Commonplace Book: Thomas Hobbes

For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, that that every man is contented with his share.

American Israel, Black Israel

It occurs to me that the American Black identification with Israel (slavery, exodus, exile) had a particular charge because it argued with/built upon/appropriated the English-New England-American identification with Israel. Well, all Christian communities (more or less) have an identification with Israel, but it was even more intense in the Anglo-American tradition. So for Blacks to identify with Israel was not only a moral challenge, but a challenge to America's founding political myth. Interesting.

Priorities

You can be in favor of fifty things, but forty-five don't really matter, because you're willing to compromise them in a pinch. Priorities matter, and tell you more than the endless wish-list. Mine:

1) Victory in our war with our enemies abroad.

2) Expulsion of all illegal aliens from the United States.

After that, nominating conservative judges, ending abortion, and conservative economic policies are pretty high priorities--but the mere fact that they're not one or two means that "pretty high priority" isn't really "high priority" at all. And everything else?--oh, hardly more than indifference, practically speaking.

Repudiations

Cass Sunstein said (re Obama and Ayers) something along the lines that you can't be in academia without socializing with the odd ex-Weatherman. And there's something to that: my chosen profession means I will have to be polite to people who are contemptible, and condemnable, and I will be condemnable for failing to repudiate them. So the metastasizing of evil: coexistence with evil corrupts. Can't live in the US in 1850 and not be responsible for slavery. Can't live in Germany in 1942 and not be responsible for genocide. Can't be an academic in Britain in 1980 and not tolerate Marxists. Can't be an academic nowadays ... but our grandchildren will ask one of two questions, I fancy. How could you eat animals?--we must rename the William Jefferson Clinton High School, for he scarfed down burgers.

Or: how did you tolerate abortion? The murder of millions, and you stood by, made no repudiation. Surely there is blood on your hands? And the answer, of course, is yes.

Beggars

On the subway today, musical beggars ended their song by saying, "People ask us why we are so happy. Well, it's because there's only 218 days to the end of the Bush administration." Some laughter greeted this.

To which, aside from general seething, some thoughts that crossed my mind:

I'm glad I didn't give you any money.

The Democrats are the party of beggars, and the beggars hate Bush. All the more reason to love him.

Another Mystery of Higher Education

Why is it always the very worst student in the class who volunteers to deliver the teaching evaluations to the department secretary? Should I be worried?

Trekkies

David Gerrold's history of Star Trek, as I recollect, says that at the end of the second season, tens of thousands of letters descended on the studio execs, imploring that the show not be cancelled. The studio execs duly prolonged it, figuring that this must mean (as it normally would) that if tens of thousands wrote in, millions must be watching the show. Then as ratings continued abysmal, they realized the horrifying, fascinating truth: every single person who watched the show had written in! The normal signs of popularity only indicated a narrow enthusiasm by a cultish few.

A certain amount of modern politics turns on whether certain political cults are the equivalents of Trekkies. Howard Dean, for example, clearly suffered from a Trekkish support--a very noisy articulate few with limited actual support. The lefty netroots in general still have a pretty low batting average in actual elections. Ron Paul libertarians clearly have similar characteristics: endless internet yammering, limited votes. But ... Dean raised an enormous amount of money; the articulate few also have deep pockets. Obama may ride to victory on the money of a narrow, noisy, well-funded clique. And the Trekkies show up to organize: the Ron Paulites may have just seized control of the Nevada Republican Party, because they were the only ones who really bothered to show up. (In the 1640s, every Trekkie in England was a member of the Army, and the Army seized control of the country.) Now, I remember back in the 1980s the Republican country-clubbers watched in dismay as the social conservative hard right seized control of the state Republican parties, and they murmured about an unrepresentative minority. I think there are enough social conservatives out there that that critique was overstated. But maybe there are more Paulites out there, and Paulite sympathizers, that they can both seize and maintain control of the Republican party--because Trekkies care, but also because the Libertarians are more than just Trekkies. It will be interesting to discover the truth of this particular point.

McCain in this scenario is clearly a Klingon. A warrior who cares for honor, dontcha know.

Madison & Understanding

Madison's idea of competing, artificial majorities, checking one another, can be rephrased in terms of Heideggerian understanding. Each political realm (Congress, Senate, Presidential; Federal, State, Local) comprises a realm of political understanding; each requires a different rhetorical act from each voter. The very multiplicity of understanding acts emphasizes the artificiality of each one, makes it impossible to think of the act of understanding as revealing any underlying authenticity. Political pluralism requires our character to become more rhetorical, requires us to become aware of ourselves as shifting masks, persona, no one any more or less authentic than any other.

Heidegger, Bush

Nancy Struever on Heidegger: "To speak is to address a hearer, the hearer defines the speaker’s task. .... Hearer relations write large are politics. .... Heidegger has an acute sense of rhetoric’s intense commitment to the priority of hearing over speaking."

2004 Presidential Debate, Bush asked (a softball question) about what he got from his wife Laura, and the other women in his life: "I learned to listen."

So much of politics is about listening--or the most effective pretense of listening, which is indistinguishable from the real thing. I like to think McCain is better at listening than is Obama--the master of the town hall versus the master of the speech. (Hmm, future blog post there.) Listening, of course, equivalent to effective action in the world.

Historical Foreshadowing

Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway ends with the sound of a guillotine. The novel, written in 1782, obviously makes no such allusion. I tend to dislike such foreshadowings--unfaithful to source material, hitting you over the head, generally bleagh. Another example: the latest Cabaret production, ending with a scene in a concentration camp. Note to dramaturg: 1933 is not 1945. Then a novel by Melvin Bukiet, set in a shtetl, ending with the rhetorical question, what on earth could go wrong in Poland in 1928? Feh, I say; no such ironies depending on modern historical knowledge!

Scattered Political Thoughts: McCainiana

* Is McCain better or worse off to have the Democratic nomination undecided?--does the self-destruction of the Democrats make up for lack of a current target, and the result that the future target will be alerted to his/her weaknesses? I recollect Jay Cost's analysis on Real Clear Politics last year, that it was Obama's fundraising that predicted his future success, not his place in the public opinion polls; this analysis has had great predictive power. I therefore think the most crucial factor is the money--all the money the Democrats are spending versus each other rather than against McCain. So on money grounds alone, I think McCain is a winner by this prolonged Democratic primary battle.

