Critical thinking
All thinking is critical thinking; honest thought acknowledges this.
Same object, different view
Andrew Sullivan sees the same thing differently than I do (unsurprisingly). About the sources of the finance crisis, he writes:
The reasons for this are well known. Since the mid1970s, most American incomes - with the marked exception of the very big - have stagnated as even growth in productivity has been swamped by far fiercer global competition and freer trade. Americans, resistant to the idea that their incomes cannot keep growing at the free-lunch pace of the 1940s to the 1970s, decided to get rich the easy way. They borrowed to reflate in the 1980s, played the stock market in the 1990s and gambled on the real-estate boom in the first decade of the 21st century.
The shrewd ones succeeded in gaining and then selling before it came crashing down. Most, as usual, didn’t. The greed that led many ordinary Americans to take out loans they had no way of repaying and the recklessness with which banks and mortgage companies satisfied that hunger are, in retrospect, staggering. Both the banks and the borrowers deserve their comeuppance. And a truly conservative, free-market administration would be happy to let them fail.
Sullivan makes an interesting concession — I suppose it is a concession — that the typical American wage has stagnated since the 1970s; while his attribution of this to the great emancipation of the markets is specious, I do think it is interesting that this is just bandied about as the source of the finace crisis. People, well, working people, received less of the share of total social productivity than they had before; I call this a greater amount of theft, Sullivan calls it a result of greater competition and the free market. Whatever: semantic difference.
But then here comes the thing: Americans, whose wages became stagnant, are made to be the scapegoat for several waves of financialization that were intended to contain growing structural inequalities in the economy? This doesn’t follow. It’s ludicrous — moralistic pap. Oh, the stupid, cretinous, avaricious American public wanted a “free lunch!” Nevermind the fact that their wages depreciated in tandem with a surge in overall social productivity. How else was all the overabundant shit going to be absorbed? Let mealymouthed conservatives curse the loathsome cupidity of the typical American consumer all they like, the financialized credit industry kept the US, and the World, economy afloat for quite some time; now that it is unraveling, we’ll need someone to blame. And there’s no one better to blame than the one most ripped off by the whole affair: those whose wages stagnated as they watched the greater part of social wealth shoot through the roof, who worked for less a share of the collective pie, who paid usurious interest on plastic accounts, who may even have dreamt — callous asshats! — of owning a home! Let them have their comeuppance! All hail the Free Market!
I think it bears repeating…
I think it bears repeating that what is being proposed to “save the market” amounts to straight up theft of public funds, and on an astronomical scale. These institution worked in, expanded, and benefited from the inflation of an asset bubble that was used to mask a structurally unsustainable inequality in the American economy; they made a killing for a decade or more by imagining up new ways to conjure wealth from air and promises. And now the entire edifice is collapsing: thunk! and the game is up! This, apparently, cannot be allowed to happen; the government is rallied and called to step in, taking upwards of a trillion dollars and using it to transfer bad debt from private holdings to public ones. And if it pays the market price for these piles of reaking feces that no one else will touch — that is the source of the crisis, really: these banks, firms, and funds all have a load of worthless shit that no one wants — it is a great sucker. A great sucker: or a brazen thief baldly transfering our, public, wealth, to private firms. And so we’ll all be expected to make good on their, now our, debts. But that’s alright, because the next time it is time to write the budget we can eliminate those pesky social safety net things that still remain — social security, Medicare, etc etc — in order to foot the bill.
More notes on legitimacy in Rousseau
So, more on Rousseau. In the Social Contract, he begins, famously and much citedly with the statement “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Seems straightforward enough, and earns Rousseau his place with those who praise him: the original, natural state of human beings is freedom; they are enslaved by circumstance. But he follows this up with a rather curious statement.
L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers, Tel se croit le maître des autres, qui ne laisse pas d’être plus esclave qu’eux. Comment ce changement s’est-il fait? Je l’ignore. Qu’est-ce qui peut le rendre légitime? Je crois pouvoir résoudre cette question.
Pleading ignorance about how our enslavement came about — and insisting, paradoxically, that the masters are even more enchained than their slaves — Rousseau claims he sees a way to make our society legitimate. More precisely, “en prenant les hommes tels ‘qu’ils sont, et les lois telles qu’elles peuvent être,” he wants to legitimate our social bonds. But he does not want to do away with them — that, it would seem, is impossible. There is no return to freedom in Rousseau: there is only legitimate bondage.
This is underscored by the form Rousseau uses to frame a legitimate government: with an adoption of the social contract (which is not a contract), the view of the people (that is not actually people so much as a myth), and, of course, the univocity of the general will. He adopts the theoretical forms of the political scientists dedicated to legitimizing the autocratic power of monarchs over and against the Church; and even though he aims to install a popular government, the formal limitations of his method of constructing legitimacy unwind his efforts: the contractual form, bent by Rousseau to sustain legitimacy over all subjects, collapses into absurdity; the abstracted rationality of the common will cannot stand up to the problem “des hommes tels qu’ils sont,” that is, it cannot in any way suggest a practical or practicable politics; the univocity of “la volonté générale,” which might be considered, from the Discourse on Political Economy, to be an amorphous, multivalent field of a legitimacy, is an effort to stop the dynamic process of legitamization, which is both an antipolitical and doomed move; I’ll probably have more to add as I go along.
