cheese it, the cops!

I'm going to read/footnote my column for SpliceToday every week on YouTube. I might go back and grab some of my favorites from the last few years as well.

 

How Thoreau Became a Radical

 

The Making of a Radical: Nathaniel Rogers and Henry David Thoreau

Crispin Sartwell

When it comes to describing the influences that shaped Henry David Thoreau’s prose and his politics as he came to maturity in the 1840s, few sources are usually mentioned beyond his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Virginia Woolf, casually manifesting herself in the drawing room at the Old Manse, 1840, reported that “If you listened to them both talking with your eyes shut you could not be certain where Emerson left off and Thoreau began." The two are obviously close stylistically and philosophically; however, their journals make it evident that despite Thoreau being the younger by fourteen years, the influence ran both ways. If Emerson dragged Thoreau through Carlyle and Coleridge, Thoreau hauled Emerson back into the terrain around Concord, Massachusetts; he brought American Transcendentalism down to earth. He had a persistently radicalizing effect on Emerson’s politics as well. In 1838 Emerson described the 20-year-old Thoreau, who soon became a constant presence in his journals, as “spiced throughout with rebellion.”

Thoreau’s own politics, in turn, were affected by some of the most deeply subversive American political writers, speakers, and thinkers of his time, or indeed of any time, such as the pioneering feminist Lucretia Mott, the radical abolitionist and pacifist William Lloyd Garrison, and - perhaps most decisively - Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, the subject of an early essay by Thoreau in The Dial, the Transcendentalist periodical edited by Margaret Fuller.

Rogers was an incomparably radical abolitionist newspaper editor from Concord, New Hampshire, about 60 miles to the north of Concord, Massachusetts and connected to it by the Merrimack River. Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, describes a journey between the towns, “uniting Concord and Concord,” though the two men, it seems, never met. Rogers himself has not appeared in book form since a small collection of his newspaper writings was published in New Hampshire in 1849, three years after his death; he persists now only in his influence on Thoreau, whose style, themes, and political orientation he demonstrably affected.

All of these figures had a specific brand of “post-Protestant” politics: they were radical individualists, abolitionists, feminists, anti-racists, and anti-statists. Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” crystallizes not only his own political positions, but those of a large coalition of American reformers in the period from 1830 to 1860. And though this variety of American radicalism emerged contemporaneously with European leftism of the sort we might associate with Proudhon and Marx and is just as extreme in its criticism of contemporary society, the American developments are also quite distinct.

A variety of factors accounts for the neglect of Rogers, though writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Thomas Wentworth Higginson paid tribute to him later in the century. Southern New Hampshire, despite its proximity to Boston, was provincial, and Rogers and his newspaper, The Herald of Freedom, were proudly and insistently local. (Even when he emerged from the hills late in his life, it was to write a column for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in the persona of “The Old Man of the Mountain,” a natural rock face in New Hampshire’s White Mountains that finally collapsed in 2003.) Almost all of Rogers’ writings took the form of short essays and news items written on extremely tight deadlines; he never completed or even contemplated a book, and rarely polished his newspaper writings into longer lectures or essays of the sort that made Emerson's reputation, and eventually Thoreau's. And Rogers was so very clear about his radical politics that many would have dismissed him as ridiculous or dangerous. Instead, they by and large succeeded in ignoring him.

Nathaniel Peabody Rogers was born in 1794 in Plymouth, New Hampshire, descended (according to a biographical sketch by his friend John Pierpont) from the “Protestant martyr” John Rogers, burned at the stake in 1555 at Smithfield in the reign of Bloody Mary. He was educated at Dartmouth and left a successful law practice to edit The Herald of Freedom and devote himself full time to the cause of immediate abolition. He defined the sort of country he envisioned as “an antislavery society” in which no person could coerce another and in which all people - African-Americans, Indians, women, and industrial workers, among others - were equally free.

Rogers associated close or ecstatic observation of the natural world with his political positions, one of Thoreau’s most persistent rhetorical strategies and sources of insight. As Thoreau puts it, Rogers “looks out from a serener natural life into the turbid arena of politics.” Thoreau’s own authorship returns intermittently to politics throughout (much more frequently and emphatically than Emerson’s, for example), and what he says here of Rogers is a good characterization of the stance Thoreau takes up in “Civil Disobedience,” but also in A Week, “Walking,” and elsewhere. Here, for example, is Rogers, in 1843, just as Thoreau was reading him.

Good farmers are learning that there is a better way to treat their cattle than by blows. The hostler of intelligence and kindness is ceasing to maul his noble horse. They are leaving off the practice of breaking steers and colts, for the reason that it is cruel: undeserved by the horse and unworthy of the employer, and because the whole horse or ox is better than the broken one. Political action is unfit even for brute animals. Is it fitter for man? Is humanity less susceptible of moral improvement than what we call brutality? 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.

And here is Thoreau in “Walking,” using the same metaphor as he launches into his praise of wildness: “Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. . . . I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.” The anti-authoritarian spirit that led Thoreau to say “I quietly declare war on the state,” or “I was not born to be forced,” or “I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterwards,” is fully present in strikingly similar terms in Rogers.

