Resisting radicalism

Having read some David Enders lately I've been wondering about his whole civilization is not reformable and should be violently opposed line of reasoning. I've found an interesting alternative take in Frederick Turner's 'A Culture of Hope.'

“The genocide and enslavement of pre-Columbian peoples by the European invaders, though no different in kind from, say, the extermination of the indigenous Khosian by Bantu invaders in Africa, or the activities of the Mongols and Tartars in Europe and Asia, or the Polynesians in the East Indies, were horrible events. But it is we, the survivors, who see them as horrible. It was partly the latent capacity to see them as horrible that enabled the colonists to triumph over the pre-Columbian peoples in the first place. The Greco-Roman humanism and Judeo-Christian conscience that combined under Charlemagne and his successors to create Christendom was not only the force that enabled modern Europe to overcome tribalism and dominate the world. It was also the origin of the idea of the Rights of Man and the reason why we can recognize the horror of what our conquistador ancestors perpetrated.

Suppose the indigenous Mesoamerican and Andean politics had continued their evolution without interference from Europe. The ancient Middle East, where pyramid/priest/irrigation/emperor cultures persisted for millennia with occasional changes of dynasty, is probably a sound analogy. The political ethics of such cultures have little of our modern squeamishness and ambiguity. They celebrate with gusto on magnificent ritual stelae their bloody victories, conquests, enslavements, and human sacrifices, and show a robust disregard for the rights of conquered peoples At the time they were overthrown by the Spanish, the Aztecs and the Incas were themselves freshly returned from the destruction of other civilizations; their altars were not yet dry from their enemies’ blood. (Indeed, part of the success of Cortés and Pizarro was that they could enlist the help of the resentful remnants of enslaved and conquered peoples like the Tlascalans.) Nor is there any historical warrant for believing that the passage of a mere five hundred years would have much sophisticated the ethics of those empires. It took at least two thousand years for riverine civilizations of Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus, the Ganges, and the Yellow River to develop the more humane ideas of the Hebrew prophets, the Vedic tradition, the Greek philosophers and Roman lawyers, and the Buddhists. If the Spanish had tried, and failed, to conquer the Aztecs and Incas, and if those empires had survived into the present day, there would no doubt be splendid frescoes and bas-reliefs of the enslavement, dismemberment, and ritual sacrifice of those strange demons from the sea, unless, in our alternative history, we can imagine that the moral qualms of Europe might have come to infect them across the Atlantic. But would Europe have learnt to interpret its morality in political terms if it had not conquered America?

The irony is manifold. It is not the just that it was those most beautiful images of human love, the Virgin and Christ-child, and the crucified savior, that gave the Europeans the faith and cohesion to crush the Amerindians. Nor is it only that the succeeding civilization, founded upon such atrocities, was for the first time in human history capable of repenting its past conquests. The irony is that it took those particular conquests to arouse the latent political conscience of the world, to translate the personal ethics, evolved at such cost and expense of time in the Old World, into the beginnings of a decent political morality. In other words, the true value of Columbus’s journey and the conquest of the New World may be that they helped to create the very ethics that could condemn them. Certainly the wealth that they created made possible large populations of the middle class in Europe and America, that class which may be unique in giving serious thought to such matters as intercultural ethics (unless the small but important Confucian mandarinate of China qualifies). And this is for all peoples, not just “Westerners,” cause for a dark and complex kind of celebration, that we are all now better able to recognize how bloody are our hands, how extravagant was the cost of our survival, and how valuable we must be, purchased thus.”

If civilization requires the conquest and exploitation of others, if a rich culture’s very existence requires that there be a sufficiently large enough portion of the world converted, often by violent coercion, to capitalist economies so that large populations of ‘information workers’ can thrive, it seems like it would be quite difficult for anyone who has the leisure to think, write and rally about the question of American exploitation not to have inherited blood on their hands. A lot of people end up radically anti-capitalist and anti-Western Civ because of this, but is Western capitalism really the only form that human acquisition by exploitation of nature and each other can take? It seems that a lesson of history is that of the Athenians and Melians, that the powerful will crush the weak for their own benefit. It seems imperialist state expansion has been very much the trajectory that a group of humans inevitably decide upon and force on the rest. Turner’s point is that exploitative and violent power is something that simply will happen in the run of human affairs, and so perhaps we should accept it as a given, and make the best of the situation.

It’s hard not to be aware of the costs of one’s own life (and comfort) on other human beings, present and past. But the alternative is not some sort of peaceful tribe existing in natural plenty, but some different morally ambiguous situation for some other successfully conquering people. I think then that one’s moral ambiguity should be accepted, but need not necessitate one living in opposition to an inevitability, in abnegation of positive life goals. I think life based around a negative idea will ultimately be hollow, and will in fact rely on what is opposed for coherence and significance. This is not to say that reform within the given inevitabilities is not worthwhile. But devoting one’s life to resistance of the inevitable seems worthwhile only as an aesthetic idea, but thin experiential gruel. I think that this does point to a reasonable alternative to radical despair, the embrace the positive ideas in life: family, friendship, work, and the spiritual knowledge of mortality. And also the dark knowledge of the cost at which all this has been purchased.

