Category: Politics

No Salvation

Somewhere (of course I can’t find it now) in his An American Utopia: Dual Power and the American Army (Verso, 2016), Fredric Jameson tells us that utopia is merely our same human world with a slight difference. One mistake (his book outlines legions of mistakes) is to think we can effect a total transformation of humankind and human society. It is not that he eschews the ideal, the dream, of revolution; he only wants to downsize what we think a revolution could accomplish. Basically, it seems he believes we can collectivize labor, but we cannot overcome social antagonism. There is a primal fear/envy/hatred/aggression toward the Other that will persist.

I am not particularly interested in Jameson’s proposed utopia; what interests me is the ramifications of taking the position that there is “no salvation.” Let me try to state my position starkly. (I will then complicate matters by exploring my uneasiness with that position.) The stark formulation: there is no once-for-all, totalizing transformation for the various ills of our current lot. No deus ex machina, no transcendence. We are condemned to chipping away at things piecemeal, in making what small improvements when and where we can. Such improvements are themselves never secured once and for all; there will be backslidings, unexpected twists and turns, unforeseen (and often deeply evil) consequences; the powers of darkness will be ever with us and ever fighting for their side.

This position fits with a robust pluralism; there is no totality, no overarching system, and hence no special point of leverage from which the whole world can be moved. We have to work with the tools that are to hand and we have to work on the problems that are also to hand. Successes will be hard won—and partial. Reliance on a totalizing revolution, on salvation, is a species of magical thinking. Worse, it is an abdication of involvement in the here and now, a religious focus on a “better world” elsewhere. This world is all we’ve got, so hunker down and get to work on it.

I trust you get the idea. Radical secularism and anti-transcendentalism. But I want to combine those positions with a radical openness. The idea is not to create constraints, not to say with Thatcher that there are “no alternatives,” or to adopt the kind of quietism that can go with Nietzschean affirmation. No “amor fati” please, but a continual kicking against the pricks—and every attempt to think and act creatively. The constant experimentation of James and Dewey’s pragmatism, where you don’t know what a situation might enable until you try it out, when you discover its affordances and resistances in practice.

I want to avoid every form of what I have called “transcendental blackmail,” meaning ontological or “realistic” claims that declare certain things impossible from the outset. But I am contradicting myself because I have claimed total revolution impossible, based on an ontological claim of pluralism. Why deny to the revolutionaries their right to experiment with the possibility of total transformation? (This becomes like James’s notorious essay “The Will to Believe” with the revolutionaries being granted the right to believe that a revolution is possible.)

What is it about dreams of total escape from the human condition that I find objectionable? Why do I want to shut down not only the hope, but the very vocabulary, of “salvation” and “redemption”? I am, it seems to me, partly in Nietzsche’s camp; I want to reject nihilism’s negations of this world, of the here and now. I want to articulate some version of “affirmation” that accepts where we are—even as it also endeavors to make our current condition better. No fatalistic resignation to no change at all; but no dream of an utterly different way of life. In short, Jamesian “meliorism,” which looks luke-warm (and therefore to be spewed from the mouth) by the zealot.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Attending to the ordinary slings and arrows of daily life, working to ameliorate them insofar as possible, is the recommended path.

But for many that is not enough, not sufficient. They want grander progress, grander solutions. My rejection of their negations seems to have three planks.

The ontological claim that totalized solutions are not possible.
The aesthetic (?) claim that total negation misses all that is beautiful and delightful in this imperfect world and society we inhabit. The perpetual sourpuss of puritanical absolutism (in whatever form it takes) is not a look I want to adopt for myself or countenance in others.
The political claim that puritanical absolutism also makes its adherents condemn every reform, every change, as insufficient. Just as they cannot affirm any aspect of current life, they also cannot affirm any change in the conditions of current life. Everything falls short of the desired total transformation.

Economic Power/Political Power

A quick addition to my last post.