Every aspect of Rogers’ politics, like Thoreau’s and Mott’s, for example, was driven by abolitionism. Such people regarded the ownership of people as a specific evil being perpetrated by their government and countrymen, but also as an image or essence of all evil. They concluded that since no person could own another, each person was the owner of herself. This insight drove the individualist feminism of Mott and Margaret Fuller and provided a vocabulary for demanding the liberation of all oppressed groups. Many of these figures were also absolute pacifists, and their anti-statism followed: they held that government rests on violence and that it amounts to a claim of ownership in people. “We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government,” declared Garrison, a hero of Rogers and Thoreau both, and he proceeded to burn copies of the US Constitution.

Rogers is one of the few writers whose prose Thoreau praised without qualification, except to say that he wished he sometimes wrote at greater length. Indeed, Thoreau roundly abused many writers, and tempered his praise even for those he admired most, such as Carlyle; he had far less tendency toward hero or genius-worship than did Emerson. In the early 1840s, Thoreau’s style - among the most distinctive and distinguished in American letters, of course - was still taking form, which is one reason his early essays are relatively little-read. As he develops, he finds a model in Rogers, and from that point his writing is at least as influenced by Rogers as by Emerson.

But to speak of his composition [Thoreau writes of Rogers]. It is a genuine yankee style, without fiction,--real guessing and calculating to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, Thomas Carlyle. It has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood. . . . If perhaps [Rogers] had all the faults, he had more than the usual virtues of the radical. He loved his native soil, her hills and streams, like a Burns or a Scott. As he rode to an anti-slavery convention, he viewed the country with a poet’s eye, and some of his letters written back to his editorial substitute contain as true and pleasing pictures of New England life and scenery as are anywhere to be found.

Rogers indeed produced a series of delightful, informal New England travelogues as he described his journeys to abolitionist events, and described as well some of the great abolitionist figures he met there, including Mott and Garrison, but also Frederick Douglass, for example. But even getting stuck at home could bring out a gentle and intense poetry. This is from his little piece “It Rains” (1845):

While I am writing, it is raining most magnificently and gloriously out doors. It absolutely roars, it comes down in such multitude and big drops. There has been but little rain, and our sandy region has got to looking dry and distressed. Every thing looks encouraged now. The grass darkens as it drinks it in, with a kind of delicate satisfaction. And the trees stand and take it as a cow does a carding. You can hardly see the people for the umbrellas, and the clouds look as though they had not done with us. The prospect for the Canterbury meeting looks lowery. Let it rain. All for the best. It is extraineous, but I could not help noticing the great rain and saying this word about it. I think the more mankind regard these beautiful doings in nature, the more they will regard each other, and love each other, and the less they will be inclined to enslave each other. . . . The rain is the great anti-slavery discourse. And I like to have it pour.

“When the reader has finished one of his paragraphs,” wrote his friend Pierpont, “the last question he will ask himself will be ‘Well, now, what does all that mean?’”

Rogers himself found models for his writing in works such as Cobbett’s American Gardener, a beloved guide that went through many editions in the 19th century (and one in the 21st):

Cobbett’s Gardener is full of short, every day words which people can understand as readily as they can tell an onion stalk or a cabbage plant. You will find whole lines of them uninterrupted, every one of them as full of meaning as it can hold: the beautiful, strong, old Saxon, the talk-words, words for use and not for show. . . . A young collegian should read it twice a day, till he gets well of his pedantry. Cobbett will cure him if any body can.

By the end of his life, Rogers’ politics had become truly extreme, and he was opposed not only to government and the church, but to any form of organization that displayed any form of hierarchy whatever. Many radical abolitionists opposed participation in politics, even voting, on the grounds that government rested on violence. Rogers had gone even further by the mid 1840s, and was described in the parlance of the times not only as an ‘infidel,’ but as an ‘ultraist,’ a ‘come-outer,’ and a ‘no-organizationist.’ He wound up opposing the existence even of societies dedicated to ending slavery.

On the other hand, Rogers’ purity and ferocity are exactly what impressed Thoreau and Emerson. As is appropriate for a newspaper editor, he reserved some of his strongest words for the advocacy of free speech, his own and that of his allies being constantly under threat by pro-slavery politicians and mobs. The abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, for example, was murdered in a pro-slavery riot in 1837, and Garrison had been grabbed from the office of his newspaper in 1835, paraded through the streets of Boston and threatened with lynching. Anti-slavery discourse was explicitly banned in many parts of the country.

The human voice is free of course [wrote Rogers]. It is naturally and inalienably free of every power but the man’s that utters it, as God is free, and language would hardly be marred more by the phrase ‘freedom of God’ than by such expressions as ‘liberty of speech.’ . . . Men better be without tongues and organs and powers, than not to use them sovereignly. If it be not safe to entrust the self-government of speech to mankind, there had better not be any mankind. Slavery is worse than non-existence. A society involving it is worse than none. The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals.

Rogers read the initial version of Thoreau’s “Herald of Freedom” in the April 1844 issue of The Dial and republished it, while apologizing for the immodesty of doing so (Thoreau added to it, in manuscript, after Rogers’ death two years later; the longer version was published after Thoreau’s own death). He was pleasantly bewildered by the praise coming from an unknown person in a distinguished periodical, and refers to him as “Henry D. Thoreau, probably a German,” which is either an odd confusion or a lame joke. But Rogers, already struggling with the illness that ended his life two years later, praises Thoreau’s prose right back, in similar terms, calling the review “elegantly and ably written,” characterizing it as “written so beautifully and freshly,” and remarking on “the grace and beauty of the composition.”