* McCain can't raise money for beans, so he's going to go publicly funded for the general election. This means, however, that he'll be able to spend more time campaigning and less time fund-raising. This will allow us to get a sense of how much value campaigning has versus fund-raising. I suspect the Democrat will be better off with the money, but it will be interesting to see exactly how much McCain gains in popular support from the extra time on the campaign trail.

* The Democrats have to unite a coalition riven by identity politics; McCain has to rally a coalition riven by whether or not they loathe George Bush and everything he stands for. It's an interesting question as to which is the more ticklish job.

An Outline of an Argument

Habermas argues that power and violence are 1) forms of instrumental reason, and 2) non-linguistic forms of domination/imposition of will. Neither contention is true. Let us start with the contention that power is a form of instrumental reason. Habermas begins with a history of theories of violence, from Machiavelli on, arguing that Machiavelli, followed by Hobbes, divorced prudence—the manipulation of other men—form ethics, thus apply instrumental reason to power. Machiavelli did this unsystematically; Hobbes pioneered the idea that the manipulation of other people should be scientific and methodical. Hobbes is assumed to cast the mold for further thoughts of power as an exercise of instrumental reason.

But Habermas’ description of Machiavelli and Hobbes is contestable, at the very least. It is true that both follow the divorce of prudence from ethics—but this is not to say that they redescribe the manipulation of other people in terms of instrumental reason. Garver describes Machiavelli’s transformation not as the instrumentalization of prudence, but as the culmination of prudence, its quintessence abstracted. The rhetorical mode of Borgian violence matters here: violence to create fear, to create the appearance of authority. Crucial to Garver’s alternate analysis is his contention that the end of prudence is not ultimately to affect the outside world, but its own perfection; prudence, ultimately, is aimed as an exercise in shaping character. The Machiavellian prudence that exercises itself as violence, force, and power stakes, and reshapes, the character of the Prince as an essential component of its exercise.

The case of Hobbes is more complicated, as he mixed both science (instrumental reason) and prudence in his philosophy. Kahn, however, specifies that the Leviathan’s actions are rhetorical/prudential, as he also creates sovereignty by instilling fear in people. Leviathan has a character to stake? While there is an instrumental aspect to the Hobbesian formulation of violence, it contains an irreducibly prudential aspect as well.

Rousseau as a negative of prudential domination? Clausewitz on war?

If violence is not instrumental, neither is it non-linguistic. Violence is an argument—and arguments are supported by violence. Rhetoric, indeed, explicitly blurs the line from one to the other. The Renaissance image of rhetoric explicitly connected rhetoric with rule, and the prince was supposed to use oratory as much as violence as a weapon to establish his rule. (Garver, Machiavelli.) In Hobbes, too, words and violence slip into one another. Rousseau tied the arguments of intellectuals to modes of social domination—institutionalized violences—and this argument leads down to Marx, Foucault, and Derrida, for all of whom words and force overlap. To this argument Habermas is explicitly opposed—and one should make this argument with an awareness that if words express or support violence, they are not themselves identical with violence. (Just as Habermas distinguishes the words that establish communicative action from communicative action itself.) But violence is linguistic—and rhetoric articulates a theory of language that allows for the dynamic transformation of words into violence, and vice versa.

In the classic age of the public sphere, therefore, rhetoric and prudence articulated violence as a prudential art of character, not instrumental but very much linguistic. Violence, therefore, does not fit the description Habermas provides in Theory of Communicative Action as a steering media that, by using instrumental reason and avoiding language, bypasses and hollows out the lifeworld. Violence is not necessarily at odds with the public sphere and the lifeworld.

Habermas, however, might well say that this is merely to redescribe what he has opposed—a Foucauldian world where violence and language are aligned, for which communicative action provides the only solution. One must, therefore, discriminate between different sorts of violence; to see how rhetorical violence can become legitimate, and aligned with the Habermasian ideals of the public sphere and lifeworld.

Hannah Arendt distinguishes between violence and power; violence is mere force, while power is the social relation among people that constitutes society. The latter description of power overlaps with Foucault’s description of power as a relationship. Violence atomizes society; power constitutes society. Violence, indeed, overlaps with instrumental reason, which (Adorno and Horkheimer), by treating people as objects, dehumanizes both the violencer and violencee, and hollows out the [lifeworld]. Power overlaps with prudential reason, concerned with other people, eminently social in its assumptions.

But the Machiavellian insight tells us that the prince can convert violence into power—dynamically transform atomizing violence into cohering power. He does this by virtu, excellence of character, action, and (above all) speech that persuades people. The prince obtains consent, by the arguments of force and word, legitimate in the judgment of those to whom he addresses himself.

How can the prince do so? Rhetoric, we must recollect, is not simply words addressed to people; it is an attitude that presupposes a relation to the person addressed—a listening as much as a speaking. (Heidegger) More precisely, perhaps, it is an understanding—a hermeneutics. (Gadamer) The prince’s rhetorical violence is as much an example of understanding as anything else—for, to be effective, the prince must understand what violence will move people, and understand how to offer the argument of violence such that it will be accepted as power. Where violence is rhetorical, it is an art of understanding; only an understanding character can proffer violence that becomes power.

But we must also broaden the Machiavellian—Gadamerian insight: the transformation of violence into power is not confined to the moment of the foundation of the republic, or of any system of power relations. Power must be reconstituted continuously, in each moment of secular time; it cannot simply persist. Power is not a stable system, but a continuous dynamic whereby violence is constantly transformed into power by rhetoric. Nor is it done so by one prince, but by a multitude of citizens. The collective exercise of virtu at every single of moment transforms violence into power; the mutual, unequal exercise of understanding constitutes the unequal relations of power.

