagiarized by an academic professor of philosophy at another university in a non-academic philosopher way. He thought, as any rational or "Irrational Man" would think, that his response was not directed at here as a threat but as a cri de coeur about the absurdity of modern academic publishing and reputations and all the rest. If you listen to that song, by Miranda Lambert or by Fred Eaglesmith you don't hear anger -- you hear fear, frustration, and despair. Of course, the other professor felt that this was threatening and degrading and racist and sexist and probably a threat to her own sexuality. Or something. Complained to her chair, who complained to Crispin's Dean who...well, it went on from there. Crispin is still working and still sending out tweets and facebook posts and still muttering under his breath.) Actually, he probably agrees with me...

Face it. Zizek is a highly respected respected academic philosopher who gets away with this stuff because he's a highly respected academic philosopher in Europe, where people know not to take him literally, but seriously. Crispin operates in a world that is bureaucratic and bizarre and does it well for the most part. If Zizek came to spend a semester at Yuppie-Wannabes On the Brandywine with Crispin, they'd both end up in jail. I would definitely send them cake with blocks of C4 in them; and, they would probably eat the C4, being actual philosophers as well as academic philosophers, and having no idea what the hell it was anyway. 

Note: Top, Giacometti, Head on a bolt; bottom, Giacometti, Le Chat

 

The Age of the Imbecile...

O' beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie -- Don Henley, End of the Innocence, 1989 

"I’d bet you’ve thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: “Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.”You’re not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite, dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.And so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion thermonuclear bomb across the globe. Lightning bolts of foolishness shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it. Here are the five kinds of stupid wrecking the globe — because your first job, these days, as a human being, is to make sure you’re not being turned into an imbecile by this wave of stupid, too". -- Umair Haque, Eudamonia, 3/4/2019

One of the tons of weightless, mass-less but still existent things that cross my field of vision daily is Medium. I like it, because it gives me access to a wide variety of interesting stuff. Kind of a Daily Kos/ Huffington Post for people who have a bit broader perspective. And one of the things I enjoy and learn from is the work of Umair Haque, who seems to be occupying an intellectual space not all that different from Kierkegaard's or Schumpeter or I don't know...Hunter S. Thompson. 

I'd never heard of the guy, and started reading him because he was echoing things I thought, which is scary. Then I googled him...turns out the guy is a highly respected management guru with a meta-view. Which, when you think of it, is a rarity. Now, perhaps sort of a bit of humanist eschatology, which is an interesting concept in itself.

 

Folks  who are neck deep in the struggle to make the world a more humane and human place might gain from his perspective or might find it annoying. Good on you. But, I think that even people trying to save the world might occasionally need a slightly contrarian buzz. As for the rest of us, I think countering the age of the imbecile is a pretty laudable exercise. 

 

I don't know where I want to go with this, but I think it's something people who think about the things they think about can find a better place to put the lever. Invite comments, thoughts, and suggestions...

 

So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
That a really good religion
Is a form of treason. -- "On Banning Bokonon" Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

 

Apropos, perhaps? 

 

 

Damn Socrates, Wittgenstein, Authenticity and Your Own Bullshit

Farrell's Guide to Authenticity. Don't believe your own bullshit. Laugh at it...

 

The sense of the world must lie outside the world...What we cannot speak about we must remain silent about...What can be described can happen too, and what is excluded by the laws of causality cannot be described -- Wittgenstein

A good guide will take through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide. -- Wittgenstein

There's a great article about Wittgenstein and the problems of authenticity in The NY Times Series The Stone this morning. It got me thinking.

Damned authenticity! It roughly means, for me, the 1=1 congruence of thought, action, belief, speech, dreams and prayers. It's bloody near impossible, because nothing is really congruent. As a born, baptized, educated and apostate Roman Catholic, it is similar to things like being in a state of grace or "making a good act of contrition." If I confess the sin of anger -- a sin I'm really, really proficient at -- to make a good act of contrition requires that I be sorry for what I did, and that I intend unreservedly to never be angry again. Yeah, right...not happening, Brother Jesus, not happening.