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College.

 

recent splicetoday things:

 

apologizing for whiteness is not the worst idea

resounding: the bellamy brothers (first of a series, reaching back and re-appreciating)

mass shootings as a kind of nihilism (perhaps ideology and, like, social media, are not the problem)

go ahead and have babies if you want (prediction, in 30 years the world will still be beautiful)

how to write an executive order on free speech (a new title ix)

hunting the ultimate game (on campus and congress)

 

 

 

Hogan's Heroes claims another victim

 

Me in the WSJ on the "resignation" of a trustee of Gettysburg College  due to a yearbook pic of him at a Hogan's Heroes costume party at the college in 1980. 

What it's like on campus: everyone is surreptitiously watching everyone else, hoping to catch each other in a lapse (while also rummaging all the yearbooks, old school newspapers, instagram feeds &c, looking for victims). When we fancy we have something, we turn on one another, snarling, and try to mobilize the college to extrude or permanently discredit one another. Students turn on students. Students turn on faculty. Faculty turn on students. Administrators turn on students. Faculty turn on faculty. [I will link or describe all these sorts of cases if you like.] And, unbelievably, presidents turn on trustees, driven to that point by the general snarling. Also the things they're catching people doing are, in many cases, insanely trivial, and the theory underlying the whole thing about the relation of representation to reality is baldly ridiculous. Look, obviously all of this is incompatible with these institutions' stated purposes. The average college campus right now is just precisely the opposite of a community.

Believe it or not, I take myself to be telling people to come together, and back to the basic institutional mission.

I like to imagine what the discussion has been like about the situation at the development office at Gettysburg, and comparable institutions, as they contemplate handing money back for no reason at all. Ringring: "I'd like to endow your new building, but if I do you'll mobilize the whole campus to rummage through every snapshot of me ever taken, pitching me eventually into the dunk tank/septic system. Going with Doctors Without Borders this year."

'Hogan's Heroes' ridiculed the Nazis. To do that, it needed to depict Nazis. I'm thinking that #gettysburgcollege might well have a literature professor or two who could run the students and admin through the rudiments of textual interpretation. Punching Nazis was sort of popular a couple of years ago. And since 1930, ridiculing and parodying them has been a central dimension of attack. Now, evidently, ridiculing and parodying Nazis is verboten, as it were: it's anti-semitic. The approach is puzzling.

Let's say that many people at GC are having thoughts along these lines, and not only in Development. Can they express them? If you were an untenured prof, would you express your reservations? (Unfortunately, timidity does not wear off with tenure.) What would happen to you as a student if you objected to this whole approach strongly? What would people call you? Now, you are creating an atmosphere where everyone pretends to agree. Look around you. I say you don't know whether any of these people agree with you or not, no matter how vociferously they may be nodding along. Meanwhile, the only means you have to address things like this is to provide 'opportunities' for frank, honest, open dialogue. Are you sure you're not just trying to lure people into a misstatement or inadvertent self-revelation, so you can gasp? I might not be attending.

['The sign of the Double Cross']

I'm a bit concerned that y'all aren't fighting oppression or injustice at all, just pictures of it. Quite the waste of energy.

The offending image is very much in the same genre as those above, I feel. Many people, thinking about this, are comparing this case to Northam and blackface (also a yearbook). Or, I imagine that's what people at Gettysburg were thinking. The images function very much the same way, which is why they are completely different politically. That is, they ridicule the people they purport to depict. Right. But blackface ridicules black people by dressing up in a parody of black people, which is bad. The G-burg image ridicules the Nazis by dressing up in a parody of Nazis, which is good. Like, why am I having to point this out?

[unpaywalled]

 

Nicholas Sandmann and Nathan Phillips: They Both Did Well

They Both Did Fine

Crispin Sartwell

There was no physical altercation. Each of them, the young man and the old, exercised his right to be there and express his political and religious beliefs peacefully. Nicholas Sandmann and Nathan Phillips both did just fine.

As I absorbed the invective coming from both sides, or watched the interviews and different slices of the videos, my sympathy wavered from one protagonist to the other. Slowly it dawned on me: I don't think either of them did anything wrong. Not in the slightest, really. It would not take much to re-see this event as something squarely and decently American.

As many have observed, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are an iconic public space, and you have the right to assemble there and express yourself, so long as you do so peacefully - that is, without physical violence. You have the right to wear a MAGA hat there, or to beat a drum. You have the right to express the traditional spirituality of your group, whether it is a group of Native Americans or of Roman Catholics. You have a right to move around, and you have a right to stand still. You have a right to chant, and a right to smile.

I think Phillips found the MAGA hats of the callow youth offensive, and I think he conceived of his rhythmic response as a way to teach a lesson or even bring healing. I think Sandmann thought that if he just stood there smiling, Phillips would not experience him as threatening. Together, they might have prevented a bit of a wider melee: I see the pair of them as the still eye of the conflict, drawing everyone's attention, and serving in part to keep the various hostile groups apart.

Now, perhaps this is too generous an interpretation, and as many have remarked - and as Phillips and Sandmann have remarked about each other - it is hard to know what is in someone else's heart, harder still on video, harder still after everyone has expressed an opinion about it. But finally it doesn't matter what was in their hearts: they behaved peacefully and expressed themselves directly. One could conceive that simply as a matter of decent citizenship or as healthy public discourse, conducted by drum and by hat.