What then legitimates these relations of power?—these relations of irreducible violence. Understanding, after all, is inherent in all of us, and we retain it in legitimate and illegitimate systems alike—or, rather, since any system may be built upon understanding, one cannot discriminate legitimate and illegitimate merely by stipulating universal understanding as a prerequisite. And to tie a concept of legitimation to violence invites (as in Schmitt and Heidegger) an equation of violence as an ultimate truth, the deepest grasp of which, Nazi-like, is the only true legitimation. (The judgment of importance must always be argued; to say violence is an ultimate truth is to assume an argument.)

Legitimation depends on consent; consent can only be measured from within, not by an external standard; the only consent is the universal exercise of rhetoric to convert violence into power—the universal exercise of dynamic, Machiavellian rhetoric, Gadamerian understanding, to convert all egotistic violence into social power; the universal staking of individual character to maintain the relations of power. This cannot be anything more than temporary—nothing guarantees this power more than the contingent effort of mankind. This does not banish violence: its virtue, indeed, arises from the constant danger that power can decay again into violence.

Liberty, democracy, and equality are not prerequisites for such a legitimated system. They are (Arendt) constituted by a collective act of virtu in a parallel fashion, but they are not necessary for legitimation. It is a Machiavellian, Arendtian, etc. argument that liberty democracy, and equality contribute to the broadening of consent, and the stability of power over time, to the pluralist articulation of individual character—that they have eased the historical-political conditions of argumentation and understanding. They are topics on which we have invented a considerable broadening and deepening of understanding, of power from violence; they are not to be discarded in future argumentation, but neither are they to be considered unanswerable arguments. But it is the exercise of prudence, the individual reshaping of character, essentially oriented toward other individuals, that constitute the core of the political and of political legitimation; all systems of government are means to this end.

A corollary concerns the instrumental use of power. It is not a characteristic of the age—but power can be used instrumentally, and the instrumental attitude toward power, and other people, can overwhelm the rhetorical and understanding exercise of power. The instrumental use of power must itself be regarded as a [technoi?]—like fortresses in Machiavelli. The prince is presented with instrumental power; his challenge is to use it within his own capacities of character. Instrumental power is part of the fortuna of the age; a ground on which to exercise virtu. It is not a prison, but a challenge.

On Public Libraries

I would save several thousand dollars, at least, over the course of my lifetime, if the public library were five minutes away from my front door instead of fifteen. Slug that I am, that distance sends me to Amazon every time. Ka-ching!--invest in Amazon, for I will patronize it.

Eavesdropping

Goldberry, Shirebourn, and I went out with our new Uppababy Stroller--we are now free!, liberated!, no longer to suffer hernias from slings and Baby Bjorns. (Hah!) We went to a Peruvian restaurant on Smith Street, where, at the table next to us, two young ladies regaled us with typical New York conversation: how much I'm paying for my sublet, and Everyone Should Have Therapy Once a Week. (Really, I heard that.) The Third Topic, however, is a sign of changing times: inquiries about health insurance, which doctors one can see, how much co-pays are, etc. By which I deduce that health insurance really is the Burning National Topic everyone says it is. I mean, it's joined apartment prices and therapy as a topic of New York conversation--what more proof could one want?

Anthony & Cleopatra

I saw a somewhat limp production at the Theatre for a New Audience. (Goldberry thought the director had "phoned it in"--a good way of putting it, I thought.) Particularly limp, I thought, was the political half--the history, rather than the private lives and emotions. Now, the playbill made a kerfluffle about how the play was set in 1884, during the Scramble for Africa, but nothing was made of it in the play, save for dressing the Romans as vaguely colonial-British, with pith helmets. I think this has something to do with the relative weakness of the political half. The meaning of the drama, after all, derives from the historical situation and particularity; shift the situation, and you immediately lose all the meaning derived from that particularity. Now, a good director can refashion a production so as to acquire as much, or more, meaning from a new situation--but it's a ticklish feat, hard to pull off. Back to this production: the putative shift to 1884 hardly interfered with the play at all, but it registers, I think, a basic disinterest with the history and the politics that registered in the duller production of the political half. A particular problem, of course, because the play meditates on the interrelations of public and private character, and to lose interest in the public politics vitiates that relation, that tension. But all productions of plays that heedlessly modernize, transpose, the history and the politics of plays, get rid of all that historical meaning, and so as like as not weaken the dramatic power. And--grand conclusion--it is the modern-day indifference to politics (as opposed to ideological sloganeering) that characteristically weakens modern-day dramatic productions.

Habermas on Machiavelli

I have come across a crucial quote in Habermas' Theory and Practice, p. 59: "Machiavelli reduces the practical knowledge of politics to a technical skill." This is precisely what Garver in Machiavelli and the History of Prudence denies, saying rather that Machiavelli provides the quintessence of prudence. The question, clearly, is how do you classify a prudence that has disassociated itself from morality? The Garver take, which I want to follow, is that it is still prudential in character, not technical, and therefore not alien from human nature as instrumental reason--and all rhetoric, all violence, is therefore immune from the critique of instrumental reason. But how to prove the Garverian contention over the Habermasian one? The point turns, I think, on whether the exercise of Machiavellian prudence shapes the Prince's character as well as shaping the actions of his subjects; if not, it is merely instrumental. There is, I think, support in Machiavelli for the idea that the Prince indeed shapes his own character by prudence--hence we refute Habermas.

Coal Tattoo

The Kingston Trio sing an excellent version.

This song is in honor of the Pennsylvania primary.

Travelin' down that coal town road. Listenin' to my rubber tires whine.
Goodbye to Buckeye and white Sycamore. I'm leavin' you behind.
I've been coal miner all of my life. Layin' down track in the hole.
Gotta back like an ironwood, bit by the wind. Blood veins blue as the coal. Blood veins blue as the coal.

Somebody said, "That's a strange tattoo you have on the side of your head."
I said, "That's the blueprint left by the coal. A little more and I'd been dead.
Well, I love the rumble and I love the dark. I love the cool of the slade,
And it's on down the new road, lookin' for a job. This travelin' nook in my head.

I stood for the union and walked in the line and fought against the company.
I stood for the U. M. W. of A. Now, who's gonna stand for me?
I've got no house and I got no job, just got a worried soul
And a blue tattoo on the side of my head left by the number nine coal. Left by the number nine coal.