Thoughts on jobs and dignity

Aziz Rana's makes the point here that Obama represents a shift in what we can point to as successful realizations of the American dream. No longer, he says, are the avenues of farming, industrial work, or small business ownership a possible way for large amounts of people to obtain self-respect in society. The modern success story, as realized in Obama, involves going to college and becoming a professional elite, or working one's way up the corporate or political ladder, and in general becoming powerful.

Now, I think somebody being president will always speak to the aspect of the American dream that involves gaining power. As to the story of being worthy of respect without being a bourgeois professional or power broker, I'm not sure that's gone away in America. McCain's campaign certainly showed that. But there is the idea that someone who works in industry as a laborer is living a less successful like than a lawyer, if our guidance councilors' advice is any indication.

But Rana is right to point out that regardless of what we're supposed to aspire to, a lot of people are perfectly happy not to have a flashy job title. They're happy to be a working person, and to provide for themselves or for their families. But this version of the American dream does seem to be getting harder to obtain with the way real wages are going.

I'm not sure I've bought the idea that people are so much worse off now. A lot of people can afford nutrition and technology that they could never afford before. Talking about real wages falling puts the question in materialistic terms, and I'm not sure that the American dream has become less possible in gross accumulation of goods. Consider what an ipod would have cost in 1970. Perhaps what has changed is the minimum level of income for self and social respect has changed, and there lies the problem.

On Obamian Ecstacies

Will Wilkinson on the spectacle of Obama's election:

I’m glad Obama won. I am perhaps the world’s most lachrymose man, and I cried seeing Jesse Jackson cry. I have always thought that the symbolic or cultural value of an Obama victory would be enormous. The dramatic reaction last night confirmed that. I understand why so many people are elated, and part of me is elated, too. I find it hard to see how you could not be. There is no denying that an election can be culturally transformative. It means something profound that a black man was elected to the most visible, high-status position our society offers. The mere fact that Obama won truly does make our society a better place.

That said, every four years, I find myself deeply disturbed by the fact that the office of chief executive of the national public goods administration agency is in fact, according to most people’s sense of things, the highest peak, the top of the heap. And the quadrennial reflex of vesting in a single powerful man so much hope for the future seems to me a truly depressing failure to internalize the spirit of American democracy. Last night’s celebratory catharsis was a long time coming. We needed it. But, frankly, I hope never to see again streets thronging with people chanting the victorious leader’s name.

I tend to agree with the point here. Personality-driven elections draw on deeper layers of our brains that developed during our tribal past and so they draw a lot of power from short circuiting our rationality. There is something creepy about Obama's election being so driven by his own image, an image often portrayed in a propagandist vein that we haven't seen for a good while in America.

I think that this sort of tribal thinking is important to us, but its proper place is a tribal setting. That means that it should be directed towards people that our major forces in one's actual life, like family (genetic or not), friends, and community leaders. But national government is supposed to be a necessary evil in America. Even those who think that the welfare state is a necessary for all to obtain positive liberty should still see the government as a dangerous instrument. We should be clear-eyed and skeptical of our leaders when they occupy power, as we learned after the first six years of Bush's presidency.

Americans liked Bush at first because of his personality. Looking at these pictures, I can feel somewhat positively toward Bush the man, he's just so adorable, and I have to think about what he did in power to feel negatively again.

I talked with my dad about Obama's potential role as president. He liked that Obama is a figure that the nation can unite around, one that restores an idea of America that could invigorate civic-mindedness in its citizens. This attitude reminds me of the time of FDR's reign, when one could find framed photos of FDR in restaurants, barbershops, and homes across America. There is something attractive about such a deep affection for a symbol of one's country.

But we should also remember what have been the results of propoganda, personality cults, and public displays of ecstatic emotion in the past. Perhaps we should also remember that if we wish to identify our nation with ourselves, we must identify with its evil as well as its good. Perhaps that is actually healthy, maybe identifying America's torture and brutality with ourselves would cause us to actually change these things.

So I guess my point is that scenes like this:



are definitely a mixed-bag for democracy.

do we (I) need moral realism?

In my english class, a fellow philosophy student wrote an essay arguing that moral realism requires bizarre, quasi-mystical explanations. He relies on Hume's is-ought distinction: that there is a gap between descriptive and normative statements that we do not know how to cross. Our motivations are simply given (based on impulses we owe to evolution, he argues), and cannot be derived from anything that actually exists in the world. He ends up saying that moral imperatives are groundless as anything but descriptions of how we are compelled to act. There is no way to really grasp an ought.

We aren't supposed to worry though, because society, friendship, trust, altruism, etc. will continue, because we'll have psychological impulses toward them all the same. I can't help but find this viewpoint disenchanting. I'm not sure how our actions can be meaningful, or the choices we make important without some normativity we can believe in.

I don't like pointing to meaning as something important for us, because it seems like such a contentless word. But I feel like our deepest emotions almost force us to aknowledge them as important, that to deny their signficance cuts us off from life. I don't know if moral realism would be necessary to resolve this meaning deficit for me, but the idea that normativity is just our highly developed apish codes depresses me. It also makes me laugh, so I suppose it's a draw.