We should all pity both Sandmann and Phillips for the firestorm they are reaping now. In the familiar fashion of the internet-to-cable-news sensation, their lives are getting ripped apart; they're liable to be more or less in hiding, along with their families and friends. Any discreditable thing that either has done or said is liable to be laid open to scrutiny. The sensation has narrowed both lives down to the image of the stand-off, which everyone reads for their own purposes. Phillips and Sandmann are being used, and perhaps used up.

One of the most frightening things about our ever-growing political polarization is that it limits and shapes our empathies. One side can't possibly sympathize with what Nicholas Sandmann is going through. The other can't possibly sympathize with Phillips. That is an arbitrary and irrational limitation on the humanity of the partisans, and a premonition of future oppressions.

I hope they do get a chance to meet and talk, which they've both indicated a willingness or even a desire to do. Or on the other hand, if they want never to think about this thing again, I understand that too. Meanwhile, we former Americans seem to be scared of political expression, even as we engage in it maximally. People are confused as between hats and weapons, smiles and violence. I'm not sure how you'd make a mistake like that, but I do know why you'd make a mistake like that: just yapping in unison with your demographic, for no discernible reason, toward no constructive goal, bashing your opponents with fiction.

Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann did better.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

What strange hell...Part II

I didn't post part 1 of this, but Part II is very stand alone. 

I kind of like this one. I'm 90% or so through Nussbaum's book and about 70% through Woodwards, and they're both interesting. Toss in the new one by Gelfand, and I may begin to understand.

https://www.veteransnewsreport.com/2018/09/17/wolf-country-gazette-what-strange-hell-part-ii/

 

Few comments on the material -- I did the sentence that refers to the US as a country of broad shoulders, and decided that the poem, or most of it, belonged in the article. As a nation, our mojo kinda sorta is on vacation; I think that Trump's election depended in large part on a lot of people showing off their pencil necked geek. Chicago was a great image of America, a country with flaws but broad shoulders. Trump's triumph requires that a part of us give up and just slump our shoulders and demand our American version of Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor. It's ok to be depressed, but damn it, you need to go out shoulders back, head high and be aggressively depressed. Or something.  

 

Dylan number is from his 88 tour of Australia with a little known band from Gainesville as his backup....Tad Putty and the Heartburners? Something like that. Looks like he's playing a Dean acoustic guitar which strikes me as odd. 

 

New Vets setup limits the amount of music I can post. As I was finishing up, I realized I wanted to add this, mainly for the first verse -- 

 

 Same old tune/fiddle and guitars/ where do we take it from here?

Rhinestone boots /big shiney cars/ it's been the same way for Years

We need a change...

Somebody told me when I got to Nashville

Son you really got it made

Old Hank made it here and we're all sure that you will

But I don't think Hank done it this a-way

I don't think Hank done it this way?

 

If old Hank did it this way, it would sound like Chuck Prophet. 

https://youtu.be/gc-9Hf_dnwE

 

conscientious objection to pastry

this week's splice:

no reason to force people to bake cakes for gay weddings

here's a bonus splicetoday column on the death of free expression in contemporary america. it's the one thing that left and alt right can really agree on.

trump and i

[how donny did the eclipse]

 

alright, i'm going to tell you, guiltily, what i like about trump, why i keep returning to a seemingly sympathetic tone, or why i sometimes 'relate,' though i utterly reject his politics. on the charlottesville weekend, i wrote this on saturday. (on saturday a counter-demonstrator was killed by a white supremacist, trump gave a lame reaction or a 'both sides do it' sort of thing. then on monday he said exactly what everyone demanded he say. then on tuesday he went off, in the disastrous way that finally convinced me that he actually is sympathetic to white supremacism.) 

through my life, i have done a lot of saying what i was not supposed to say, from the slightly continually inappropriate to the in-your-face transgression. i have calmed down a lot through the years, actually, but i definitely have an impulse, in any given situation, to feel for the verboten position, word, line of jive, and then find a way to deliver it, perhaps with a slant that makes it a bit hard to interpret. when i feel that people are telling me what to say, i have a vivid physical sensation of constraint; i might comply for awhile; ultimately it won't go well. the peeceer the people around me, for example, the more i talk wrong, or work on ways to undermine the constriction.

this impulse, i feel, has stood me in good stead many a time, and if you ever want a counter-consensus position, i am the wholesale outlet. it's led me to important moral insights, i believe, including that the political state is completely incompatible with any decent ethics whatsoever. but it will also tempt me toward the dark side, toward, for example, the views that are the opposite of the pc views. but that they're not pc, of course, does not entail that they are not evil, and so on. i sort of sometimes end up on the wrong side even by my own lights.

trump has that same set-up, which is more or less why i connect with him. whatever his views on race, etc, his very being was rebelling at the notion that everyone was writing a script for him, that they didn't care what he thought as long as he said a pre-rehearsed set of words that anyone could write in their sleep. that press conference tuesday was his whole being just saying 'fuck you'; he was chomping at the bit; he had the sensation of a release from physical constraint, of selfhood and self-respect and defiance. but he also expressed considerable sympathy with fucking neo-nazis, alright? you cannot have that in a pres of the united states, however he got there.