Some day when I'm dead and gone to heaven, the land of my dreams.
I won't have to worry on losin' my job, on bad times and big machines.
I ain't gonna pay my money away on dues or hospital plans.
I'm gonna pick coal where the blue heavens roll and sing with the angel band.

Rereading Habermas II

Habermas knew everything I want to argue about rhetoric, and rejected it consciously. I have nothing (or very little) new to say in terms of basic concepts. I just happened to wander in at the question from a different disciplinary approach, with a different vocabulary. Learning how to translate the vocabularies is worthwhile, but originality, alas, is harder than I expected. The trouble is all my already published articles now seem very bumptious and snippy. And a little obtuse--I now realize that I've faulted Habermas for ignorance about rhetoric, cited a page for proof, and not noticed that a footnote on the same page, properly understood indicates quite significant knowledge on his part about rhetoric. The gentle lacerations with which he could dismantle me!

I want to read Habermas' take on Foucault. As I reread Structural Transformation, it seems to me he says everything Foucault does--but retaining hope for a way out of the limitations of the world, by means of reason. Given how much they overlap each other, I wonder why he had such animus against Foucault? Perhaps Habermas, like me, didn't always recognize familiar concepts in strange vocabulary.

Denethor

In a comment a while ago to Ralph Luker I labeled Dick Cheney as Denethor. This may be unfair to Cheney, but I want to expand a little on what that means. Tolkien, and Lord of the Rings, are of course my guide to life--evil exists, there are orcs who must be fought, and a variety of virtues, including faith, prudence, and whatnot, are in order. Denethor is a rather important figure for the happy young (middle-aged?) conservative--a warning. He's the man who knows that evil must be fought, but who is willing to use the weapons of evil, and who ultimately has no faith to sustain him. He oscillates between willingness to use Sauron's weapons, and suicide when he sees no earthly means to sustain him. Tolkien had some thoughts about the immorality of using the atom bomb in reference to such a frame of mind. Yours truly, a supporter of the use of torture as necessary to save American lives from atom-bombing, would probably be considered another Denethor by Tolkien. So, too, the entire school of grim warriors against Islamofacsism, ready to take all measures in defense of America. I think of Cheney as representative of this school, although, again, I may be unfair to the man. This is why I prize Bush (and, as recent revelations show, Ashcroft), whose faith makes them gentler than I would be--who are not willing to do quite everything in defense of America--whose hard heads are balanced with loving hearts--who will not despair, in the worst trials--who I am glad to have advised by Denethors, but who I prefer to be in charge of the country. The image of Denethor is a reminder to myself not to be too hard-hearted--and a reminder to other people not to accept my counsels unreservedly.

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political

The political, at bottom, rests on the ability to tell friends from enemies, and to recognize that enemies provide an existential threat. "Existential", however, means a threat to one's character, which Schmitt takes both as deadly serious and as less inhuman than various (liberal) ideals, which to easily identify a political argument with humanity, by implication arguing that all who disagree with you are inhuman, and to be treated accordingly. One must go to war with enemies, if need be--but you and your enemies both remain human. But, in a somewhat different line of attack on liberals, they fail to understand the friend/enemy distinction, and fall either into an economic conception of "competition," or into the idea that politics can be solved by endless procedural debates--fail to understand that war and violence are the ultimate resorts, for which competition and debate are inadequate substitutes.

I think of Obama as an excellent example of Schmitt's conception of a liberal--can't identify enemies, wants jaw-jaw and shrinks from war-war.

On a first read, I disagree with Schmitt's idea that violence is the "ultimate" truth of politics, that life is basically conflict. This strikes me as another example of searching for a specious authenticity, this time in violence. On the one hand, to identify an ultimate truth argues ultimately toward a positive embrace of that ultimate truth--Schmitt claims he is not militaristic, but to say violence is ultimate is to argue for violence in the long run, to seek transcendence in its embrace. I don't like hidden truths--all is appearance, saith the Philosopher, all, and the politics of peace, economics, procedural debate, are no less real than violence. Schmitt is correct that violence is an inescapable part of politics, and a politics that will not acknowledge violence is deeply flawed--but violence is only one appearance among others, one rhetoric among others; no touchstone of truth. Friend/enemy is likewise a great truth, but not the truth--we are just as much competitors and debaters, and to excise liberalism entirely is to gouge out a part of politics as well.

Obama Odium

Over the last few weeks, Withywindle and I have both found Barack Obama increasingly annoying and unlikeable (see, for example, here and here and here and here). I started out liking him, actually: he seemed nice enough and my major objection to him was inexperience.

For some reason, it was this clip -- an Obama speech yesterday, reacting to the last debate with Hillary -- that turned my growing disaffection into actual loathing. The first few minutes seem to me to reveal a guy who is, in Withywindle's word, a jerk: petty, smug and...my God, did he really do that childish thing where you give someone the finger while pretending you haven't? (The crowd seemed to think so.) Did he really mimic that Jay-Z rap video?

Maybe I'm not a great judge of character. Then again, maybe this man simply isn't fit to be president. On the basis of policy views, of course, I wasn't going to vote for him anyway. But I really did want to believe that the election of 2008 would at least be fought between decent men who were also grown-ups.

Arendt Aphorism, #1

No body politic I know of was ever founded on equality before death and its actualization in violence; the suicide squads in history, which were indeed organized on this principle, and therefore often called themselves “brotherhoods,” can hardly be counted among political organizations.

The Palestinians, in other words, are not political, which is why they can't be negotiated with.

Ambiguities

On the Obama-Clinton debate: who are these morons who come up with questions like "Will the US guarantee Israel against a nuclear attack by Iran?" Repeat after me, boys and girls: A formal guarantee of Israel would be a major policy shift by the United States, one that commits us to, you know, a non-trivial risk of nuclear war with Iran. This is the sort of thing the President should decide in consultation with the leaders of Congress, relevant bureaucracies, our allies, and possibly by getting a mutual defense treaty through Congress. A presidential candidate who opined on the subject on the campaign trail, particularly on the fly in a debate, would be a damn fool, instantly unfit to be president. Thank God Obama and Clinton both knew enough to sidestep that little bit of idiocy. And, frankly, the US, like most intelligent powers, does well out of strategic ambiguity: reserving all options but making no guarantees is default good policy--NATO is exceptional, and our mushiness about Taiwanese independence is more normal. So, all future journalists: try not to ask questions which invite fudging answers and, if unfudged, would do material harm to the interests of the country.