The desire is to somehow hold economic power and political power apart, using each as a counterbalance against the other. To give the state absolute power over the economy is to insure vast economic inequality. Such has, generally speaking, been the lesson of history. Powerful states of the pre-modern era presided over massively unequal societies.

But there is a modern exception. Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe did produce fairly egalitarian societies; in that case, state power was used against the accumulation of wealth by the few. There still existed a privileged elite of state officials, but there was also a general distribution of economic goods. The problem, of course, was a combination of state tyranny with low productivity. The paranoia that afflicts all tyrannies led to abuses that made life unbearable.

But (actually existing) communism did show that it is possible to use state (political) power to mitigate economic inequality. Social democracy from 1945 to 1970 was also successful in this direction. Under social democracy, the economy enjoys a relative autonomy, but is highly regulated by a state that interferes to prevent large inequities.

Where there is some kind of norm that political power (defined as the ability to direct the actions of state institutions) should not either 1) be a route to economic gain or 2) be working hand-in-glove with the economically powerful to secure their positions, the violations of that norm are called “corruption.” The Marxist, of course, says that the state in all capitalist societies (the “bourgeois state”) is corrupt if that is our definition of corruption. The state will always have been “captured” by the plutocrats.

What belies that Marxist analysis is that the plutocrats hate the state and do everything in their power (under the slogan of laissez-faire) to render the state a non-player in economic and social matters. Capitalists do not want an effective state of any sort—either of the left, center, or right. A strong state of any stripe is not going to let the economy goes its own way, but will (instead) fight to gain control over it. I think it fair to say that the fight between political and economic power mirrors the fight between civil and religious power in the early days of the nation-state. The English king versus the clergy and the Pope.

The ordinary citizen, I am arguing, is better off when neither side can win this fight, when the two antagonists have enough standing to prevent one from having it all its way.

Our current mess comes in two forms, the worst of all worlds. We have a weak state combined with massive corruption. What powers the state still has are placed at the service of capital while politicians use office to get rich. We have a regulatory apparatus that is almost completely dormant. From the SEC to the IRS, from the FDA to the EPA, the agencies are not doing their jobs, but standing idly by while the corporations, financiers, and tax-evading rich do their thing.

The leftist response is to say that the whole set-up in unworkable. We need a new social organization. I have just finished reading Fredric Jameson’s An American Utopia (Verso, 2016). Interestingly enough, Jameson also thinks we need “dual power” in order to move out of our current mess. The subtitle of his book is “Dual Power and the Universal Army.” More about Jameson in subsequent posts.

Here I just want to reiterate what I take to be a fundamental liberal tenet: all concentrations of power are to be avoided; monopolies of power in any society are a disaster that mirror the equal but opposite disaster of civil war. Absolute sovereignty of the Hobbesian sort is not a solution; but the absence of all sovereignty is, as Hobbes saw, a formula for endless violence. Jameson says the key political problem for any Utopia is “federalism.” That seems right to me, if we take federalism to mean the distribution of power to various social locations. Having a market that stands in some autonomy from the state is an example of federalism. There are, of course, other forms that federalism can take. All of those forms are ways of working against the concentration of power in one place.

Of Truth and Lies in the Digital Age

Colin Burrow has a thought-provoking essay (title: “Fiction and the Age of Lies”; link: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/colin-burrow/fiction-and-the-age-of-lies) in the most recent London Review of Books (Vol 42, No 4; 20 Feb 2020).

Two long passages (one that has introduces the key concept of the “algo-lie,” a lie that is targeted to the audience most likely to believe it via the by-now ubiquitous algorithms; the other passage a rebuke of Jonathan Coe’s novel Middle England, which I quoted a few posts back.)