what disturbs me more than anything about the current situation is that the left and the alt right seem to agree that free speech = fascism and white supremacism. that's ironic, etc, but it certainly portends disaster for the future of free expression. when i say that, i hope not to be expressing nazi sentiments. maybe you think the nazis were big advocates of free speech, har har.

i doubt that neo-nazis are free speech advocates when push comes to shove, for they are totalitarians. but i don't doubt that the left of this moment is more or less entirely opposed to free speech in any form at all. they are totalitarians too. i feel that overall this is not a good moment politically.

violence, violins, silence

one thing about 'science': surprisingly, the word seems to turn off all critical reasoning faculties. but of course you have to like the conclusion; then any argument is a good enough argument, as in this tissue of strange fallacies by lisa feldman barrett in the new york times, arguing that speech can be violence and that she has a scientific basis for distinguishing speech that is from speech that isn't.  

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

the argument runs like this: what causes physical harm is violence. stress causes physical harm. words can cause stress. so words can be violence. as usual, the neurology does nothing at all, especially if you already knew that stress can cause physical harm. but it describes the harm: stress = violence shrinks telomeres. so i wonder what else shrinks telomeres; it's all violence.

seriously, boiling down the argument, it's this: doing anything that stresses someone out is assault.  think about that for just a minute, alright? 

message to the repression-of-expression left

This thing on my face? It's my mouth. That one on yours is yours. I'm in charge of this one; you're in charge of that one. I know you'd like to jam your arm up my ass and operate my mouth like I was your sock puppet. Perhaps that's your sexual orientation, so I guess it's not your fault.

true, i'm in the wall street journal today, talking about 'linguistic constructivism' and campus speech repression. 

here is a much longer 'academic' paper on the same topic

here's my memoir of richard rorty

deeply inappropriate

privileged readers of this blog will be familiar with this week's splicetoday riff on offensive numbers. god i hate them.

but talk is cheap

The invocation to prayer in the new religion - or ancient superstition - goes like this: 'words have power.' What that means is that you ought to be silenced, or, you answer to us for what you say. I'd call it voodoo, but that's unfair to voodoo. It asserts that words are supernatural weapons that can be wielded to commit assault at a distance. It asserts that I can reach out and 'literally' commit violence against whole groups of people and the individuals in them (if we can indeed distinguish any individuals in them), by sitting here in York Springs typing. While I do appreciate the supernatural powers you are attributing to me, I am not actually a witch, and I can't actually harm you with incantations, spells, or writing a word of power on a piece of paper and folding it up just so. You think you can control reality as a whole by silencing people; and you're gearing up to impose your superstition by an authoritarian regime. You have already verbally cleansed America's colleges, which at this point are the merest re-education camps. Simulated unanimity and continual self-censorship, produced under massive social pressure and by policy, are incompatible with education in a free society, obviously. I don't think you are any more democratic, rational, or decent than Trump, and I'm beginning to wonder where I can go to escape you both. I don't think you're doing anything substantive for social justice, just trying to achieve the impression or illusion of it. I do think you should turn your attention to the math department and work on suppressing oppressive numbers.

It would be hard to deny that numbers have power, if abstract things like words can have power. It would be hard to argue that, if words are the sort of thing that could oppress people, numbers are not. Indeed, you are being oppressed by numbers right now, even as we reduce your ass to statistics and your personality to your membership in some demographic segment. You're oppressed by your SAT score, by the balance in your bank account, by the numbers on the bills in your mailbox. You might want to think about the historical role of numbers in racism, for example: all those ledgers and bills of sale. And what if i call you a 0, or put a minus sign before the name of your group? We are very oppressed by our divisions, which are multiplying. Delete these things from public space and your personal idiolect. Do it now. You're also being oppressed by fictional characters, mythological beings, sense impressions, logical entailments, Platonic Forms, and by the very concept of injustice, which should, along with the word 'injustice,' be ruthlessly suppressed. Anyway, of course, many actual numbers have been regarded as taboo or have been suppressed: that is, some numbers have been and are really offensive in the same sense as many words. So do to the number-line what you're trying to do to the language and delete delete delete!

To be fair, you also do want to ban, with regard to members of certain groups, particular hairstyles, hats, shoes, accents, musical styles, and so on (for example, because of 'cultural appropriation'). So it's not just words, but all kinds of signs and symbols and identities and expressions and arts. You want control of public space and people's self-presentations and expressions within that space. You demand control of my body in more or less every respect; you want to operate me like a marionette. You demand micro-control of my body to address possible micro-aggressions that could emerge from it. You want to rearrange my legs because i'm manspreading or whatever it may be. That's your cure for oppression, yes? That is the liberation you offer.

I have some news to break to you. We are not the stories we tell. This world is not a narrative. We did not construct this universe or ourselves or one another by weaving a tapestry of words. We do yap ceaselessly, but it usually amounts to next to nothing. We cannot make a new world by re-narrating or getting control of the signs; we can only make a collective delusion, and not even that, because the thing is too flimsy to delude. Words have power indeed in this account: the power to create worlds! a power not even Odin or Zeus could claim. Wait remind me how you reached this conclusion? because I never could quite figure that out even when I heard Richard Rorty do the schtick.