Note I say this as a great friend of Israel. But friendship does not mean I want the US to act in a damfool manner, and giving Israel a security guarantee on the fly qualifies as damfool.

Arendt, Violence, Foucault

Just read Arendt's On Violence. Fascinating, of course. I will mention that her dislike of violence as instrumental parallels the critique of instrumental reason. Also, her assertion that violence cannot create power (which I would call "authority", but all is semantics) contradicts Hobbes, and Hobbes may be right. The distinction, I think, turns on violence that creates community and violence that atomizes community--tying in, of course, to her critique of totalitarianism. Also, violence which seeks to create a monolithic consensus rather than a plural community, and which attempt to immanentize the eschaton via transcending, emancipatory violence.

I wish she wouldn't wander from philosophy into commentary on current events. It dates badly, and clutters up her arguments.

I think I may be reinventing Foucault. At any rate, I see where he does come out of a very similar set of assumptions. Assuming one can separate Gadamer both from Habermas and from Foucault, I think I might try a catchphrase like "understanding = power"--which is distinct, importantly, from "knowledge = power".

I've just read an article by a David Ingram, 'Foucault and the Frankfurt School,' which says that Habermas essentially zapped Foucault for acting like Alpheus' students--historicizing the past, while in the final analysis attempting to stand outside of history himself. I think Gadamer provides a better standpoint than Foucault--historicizing the past, while accepting one's own historicity. And the critique that Foucault is relativistic (if correct--I am no longer sure) proceeds, I should think, from attempting to locate the production of knowledge in history; to locate the production of understanding in history is, I think, a much less relativistic claim.

As Glenn Reynolds Would Say

Heh.

Political Apologies

One thing I don't blame Obama for is not apologizing for his remarks. Politicians and nations tend not to apologize. They obfuscate and parse, pretend they said something different, pretend they never said anything at all. When you have exceptions, it's usually for things that happened long ago--McCain for opposing MLK day 25 years ago, the US for Japanese-American Internment 50 years after the fact. Even Willi Brandt fell on his knees after 25 years passed. This isn't large-souled, perhaps, but it does seem politically rational. That is, if you apologize, your enemies just use your apology as a cudgel against you, and you lose reputation with the voters. The reason for the last I think has to do with a very old moral-political logic, which I still need to think out--fundamentally, an apology makes you weak, I think--but voters seem to prefer bluster to apology, though they may prefer someone who doesn't need to bluster to cover up apology. So Obama isn't to be blamed for not apologizing--only a fool of a politician would.

Meanwhile, Italy, France, and Germany are all headed by conservative governments, and Britain may well be soon. Interesting times.

Formative Experiences

Everything I needed to learn, I learned in kindergarten. Specifically, I was always annoyed that they provided just as many lefty scissors as righty scissors, even though lefties were few and far between. I knew they meant well, but it always meant we had to compete for righty scissors, while the few lefties smiled in a happy world of superfluous scissors. This is why I don't like affirmative action.

My dislike of government monopolies comes from standing in line at the post office. Which I just did for an hour, at the main post office in Brooklyn. Where there was only one person serving the lengthening line for the first half-hour, and only two for the second half-hour. We natives were growing restless by the end. Fortunately, I had a book with me--rather, by foresight I had a book, since I know how post offices work. George MacDonald Fraser's memoir of soldiering in Burma, Quartered Safe Out Here. It's very good.

Rhetoric, Violence

A good deal of the reason/rhetoric divide involves mutual accusations that the other is more prone to violence. Much as I love rhetoric, I think that it is aligned in important ways with violence--that forcible persuasion is not entirely separable with the Machiavellian or Hobbesian persuasion-by-violence that establishes, among other things, sovereignty. A good deal of what Habermas, etc. are concerned with is also social domination, inequity, that distorts language, and the possibility for language to constitute a just society--this I think is also an aspect of violence. I think rhetoric can create a just society from violence, but that the attempt to exorcise violence is futile. I also think I need to read Arendt's aptly named On Violence--it will, I think give me clues.

More Auden

When statesmen gravely say--"We must be realistic--"
The chances are they're weak and therefore pacifistic:
But when they speak of Principles--look out--perhaps
Their generals are already poring over maps.

************

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word Intellectual suggests straight away
A man who's untrue to his wife.

Obama, Jerk

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Political analysis, blah, blah, blah. Liberal elitism, blah, blah, blah. It boils down to, you have to be a real jerk to talk this way. Now, jerks can win campaigns. Jerks can become president. (See Johnson, Lyndon.) It can even be a positive--"Our Jerk, Giving the Finger to the World." But we now have a new political fact: Obama, Jerk.

W. H. Auden Poem

I have no gun, but I can spit

Some thirty inches from my nose
The frontier of my Person goes,
And all the untilled air between
Is private pagus or demesne.
Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes
I beckon you to fraternize,
Beware of rudely crossing it:
I have no gun, but I can spit.

Why Blog?

A question asked me by friend Gowanus recently--are you ever going to change your mind? And a recent comments thread over on What Would Phoebe Do? brings up the related question of, Why Comment?, particularly if you disagree with the blog author.

I may not be the first person to have considered these questions.

So, in my case: aside from egocentricity, blogorrhea, an urge to avoid doing my own work? As stated, part of the point is to Be a Conservative Academic in Public, hopefully representing my tribe well. Also ... I blog partly because my thoughts only become clear once they are put in written form. Partly because I do seek a certain amount of conversation--some admixture of (I am weak) compliment and critique. A hope that new ideas, even if I resist them fiercely at the time, will percolate and help me to change my mind later. (Virtually everything I argue nowadays I argued against at some point in the past.) The hope that some of my ideas might be helpful to other people in similar ways--and where my ideas fail, that the links I provide, the works I cite, may be more helpful than my own thoughts. And while Fame!, Fortune!, Publicity!, are all well and good, the comments threads on the most well-read blogs are generally obscene and banal--I don't actually want too many people to read this blog--or comment on this blog--for fear it will become as obscene as the others.