Damned Wittgenstein, for that matter. His philosophy is so dense because he sought absolute congruence between thought, action, and belief. But one thing the universe is, and remains, is not congruent. Trying to understand it can make multiple very bright people flee to things like cultivating a rock garden, as my buddy, indicted coconspirator and practicing Philosopher as well as Philosophy Professor Crispin Sartwell has done. Or, run for Congress. Or, run to prayer.

Confession, authenticity, congruence, integrity...Damn them all, I say. And, I recommend than taking a deep breath and getting back to trying to figure it all out. It's not the job of the academic philosopher to do this; it's the job of the authentic human being.

"But one thing we can understand about Wittgenstein is that he longed to change himself; and he saw confession as a means to fulfilling this. “Nothing is so difficult,” Wittgenstein wrote in 1938, “as not deceiving oneself.”’ His vision of the authentic self is perhaps always beyond reach, like the exemplars of authenticity with which he was familiar through the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Authenticity throughout the history of philosophy is often conceived of as an ideal to which we should aspire, but that doesn’t prevent it being a useful means for self-improvement. Confession can help remove obstacles standing in the way of our becoming our authentic selves. "If it can do that for Wittgenstein, it may do the same for us."

Or, maybe not. 

Maybe you should just not think about it all. This one is for Crispin, Jeff, James, Agi and Adam...

 

yet another problem with demographic politics

let's say you define the future of your political party, and are attempting to articulate the political future of the nation, by demographics. you will appeal to 'women and minorities,' breaking off those demos as we become majority-minority. thus, total domination is our destiny! others think this is a sad approach because it involves technologies for exacerbating differences extremely, or relentlessly treating each person as being identified primarily by their position in gender and race hierarchies. ok, perhaps disastrous for our society, but strategically sensible? 

but one insane aspect of this structure is that though it looks like it just sorts individuals into groups, the demographic lines you're drawing run through individuals. like can you really have missed this? so here's the approximate distribution: the population is about 60% white, so about 60% of women are white, and about 30% of americans are white women. about 40% of the population is minority, and about 50% of the minority population is male, so about 20% of the population of the country is minority male. so 50% of the population is white and female or minority and male. for each person in half the population, in other words, the 'women and minorities' distinctions run through them, not around them. your conceptuality splits each member of half the population internally, and yet you act as though are describing distinct demographic segments or distinct populations. but you aren't.

this actually amounted to a possibly election-deciding confusion: white women didn't turn out for hillary as predicted, and voted more heavily for trump than predicted. that was...predictable as a result of this grotesquely incoherent strategy.

nothing, nothing could be more obvious! how in the world can you have missed this? there is no future in it, because the situation will persist in precisely the same form in a majority-minority america. alright? for god's sake sit there and think for a few minutes.

'identity politics' basically treats individual identities by place in a demographic taxonomy or grid: race, gender, income level, region, educational level, and so on. but now the situation is just internal chaos for almost everyone as everyone occupies many boxes. and most of them occupy boxes that both sides are dedicated to annexing. their basic political strategy is literally logically incoherent: it cannot be construed in a way that makes it conceptually consistent. there is no possible world - i mean this seriously - where a real population can vote in the patterns suggested by the strategies.

Poetry, Myth, Southern Rock, Politics, Trump

 

One of the projects Crispin and I have been putting off until he's in the witness protection program here in California is our own musical-poetical-satirical-philosophical unified field theory. Fuck Einstein, our's will work. Here's my latest stab at it from over at Veterans News Now or where ever they're putting my stuff...

http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/09/28/more-mid-week-blues/

 

 

A sociopath in the White House can ruin your whole day -- Krugman

When the opportunity arises to link Donald Trump with Macus Antoninus, Damian Lewis, Tom Morello, Ani de Franco, Woodie Guthrie and Shakespeare, how can you expect me to resist?
And, you get to see another shoot of Big Donnie's Doppelganger, Dickie Small Hands. How could anyone resist?