My view is that racism became unconscious when white people started thinking that racism was a matter of what words we use. We ditched all the bad words, and were innocent, and the structural racism of the country just went right on, or even intensified. You have got to learn from that, alright? Making people talk in some prescribed way just makes reality and representation, the real deal and the narrative, come apart completely. That is what you are demanding.

Remember when you were going to ban fake news? It was right-wing propaganda that was destroying our very concept of truth, blahblahblah. It took 30 seconds for 'fake news' to be appropriated by the right. Your enemy took your gun and pistol-whipped you with it. In general, all the mechanisms of social control, formal and informal, that you are instituting and want to institute can be reversed on you suddenly, and make you an enemy of the people, a traitor, etc. Your goals are different than your opponents'; your procedures the same. They will be visited upon you.

You might think that all this continues the beautiful legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr, of James Baldwin, of Malcolm X, of Ralph Ellison, of Zora Neale Hurston, of Richard Wright, of W.E.B. Dubois, of Fannie Lou Hamer, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells. Now I have a challenge for you: show me where any of these people advocated speech repression as a way to address racism. This is new, y'all: a distortion, a falsification, a disaster in which the oppressed seek to become oppressors, imitate their oppressors. This is where these movements turned from the physical reality of oppression to the symbolic reality of symbolic oppression, which can be addressed only by oppression. 

 

my splicetoday column this week is so good, so right, so true. or is it?

 

Berkeley vs Berkeley

berkeley in 1964:

 

berkeley now:

 

they are indeed at war. i hope those kids don't think they're anarchists, for anarchists are on the side of free expression. ask fucking emma goldman, alright? headline: "Berkeley Students Demand Unfreedom, Mario Savio Writhes in his Grave"

free our babies. or, babies: free yourselves.

i am telling you that the average american school is run like an eastern bloc dictatorship. i assert this flatly and seriously. i would ask the administrators, those grotesque little martinets: in virtue of what do you think you have the right to tell human beings how to dress, what to say, where to gather, and so on? and i'd just point out that attendance is compulsory. and then i'd gesture at the standardized testing regime, for there is nothing else left in american education. we are brainwashing people in a totalitarian system designed by authentic idiots. and then i would add also that the baby authoritarians are rocking the colleges now with their unthinking intolerance and their constant appeals to authority, and that this is incompatible with citizenship in a democracy, or with any of the ideals that america has ever professed. i do recommend a rebellion, within each of these interment camps, if there is anyone left in them who is capable of experiencing their own continual, palpable oppression. resistance is a moral obligation.

spree feech

where's mario savio when you need him? dunno, but we've still got the great camille paglia.

fear of language

sorry, d. watkins, but i can use whatever words i please. you can try to stop me i guess.

 

a golden age of wimpery

henry draws my attention to this story, which has a shape remarkably similar to mine: people repress your song instead of trying to deal with your content. it can happen to a high school student, or to a professor, or to you. there are a variety of factors that have taken us into this new golden era of american censorship, authoritarianism, and breathtaking stupidity: the mass shooting phenomenon has everyone - especially anyone running any sort of institution - pissing in their depends, just pouring all day. the 'anti-bullying' obsession, possibly the only decently-funded educational initiative of the last decade, is boiling up into every aspect of society, so that people pretend to experience a nasty comment on the internet as an act of violence. war on terror, universal surveillance, and so on: no one wants to be free or wants anyone else to be free because they are too scared to be free. people wonder why the right is angry etc: the only thing any leftist ever said about trump. i'm asking instead whether we really want to live scared of our own shadows and out of our wits, live a life of cravens, and use that to motivate morbid censorship and insipid totalitarianism. everyone just wants to be protected by the authorities, while the authorities tremble like they've got parkinson's. 

insults

i just want to say to such folks as george yancy (whose work, again, i have long admired and participated in) and jessica valenti: people have a right not to be threatened. but no one, not even a member of an oppressed group, has the right not to be insulted. there are no illegal words in contemporary english. also, once more: speech is not violence, under any circumstances. if you think it is, i will say once again, i don't think you have experienced actual violence.

the reasons people like that - and whole movements on college campuses, and the american philosophical association, and so on - want to lose that distinction is because they want state control of the media in order to impose an ideological agenda. that is much, much worse than the conditions it is designed to ameliorate. they just want to shut people people up so that they themselves are never exposed to anything not themselves; they want to live in an hallucination of unanimity, in a world where everyone is forced to pretend to agree.

if you think that would be a substantive blow against racism or sexism, you haven't been watching the last few decades, in which people learned to talk right, but the society continued right on with its structural inequalities. you are very, very confused about the relation of language to reality, and if you want to argue this out on that level, i am very ready. yapping does not construct reality. you know this very well, though people can all play 'let's pretend' together, using words. that's what you're demanding. a prison is not a paragraph nor a paragraph a prison; surely you don't actually need me to give arguments for that?

like hillary clinton raising wall street money, you advocate oppression and inequality (or as rogers says below, slavery) in order to mitigate oppression and inequality. that is the whole structure of this sort of leftism for a century and a half. i don't know how you thought your way to this, but you are the conditions you're supposedly attacking. people like valenti and yancy aspire to be oppressors, which admittedly is one of the traditional reactions to being oppressed. and within the institution from which i just emerged, they are achieving their purpose extremely effectively. ain't no liberation down this alley, though.

once more i'm giving you some actually american values, as expressed by nathaniel peabody rogers, who, let me say again, was an advocate of absolute equality of the races and sexes. jessica valenti would agree with all his positions, and try to shut him up anyway, i presume.