Why comment, then? This is ticklish. Generally I read blogs where I feel some sense of kinship, affiliation, despite differences. I read Easily Distracted because Tim Burke is a Swattie history professor with a fair bit of geek knowledge; this makes up for a fair bit of political difference. But commenting on Easily Distracted--even being as sober and articulate as possible, and I do fail at that far too often, the difference in point of view means that my comments, especially if repeated, are functionally trollish. This is one reason why, aside from getting distracted setting up my own blog, I've stopped commenting on Easily Distracted so much--repeating myself, aside from being boring, can only get more trollish with each iteration. So, my comments are intended not to be too hostile or trollish, if occasionally critical--and are intended to pay the compliment of showing interest. Now, this compliment may not always be welcome, alas--and execution is always difficult--but the intent, at any rate, is amiable.

Holy Joe Lieberman, Batman!

I begin to think McCain might really want to have Joe Lieberman as his Veep Choice. Consider that short-list of veep choices circulating on the net: Joe Lieberman, Charlie Crist, Tim Pawlenty, Haley Barbour, and Marsha Blackburn. None of the latter four really is a home run--and if it is Obama, despite his current troubles, you probably do need a home run to help combat his money and his charisma. The idea that McCain needs to firm up his conservative base makes sense--but his fundraising is anemic enough, that maybe he thinks its not worth bothering going after the conservative base. The tea-leaves saying he'll definitely commit to public funding for the general election is maybe a sign that he's making a decision not to go the conservative route. So ... Joe Lieberman. Yes, its the Two Warmongers for the Price of One ticket, but you get instant Gravitas, instant appeal to moderates looking for centrist policy on domestic issues, incredible news story--former Dem Veep candidate now Repubican Veep candidate!--and for the Pathbreaking Ethnic Identity schtick, why, Mabel, did you know he's Jewish? And, indeed, given Obama's progressive alienation of Jews, Lieberman might be a canny choice to peal off Jewish voters in a few crucial states. (Pennsylvania, Florida.) Now, Lieberman might also provoke wholesale revolt by the Republican party--and I guarantee McCain would be testing the waters extensively, and privately, before he went with a Lieberman choice. And, frankly, any conservative would be justified in sitting out such an election, or voting for a Bob Barr Libertarian candidacy instead. But it's just the sort of Hail Mary Pass, with the added pleasure of aggravating conservatives, that would appeal to McCain. It would be bold, and maybe a game-changer. So, for all the reasons to doubt he'll do it, I just think he might.

Theocracies

Mormon cults with kids in compounds ... Muslim groups with compounds in the Catskills ... Ultra-Orthodox hiding child abuse ... is America facing a rise in the number of theocratic groups?--sects, cults, with no interest in acting as individual citizens of the US, regarding its liberties and welfare payments as goodies to be taken with nothing given back? Is America's tradition of religious liberty, unlike France's positive secularism, something that renders it less able to face the threat presented by such tight religious groups? Or am I overreading stray incidents? Vilifying religious groups for acting like every other selfish American? Mm, don't know.

Spengler

Daniel Larison doesn't like this article. I do.

Gentle Reader

Many years ago, Alpheus read to me from a Miss Manners collection. I remember the letter being read--the writer unwittingly displaying a most appalling lack of manners--then asking Miss Manners for advice on whether or not to do something which would intensify the bad manners even further. The first line of her response, I think, was,

"Gentle Reader, sometimes Miss Manners does not know where to begin."

I still crack up (mis)remembering this line.

Alpheus, do you by any chance have the original, such that you could post it?

Boeing Engineering Better Than The Aliens

On that fine show Coast to Coast, someone was nattering on about the alien technology we used to develop our current military hardware. [Image in my mind from Babylon 5, of an Earth battleship with Shadow spiderlegs sticking out of the side.] Two thoughts, from the point of view of a Boeing engineer.

1) Cool! We make such good airplanes, the loony-tunes think the technology was gotten from a UFO.

2) This is annoying. We put in several million [?] man-hours of R & D, we make some amazingly good product, and then people say we ripped it off from a UFO. I feel seriously disrespected, and I am going to lob a cruise missile into the Coast to Coast offices one day, with a little note attached saying "MADE IN THE USA."

While we're at it, maybe the Mexican embassy should lodge a protest for the denigration of their ancient engineering skills as well. [See, Pyramids, Presumed Alien Construction Thereof.] "Aliens? Aliens? We don' need no steenkin' aliens!"

Charlton Heston, Long John Silver

I haven't seen much of Heston's work--of the major stuff, just Touch of Evil, Ben Hur, and Planet of the Apes. But I did once see a TV movie of Treasure Island, from maybe 15 years ago, where he played Long John Silver. It was a good production, and he was stellar. Already aged--he was usually filmed sitting down--but he got the heart of the character, gave the character a heart. Worth remembering, along with much else.

Long-time readers of the blog will by-the-by remember that I said they would take my Doritos from my cold, dead fingers. (Cold, orange fingers, commented Roro.)

Rereading Habermas

He dislikes scientific reason as much as I do. Crucial: he takes market relations to embody a form of scientific reason. My argument that they are actually prudential means that I can steal him for the private marketeers.

I have a new reading list for myself, which would also double as a good syllabus for a course: Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Jurgen Habermas, and maybe Ernst Kantorowicz.

Yankees Haiku

I hate Steinbrenner
More and more every year.
He still owns the team.

(I actually am neither a Yankees fan nor a hater of Steinbrenner.)