I don't really understand why we haven't heard in detail what he intends to do about it when elected?

the era of pseudo-explanation

one thing that is particularly characteristic of contemporary discourse in many areas, including politics, is the transformation of the merest concepts, or even sheer general terms, into actors or forces or beings with causal effects in the material world. i am going to assert that in a wide range of cases, such an approach can explain absolutely nothing. this is also the language of advertising, for example. here's a pretty classic example:

 

how does optum help you out? it uses wellness to keep away illness. a medical breakthrough! like it was an aesthetic breakthrough when the beatles used grooviness to keep away suckiness. what can save us in our terrible predicament? innovation! that's why optum is an innovation company.

or here's richard cohen: our enemy isn't islam or immigration or something; it's 'intolerance': the very same force that caused catholics and protestants to war in the 17th century. it's like intolerance is a substance or entity with physical effects: cupid's nasty little twin. or it's a force, like gravity. unlike gravity, however, it operates intermittently and its mechanisms are not well understood at any level. what accounts for its sudden emergence, the way it suddenly takes over individual heads or drives movements or peoples and then fades as progress again takes hold? now that we say the enemy is intolerance and half-assedly trace the history of particular people and events here or there to their participation in intolerance - their manifestation of intolerance in physical reality - what do we understand that we did not before? 

i'd say i've been resensitized to this problem by the works of bruno latour. but anyway, as soon as you focus on this, or try to spell out the ontological status of the abstraction so that it can have effects in the world, you see its emptiness and also its ubiquity. it's a general style of explanation, where we explain some specific event or object by its relation to or participation in an abstraction. we might call it contemporary platonism. i'm going to start collecting examples, for this is a dominant dimension of the nonsensical yipyap that is our public discourse.

it's hard not to do this: our languages suggest it especially when they permit converting adjectives into nouns. the germans have a fascist ideology. pretty soon, fascism is sweeping across the continent like a gas. then if you're kerry, the same gas is arising from the middle east: a chemical weapon, only with non-material chemicals. or: why the heroin epidemic? it's 'the economy.'  why should we increase social welfare spending or something? 'progress', etc. in some cases it might be a relatively harmless shorthand. but in every case, we should immediately prick up our ears: ok, have i just formulated an explanation in any sense, or just posited a whole realm of dormitive virtues and fantastical beings? or: what might this be a shorthand for? if pressed, how might we give meaning in terms of specific phenomena to the abstractions we are tossing around? what do i understand by means of the abstraction that i could not understand without it, and is it distracting me from what is actually happening to specific things and people at specific places and times? a lot of these things just fall apart as soon as you press them at all.

kerry has doubled down on "a medieval and modern fascism, both at once." here, concepts are mating willy-nilly in the nether-world of platonic heaven, committing adulteries like the greek gods. how would someone reach such a point in their 'thinking'? well, you have a few categories in your head, a few periods, a few ideologies. then the new phenomenon has to be jammed into the existing taxonomy. someone like kerry is so inured to the idea that abstractions or concepts cause events in the world, that he works backwards from any given event to the concept that must cause it. but he has an extremely limited repertoire of concepts. he generates a god to explain the phenomenon, even if it is a bizarre chimera. then he feels that he has reached rest, that he understands something puzzling and can convey that understanding to us.

i remember when my son was 2, he had a vocab of fifty words or whatever. now, for whatever reason (he had some mild speech issues, perhaps), it narrowed down to two nouns: "dog" and "ball". everything was a dog or a ball: cars were dogs, whereas blankets were balls. his sister took to calling him 'dogball.' we finally figured out the principle: things that moved themselves were dogs, whereas things that had to be kicked or whatever to move were balls. but at least there are really dogs and balls and he was responding to actual aspects of the real world. still you're going to need a few more categories.

or like the bush admin was hypnotized by abstractions when they formed their iraq policy; they were fighting the war on terror and bringing freedom to the iraqi people. i think that the neo-cons were actually operating at that level of abstraction, and that it made them profoundly insensible to the particular events on the ground; i think these pseudo-explanations relying on non-entities often drive practical disasters.

eventually, the whole world looks like the playground for concepts, while particular things and events take on a flickering quality as themselves reflections of the abstractions, which are the real actors. then you'll be surprised when a particular bomb blows up your particular body.

also i'll take examples if you've got some.