 

Speech

     We speak of the "freedom" of it, and of "liberty of Speech," as though it were even to be claimed that the human voice should not be regulated at all times and under all circumstances, by the arbitrary caprice of tyrants. The human voice is free of course. It is as naturally and inalienably free of every power but the man's that utters it, as God is free, and language would hardly be marred more by the phrase freedom of God than by such expressions as Liberty of Speech. Who should think of regulating a man's speech but himself? What has he got it for, but to use at his discretion, and what has he discretion for, if not to govern himself with, in speech and thought? If a man has not discretion enough to govern his own utterance, how can he govern his neighbor's? How can any number of men, each and all incompetent to regulate themselves, regulate others? Those others meantime competent to regulate them, though incapable of bridling their own tongues - or rather of guiding them without bridle, as the Parthian manages his unreigned steed.

   Human speech is sovereign. Nobody can govern it but the individual it belongs to. Nobody ought to think of it. Every body has his hands full with his own, which he can manage and ought to, and which he cannot innocently commit to the management of another. It can be done. Speech is good for nothing unless it be done. Men better be without tongues and organs and powers, than not use them sovereignly. If it be not safe to entrust self-government of speech to mankind, there had better not be any mankind. Slavery is worse than non-existence. A society involving it is worse than none. The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals.  

mo def

amdef, p300.

In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

--Thoreau, "Life With Principle"

more defiance

i think the paperback of american defiance came out beautifully.

the essay by douglass, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered," given as a commencement address at Western Reserve College in 1854 (!) - is one of a number of little-known treasures.

The relation subsisting between the white and black people of this country is the vital question of the age. In the solution of this question, the scholars of America will have an important and controlling part. This is the moral battlefield to which their country and their God now call them. In the eye of both, the neutral scholar is an ignoble man. Here, a man must be hot, or be accounted cold. The lukewarm and cowardly will be rejected by earnest men on either side of the controversy. The cunning man who avoids it, to gain the favor of both parties, will be regarded with scorn; and the timid man who shrinks from it, for fear of offending either party, will be despised. He that is not for us, is against us.

Call no man master -- that is the true doctrine..

--Lucretia Mott

god will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

[emerson]. introduction to american defiance, now also on kindle.

   I would like this book to remind Americans, and whomever else might be interested, that our cross-section of this continent has a great anti-authoritarian history: a history of religious individualism, revolution, anti-slavery, anti-gender-oppression, anti-statism. It is a tradition of looking skeptically at all forms of political and economic hierarchy.

   I intend to do a companion volume on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but one thing I very much like about the history I'm presenting is that it occurs before and outside the left/right spectrum, which only became current in the US in the very late 19th century. The question of whether an anti-federalist like Robert Yates, or an agrarian like John Taylor, or a radical individualist such as Emerson or Spooner is on the left or the right is ill-formed. At any rate, they were skeptics about state power and unbridled capitalism, opponents of slavery and exploitation. Nor do feminists such as Sarah Grimké or Lucretia Mott fit comfortably in the later political spectrum: they are extremely religious and also radically individualist, and yet they supported all the progressive reforms of their era.

   Several of these documents are famous, but a number of the figures are far too little known and their texts far too little available. I also hope that this volume is an exercise in canon-formation.

[not to put too fine a point on it: the political left is authoritarian, elitist, thoroughly dedicated to hierarchy. it ain't freed nobody from nothin, and it never will. judged by the values it itself professes, it is evil; it is precisely what it professes to be dedicated to destroying.]

department of defiance

 

american defiance is out in paper, with kindle coming soon. it is a collection of anti-authoritarian texts stretching from anne hutchinson's defense against and attack on the puritan theocracy to voltairine de cleyre's "anarchism and american traditions."

there are some celebrated slices, especially emerson and thoreau, but there is so much that is so little known. i've tried to give whole texts or very substantial parts. john woolman's 'plea for the poor' from the 1760s anticipates the arguments of peter singer. sarah grimke's letters on the equality of the sexes is probably the first feminist book published in the us, and she's better than fuller, i think. william lloyd garrison argues for total anti-statism in 1838. sitting bull lures a reporter into the new york herald's last stand. there is a really stunning and ground-breaking essay on race by frederick douglass that is almost never read (better than dubois 50 years later), along with a big chunk of david walker's unbelievable appeal. angela heywood throws down some surrealist political sex poetry. anti-federalists, abolitionists, anarchists, and antinomians are all represented. 

this is our most radical and most american heritage: a fierce anti-hierarchical tradition, the texts themselves sometimes unimaginable acts of defiance. we need remindin.

in editing this book, i am appointing myself secretary of defiance. these texts constitute our artillery battery, our canon.

american radical

i've just published a new book to kindle:

Herald of Freedom: Essays of Nathaniel Rogers, American Transcendentalist and Radical Abolitionist

i'm telling you this is a discovery: someone's going to have to convince me that a more important straight-to-e book has been published.