Academics vs. Jacksonians

Michael Barone has an article analyzing the Obama/Clinton divide among white Democratic voters as one between academics (and public sector employees) vs. Jacksonians. Say I, this is the same Greater New England story vs. the Scots-Irish label gussied up under a different label. Consider: it's not just that Greater New Englanders are overrepresented in academia--although I bet they are. It's that Luther's innovation was to make every man his own monk, to impart the character traits of a monk into secular life. Calvin promotes refined Lutheranism (simplifying! simplifying!), and New England has a bunch of Calvinists set the stamp for regional culture. Academics, of course, are also originally medieval priests, and the Puritan-academic tight is not only characterological but institutional--note, as always, founding Harvard as early as 1636, to provide the properly educated ministers for Massachusetts. The Puritan character and the academic character overlap heavily. And the Jacksonian Scots-Irish? You might just say they're normal--most of the world isn't made up of secularized monks. Or you recur to all the analyses that point out that the Scots-Irish came from the Anglo-Scottish borders, where, unusually late, each man was his own warrior, just as for the Puritans each man was his own monk--so, yes, the characterological divide is particularly pronounced, between the warriors and the monks.

Entangling Alliances

Fear and Loathing in Georgetown has been on an anti-NATO rant the last few weeks. I disagree--have said so briefly on a comment at his blog--want to expand the comment here.

The basic argument is that it's better to keep annoying, ineffective nations allied to us than to let them go free, since, once free, who knows how they will change in their views? Decouple America from Europe, in other words, and Europe may begin to spin institutionally in an anti-American direction; we may wake up one day to find those annoying little eunuchs have regressed into their saber-toothed ancestors, and are hostile. So it's worth spending some effort tying them into institutional knots of alliance, as insurance against an unpleasant eventuality.

This basic argument, however, is subject to a number of complications.

1) We want to tie down the Europeans, while preserving room for maneuver [nota bene, thank God for spell check! -- I can never spell that word properly] for ourselves. They want to tie us down--not just to tie us into defensive alliance, but to constrain our ability to offend anywhere in the world, both for ideological reasons, and for the not irrational thought that what we do elsewhere may end up involving them in the long run. (See Afghanistan.) So one needs to be careful about how to structure these timewasting alliances, and make sure they keep the furriners busier than they keep us.

2) We don't necessarily want to be allied with every country in the world. Actually, in the economic arena, we do, hence the WTO. But militarily, there are cost-benefit analyses to be made. I.e., while it would be nice to add Ukraine to the Tied Down World, do we really want to be hostage to the latest psychotic government in Russia? Or even to annoy them right now without particular benefit? To say that NATO has a point isn't necessarily to say that it should be expanded indefinitely, without hardheaded analysis.

3) This sort of institutional tie-down doesn't work with maniacs, habitual liars, and would-be conquerors. The same impulse that makes us blather with NATO allies to some effect also leads to an urge to blather with North Korea and Iran about nuclear weapons, and to encourage a Peace Process with Predatory Palestinians. This is a waste of time. Frankly, putting China in the WTO, when they a) don't have the rule of law; b) can't control their provinces; and c) are still in the ethos of Primitive Capitalist Accumulation; makes d) Chinese membership in the WTO a pretty dubious proposition. Institutional tie-down and diplomatized blather should be part of the tool-kit, but not a universal palliative.

4) FLG also favors substituting the EU for NATO. This, I think, misses the point that part of the institutional tie-down is aimed at different bureaucracies within the target governments. NATO keeps the European militaries aligned with us, and even makes them bureaucratic advocates within the government for the Atlantic alliance. The point of having NATO and EU work in tandem is, in part, to tie down as many different bureaucracies within the European governments as possible.

5) There is the question of American engagement in the world. I do feel ambivalent about this--I have a certain isolationist impulse myself, and an urge to shed the European and East Asian alliances, where are good offices are met with remarkable ingratitude, and allow our allies to avoid the hard work of defending themselves. But I do want America engaged in the world--dominating the world, frankly--and I do, in sum, think engagement in the alliances are a net plus. But on a slightly different level of analysis, I'm against chaos, and I think America should be too. Changes in the world should be as slow as possible, to allow for minimum panic--including changes by us. I want America free to act, but there's a point to having our actions articulated, in part, through international structures. Conflicting impulses, I know. And if we are to free ourselves from the alliances, I want this to happen slowly--the troops should come home in thirty years, not three; NATO should be wound up gracefully and with all deliberate speed. Yes, this means we defend ungrateful idiots for too long a time--but better that than sudden change.

6) Finally, there is the question of American character at home. Simplifying radically, the isolationist impulse overlaps with a paleoconservative impulse that in turn overlaps with a sort of anti-Semitic white nationalism I don't find wholly congenial. (The isolationists, strangely enough, are remarkably often most intent on shucking our alliance with Israel.) Contrariwise, of course, the Skoptsy among the liberals want to tie us down completely in international organizations as a way of post-nationalizing America, and rendering us mere Europeans. To change our alliances abroad, in other words, is inseparable from changing our political character at home. The sort of America I desire--the one whose character I cherish--is neither entirely free of alliances nor entirely entangled by them.

In the Newspapers

* In the airport, I picked up a New York Times someone left behind. The name on the sticker was Christiane Amanpour! The sticker says she subscribes to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York TImes.

* Nikolai Baibakov died. He was chief planner for the Soviet economy for some decades after World War II. In World War II, he dismantled the Svoeit oil wells and refineries before the German occupation, then set them up again once the Germans retreated. Stalin told him, "If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot, and when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again."

* The Economist by-the-by refers to "the racially charged rantings of Barack Obama's former pastor." I do like it when "rantings" is so obvious that even the sober, judicious Economist decides that is the mot juste. Though "demented rantings" might have been even better.

* The Economist also has a chart on European military deployments worldwide since 2001, including the Balkans. Steady at about 50K. Wimpy, but not negligible. The objection to their Iraq policy, this underlines, is not so much their failure to send troops, since they could legitimately claim being busy elsewhere, as their diplomatic obstruction to our efforts.

* The Economist notes that in America, conservatives are happier than liberals because they go to church more and have more children. Also, liberals believe they're being crushed by an unjust economic system, and are generally Victims; hence they are unhappy. Yup.

* The Economist's article on the new Taiwanese president is titled "Ma's horse comes in." The Chinese-language joke--Ma=horse--is never explained in the article. Is this wit or hasty editing?

* The Economist's article on Bhutan says the current international airport at Paro "is shunned by every national carrier except Bhutan's because of its terrifying hilly approach." I want to read more about this airport.