First, though, I think it will be worthwhile to set up what I think Rousseau implicitly understands legitimacy to be, and contrast that with how he explains and presents it as. That is: Rousseau shows a tacit understanding of the problem of legitimacy, in his remarks regarding the difference between “prudence” and “duty”; yet he seems to abandon this understanding in an effort to avoid it, to put it off, or to simply imagine it away by recourse to rhetorical sleight of hand.
Notes on legitimacy in Rousseau
For Rousseau, the line between the exercise of might and right is drawn by law. Yielding to the first is “necessity”; following the second is “an act of will.” (Book I Chapter III) Since might is finite, the rule of thugs and bandits is limited by their ability to force their subjects to obey; but rights, it seems, might compel people even outside direct coercion, since if the will of every subject is unified there would be no reason for it to change, nor for it to coerce. Hence it is this that interests Rousseau. He wants to put forth a theory of law, of the constitution of legitimacy, that would be common to all members of a “body politic.” This constituting force he calls the general will.
But there are more than slight difficulties in the derivation of the general will. In the Discourse on Political Economy, for instance, Rousseau attempts to flesh out the sources of legitimacy in both the family and the polis by juxtaposing them, by playing them off of each other. The crucial divide between the two lies in the fact that where family is structured according to “natural feelings,” political society is structured according to a relationship between rulers and the ruled:
The duties of a father are dictated to him by natural feelings, and in a manner that seldom allows him to neglect them. For rulers there is no such principle, and they are really obliged to the people only by what they themselves have promised to do, and the people have therefore a right to require of them.
Here is the foundation of political society: the mutual recognition of a promise, and the demand that this promise be met. With all that this entails: the promise and its recognition; the demand and its recognition; all the intersubjective codes of understanding, exchange, and discourse occurring through time. The structure of political society is, it seems, dynamic, and is shaped by the contention of particular wills: that of the ruling, who make promises and that of the ruled who exercise their right to demand their fulfillment.
Some things to note: before any determination of who is ruling, there is a formal organization of priority of power to rule: the ruling first make the promise to the ruled; the ruled then might exercise their right to demand its fulfillment. So, despite its dynamism in portraying a (potential) Historical evolution of laws, this structure remains, as it were, autocratic. The ruling call the shots; the ruled might respond. Second, and this comes with the primacy of promising, the ruling determine what is at stake; the ruled can only accept or reject it. Third, and this will have importance later, when Rousseau attempts to flatten the dynamic of political society, there is an inherent polarity in the constitution of law. Law is not merely a proposition, but a proposition and a response: an intention and its fulfillment.
On making people uncomfortable
There was an interesting segment where Jeremy Scahill went into the RNC to interview delegates — presumably because Amy Goodman and the two producers of Democracy Now! had been detained and had their RNC press badges were taken by the Secret Service — and talked to this lady who was selling buttons. She shows him one, that has a bald eagle flipping the bird, as it were, next to a caption that says Jihad This! The lady runs along for a while, discussing how this reflects her views, on how she loves the troops, how she loves America, and doesn’t love jihad. Scahill listens quietly and waits for her to finish, then he says “I don’t get it.” There, in that moment, the surrounding and sustaining ideology of the woman’s views are no longer self-evident, and she struggles to justify what she has just said. It even seems that she feels shamed for saying it.
This passive attack — which boils down to “oh really, why do you think that?” — on a received and baseless view may be more effective than more aggressive efforts.
Hudson
As close as I’ve gotten to Jersey.
Handicrafts
Handicraft
Secularization
José Casanova wrote a book in the early 90s about the resurgence of “public” religion — the surge of the Religious Right in the States, the Iranian Revolution, etc — that shook received wisdom about religion. Modern society was not, against widely held notions about secularization, well on its way to finally killing God off; and religion, personally held beliefs, were no longer just a private affair. They had reentered the public sphere, and so were again political forces. Modern states were no longer essentially secular entities with decaying remnants of a religious past. Suddenly, it seemed, religion was political again.
Choices
But honestly. The real source of urgency in this campaign has nothing to do with Obama’s lacklustre policies, or the (Small) Change You Can Believe In. It is the threat of another four years of elephantine extremists and pachydermic psychos in the White House. On that index, the election is fundamentally, structurally about despair, and panic. The least worst option in the choice between Obama and McCain is a return to ‘normal’ after years of giddy ruling class plunder. A plunder which was accomplished largely by terrorising the public with one crisis after another, by megaphoning selected portions of bin Laden’s cavebound ramblings, by persuading a majority of the American public that a threat from Saddam was imminent and that he had something to do with 9/11, by arresting tupperware terrorists on spurious charges of conspiracy, and so on. Obama, with his modest reform package and his soothing bromides, personifies that desired sense of normality, and I suspect he understands this perfectly well. To be sure, he is conventional and conformist, and he is more socially conservative than most liberals would like. He is aligned to the interests of Wall Street, whose luminaries are bankrolling his campaign, and he will almost certainly be on the case of privatising social security in part or whole at some point. He is an American imperialist, and will be up to his knees in blood in no time at all if elected. Click
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