A great and almost unknown American writer from New Hampshire, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846) was the most radical American political voice of the antebellum period. He is also an undiscovered American Transcendentalist, at his best comparable to Emerson and Thoreau. Both men acknowledged Rogers' influence on them, and Thoreau published one of his first essays - collected here - on Rogers' work, recognizing his excellence as both a political and a nature writer. Anti-slavery drove all his thought, and as an abolitionist writer, only Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips are his rivals. Rogers was an anarchist, a pacifist, a feminist, an environmentalist, a religious heretic, an individualist, an anti-capitalist and an advocate of animal rights.

His writings are collected here for the first time since 1849, along with Thoreau's essay "Herald of Freedom" and other materials about Rogers and American radicalism of the early 19th century.

nathaniel rogers was an amazing radical and an amazing writer, and if you want to see someone in 1840 who speaks up for animal rights, against capital punishment, against slavery, against the state, for environmentalism as that came much later to be understood, for indian rights, and so on, and did so with extreme clarity, creativity and vigor, you've got to check this out. he was a decade emerson's senior, and he is a fundamental american transcendentalist.

boy kindle does still mangle a word document. here is a clean, free pdf

 

Contents

Preface, 3

Introduction by John Pierpont, 7

 

Writings

I. Manifestos of Liberty and Infidelity, 20

Speech, 21

Authority, 22

Church and State, 26

Infidelity, 27

Politics, 28

The Great Question of the Age, 29

Rhode Island Meeting, 31

War, 38

Reply to a Correspondent, 41

 

II. Anti-Slavery, 46

Constitutionality of Slavery, 47

The Amistad Case, 52

 

III. Against Hierarchy, 56

Osceola, 57

Color-Phobia, 60

The Rights of Animals, 62

Thoughts on the Death Penalty, 63

Aristocracy, 65

Letter from the Old Man of the Mountain, 67

Address to the Female Anti-Slavery Society, 69

 

IV. Capitalism, 72

Labor, 73

Against Property, 76

Anti-Slavery and Capital, 79

 

V. Nature Writing and Personal Essays, 81

It Rains, 82

Bell-Ringing, 83

The Ground Bird, 85

Cobbett's American Gardener, 87

Tilling the Ground, 89

Trees, 91

"Herald of Freedom," by Henry David Thoreau, 99

Appendix A: William Lloyd Garrison, "Declaration of Sentiments of the Peace Society, 108

Appendix B: American Radical Anti-Authoritarians of the of the Early Nineteenth Century, 113

 

 

from nathaniel peabody rogers

Speech

[From the Herald of Freedom of Dec. 30, 1842: Miscellaneous Writings, 247]

     We speak of the "freedom" of it, and of "liberty of Speech," as though it were even to be claimed that the human voice should not be regulated at all times and under all circumstances, by the arbitrary caprice of tyrants. The human voice is free of course. It is as naturally and inalienably free of every power but the man's that utters it, as God is free, and language would hardly be marred more by the phrase freedom of God than by such expressions as Liberty of Speech. Who should think of regulating a man's speech but himself? What has he got it for, but to use at his discretion, and what has he discretion for, if not to govern himself with, in speech and thought. If a man has not discretion enough to govern his own utterance, how can he govern his neighbor's? How can any number of men, each and all incompetent to regulate themselves, regulate others? Those others meantime competent to regulate them, though incapable of bridling their own tongues - or rather of guiding them without bridle, as the Parthian manages his unreigned steed. Human speech is sovereign. Nobody can govern it but the individual it belongs to. Nobody ought to think of it. Every body has his hands full with his own, which he can manage and ought to, and which he cannot innocently commit to the manage of another. It can be done. Speech is good for nothing unless it be done. Men better be without tongues and organs and powers, than not use them sovereignly. If it be not safe to entrust self-government of speech to mankind, there had better not be any mankind. Slavery is worse than non-existence. A society involving it is worse than none. The earth had better go unpeopled than inhabited by vassals. How it must look to spectator eyes - tenanted by hampered immortality, with clipped wings and hand-cuffed wrists and fettered spirits. What angel would ever light upon it but that dragon-pinioned one who as John Milton has poeticized - lighted once from Hell on its "bare outside." Better have them kept bare to this day, than peopled by a tongue-tied race of men.

 

Rogers was a radical abolitionist/pacifist/feminist who edited the New Hampshire paper Herald of Freedom. I've done a lot of work on him; I'm gathering it up into an e-book which I'll put up in the next few days on amazon and googledocs.

beetle leeches

right, donald trump has got to go. but not because he sort of made nasty cracks about john mccain. his rivals are saying things like 'that disqualifies him for the presidency'. pretty soon we'll be publicly flogging people for failing to refer to all who who have been in the military - timothy mcveigh, e.g. -  as "america's heroes."  'i will say what i want to say': that should be a slogan for everyone. we have really reached the maximum of pc pall and the correlative cowardice: you wouldn't think we could have a safer, emptier, more dishonest presidential campaign than the last few, but we are going to. the supernatural power of phonemes and abstract designs (rebel flag) is self-evident to everyone, especially young people. both with your mouth and with your ears: show some fucking guts, little bitches. we'll never address race in this country, e.g. we'll just mutter pablum in unison and intern anyone who says...anything.

you're going to need to generate a list of all the things no one is permitted to say. sadly it's going to require infinitely many of you little monkeys and infinitely many typewriters, because there are infinitely many things we are not permitted to say.