* A new study has found a link between the NaDene languages of North America, and the Ket language, spoken only in four villages on the Yenesei River in Siberia. Previous people have speculated about a tie between the two, but this study, by Edward Vajda, finds "almost identical wrods for canoe and such component parts as prow and crosspiece. .... also a clear correspndence in verb systems and other grammatical structures." The Ket also seem to have had a dramatic life. I find on the web, lifted from something else by Vajda: "The modern Ket are thought to have migrated to their present location on the middle Yenisei from some point closer to the Altai and Sayan mountains during the past 2000 years (where they were probably neighbors to the proto-Samoyeds. Ket legends tell of ancient migrations north into the taiga to escape fierce invaders. The legends tell of the tribe crossing a huge mountain range to escape the Tystad, or stone people. While we do not know who these stone people were (perhaps ancient Indo-Europeans), it is fairly certain that the mountain range in question was the Sayan mountains on the Russo-Chinese border. These Tystad may well have been some of the peoples who forged the early steppe confederations of the Huns (3rd century AD). Although the bulk of the peoples in these confederations are thought to have been Turkic speaking, there is some evidence that Ketic speakers were also represented--perhaps those who did not flee northward into the taiga were absorbed by the Huns. Once in Central Siberia, the Ketic tribes moved north again due to attacks by another fierce group, the Kiliki. These Kiliki may well have been the fierce Turkic Kirghiz (later called the Kazakhs) who rampaged through southern Siberia in the 9th century AD. By this time the Kets were far enough into the taiga to avoid trouble from the steppe nomads. In the Yeniseian river valley taiga, the Kets mixed with and probably displaced peoples related to the Eskimo. The term Yugh is the Eskimo word for "human being," which suggests that the Yughs are Keticized Siberian aborigines originally related to the Eskimo. There is additional evidence for this connection in a number of other Ket words, which seem borrowed from a language related to Eskimo. Studying pre-Russian place names confirms the Ket belief in their southern origin, as do various Ket ethnographic details. Most of the river names in southern Siberia are of Ketic origin. Also, the clothing of the taiga Ket seems to have originally been developed for a more southern climate and later adapted to more extreme northern conditions. The Ket wore a type of loose-fitting robe or caftan unlike any found elsewhere in the northern taiga. Later, additions were made to the clothing which insulated it and better safeguarded against the extreme cold of the northern taiga. Ket men wore a type of scarf. There is also evidence that the southernmost Yeniseian peoples--the Arins and others-- had knowledge of iron smelting, and participated in livestock raising, features which the northermost Ket either lost during their migrations into the forest zone or never developed."

Wanna Spambot!

As readers probably are aware, Withywindle and I are constantly thinking of ways to make this site better. We've had lots of ideas, most of them fairly standard: more nudity; add another city to the name; change the stark brown background to a more inviting taupe; Friday is pig Latin day!; etc., etc.

Well, now a recent comment on one of our posts has now shown me the way. (By the way I urge everyone to give this comment the careful attention it deserves, and then pop over to SBTVD for all your Brazilian digital television needs.)

Clearly, what our web site needs a spambot to drum up traffic. I don't know why we didn't think of this before. Withy, silly fellow, has been spending time actually reading and posting long thoughtful comments on other people's blogs.

Rest assured, though, I'm going to exert the greatest possible effort to make sure we have the Athens & Jerusalem Spambot up and running as soon as possible. Our spambot will be the Mightiest Spambot of them all, overshadowing all the other puny spambots in its production of...well, spam, of both the blog-comment and email varieties! We'll soon be deluging the web (and your inbox) with links galore -- or my name isn't really Alpheus!

Okay, enough. Actually, I just like the word Spambot.

Melancholia

Over at The New Republic's The Plank blog, Jason Zengerle writes:

I was talking to one McCain friend about this a while back and he made a smart point about the effect Salter's speeches have on McCain. "He's like the last World War One veteran marching alone in the vets parade," this McCain friend said. He added, "There's a melancholy undercurrent to everything McCain says. He understands the sadness of life. That's one of the reasons the press likes McCain, writers get sadness. But your average Sprint salesman doesn't want to hear that." I don't think many Sprint salesmen are going to be won over by McCain's words this week.

Interesting. I respond well to acknowledgments of the sadness of life too, which may explain some of my fondness for McCain. But if McCain is melancholy, this undercuts the TR and Churchill comparisons. It makes him more like Lincoln, our most notable melancholic president--and whose melancholy, among other things, made him the finest-souled wartime leader in history, in addition to being a rather successful one. A Lincolnian McCain is a fond idea. Although Zengerle is doubtless right: melancholy in a presidential candidate doesn't sell well as a rule.

And for melancholy, consider Jacques on McCain:

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the canon's mouth.

Riparography

Fear and Loathing in Georgetown suggests fanciful autobiographies for anonymous bloggers. Here is mine:

Withywindle was born as the Platte, six inches deep and a mile wide at the mouth. As a teenage prank he became the Cuyahoga, and set himself on fire. In college he became the Cam, and was punted. Now he is Old Man River, with a babbling brook of his own. His detractors say he is really the Hudson, an estuary in disguise. On my tombstone they will write this:

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

April Fool's Amnesty

I really feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Had she insisted on her Tuzla airport lie for just a week longer, she could have passed it off as an April Fool's thing.

Obama, meanwhile, still has about 16 hours to dispel, in a similar fashion, his string of credulity-straining statements about Jeremiah Wright.

Actually, I'm warming to this idea. Maybe April 1st, in addition to the usual lighthearted prankery, should become a sort of amnesty day for public figures who have been lying and want to make a clean breast of things. O.J., let's get the ball rolling? Senator Craig? Dan Rather?

And why stop at public figures? Imagine the possibilities:

--"Susie, remember how Mommy and I told you your doggie was just sleeping?"

--"Honey, you know how I've been saying there's nothing between me and the handyman?"

--"For months now I've been assuring all you loyal employees that our company was financially sound and that your jobs were secure. Well.... [big "gotcha" grin]"

Come on people, let's make this happen! Let's make the Kalends of April everything we know it can be!