“Political lies now tend to be something more than statements by individuals that are designed to mislead: they are partly generated by the desires and beliefs of the lie-ee. They can be algorithmically created to elicit a particular response from an audience that has been microtargeted, and is fed little drips of misinformation it is predisposed to believe. The guiding presumption of algo-lying is that human beings are as manipulable as white mice. The object is to develop a stimulus that provokes the desired behaviour. Send out the stimulus, irrespective of its truth or falsehood; keep sending. Provided the white mice are in a majority and they all head for the cheese it’s a victory. It doesn’t matter if the stimulus is a lie that generates unpredictable side effects, like a loss of trust in institutions, or if the lies designed to appeal to the white mice so enrage the piebald mice that they start a civil war. It’s short-term outcomes that count.”

“Middle England (2019) by Jonathan Coe (b. 1961) strikes me as a classic instance of this problem. It’s a Brexit novel which offers comforting stereotypes – the xenophobic former Birmingham car worker, the wonderful Lithuanian immigrant cleaner – while not having anything to say about the technologies that now influence and distort the opinions of those types. A little texting and emailing is the deepest Coe’s characters get into the world of social media. Fiction that recirculates perspectives on the present which correspond closely to a particular strand of print or electronic media isn’t doing the job fiction should do. It knows what its audience wants to hear, and says it. The problem is that it will therefore sound like lies to those who don’t want to believe it. If the main literary consequence of this latest age of lies is to identify the audience for serious fiction with a small group with mutually sustaining and more or less identical political attitudes then we all should be very afraid for the future of fiction.”

I don’t think much in the way of comment is needed. Burrow has a touching faith that novels are supposed to help us out of our mess by providing a thick analysis of the ways we (and truth) are manipulated using the new digital tools. He ends the essay with a call for the “great British technonovel of the 21^st century” (the British nationalism here must be noted) and the very last sentence of the essay is “But if our present age of lies has one good consequence it would be that book,” as if a great novel would be sufficient consolation for the general woe. Or is that last sentence a joke? It doesn’t read like one in context.

Fathers and Sons

I have just finished reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (published in 1862). I first read the novel some thirty years ago (I really have no idea when, but it must have been somewhere between 1974 and 1984). I was not very impressed by it, and filed it away in my mind in the bin labeled “overrated.” Then, for reasons completely obscure to me, I re-read it sometime in the past ten years. This time I was very moved. Bazarov, the main character, is a self-proclaimed “nihilist.” But, in fact, the novel shows that he is a very intelligent, very energetic, very talented young man from a lower middle class background (in so much as that terminology makes any sense in the Russian context). Through education, Bazarov has acquired what is a perhaps exalted sense of his talents, but his self-conceit (the novel’s term) is justified by the strong impact he has on others. He is a force. But he is a baffled force because Russia offers no outlet for his talents. Turgenev portrays a paralysed society, one that is in the process of dismantling its feudal past. The novel is set in 1859, even though it was written in the wake of the 1861 emancipation of the serfs. It clearly presents Russia as incapable of making the transition to modernity, to a rent/wage system of labor, even as Turgenev holds no truck with serfdom. What moved me was the portrait of a well-meaning (even if boorish) young man frustrated (in the deepest sense of that term) by his dysfunctional society.

So I decided to teach the novel. My recent re-reading is for my class–and I will be interested to see how they respond to it because, perhaps in the effort to see it through their eyes, I have found the novel less satisfying this time around.

Paralysis certainly seems to describe the US today. Yes, it is true we live in turbulent times. But all the sound and fury really seems to signify nothing since our dysfunctional neoliberal order only becomes more entrenched, more immune to any reform or revision. Our public discourse barely attends to our society’s ills: homelessness, racism, declining wages, ecological disaster (the list could go on). And the openings for the talented young are being eroded away. No jobs for our PhDs, for our lawyers, for our idealistic young. Politics is no place for someone with a conscience, and neither is business. Where does one get a purchase on this disaster we are inhabiting? This semester, in both my classes, my students exhibit a world-weary cynicism that alarms me. They expect nothing from our politics and our society; they view it as rotten to the core, and take attaining their own separate peace, their own precarious niche within it, as the only path forward available to them.

Reading the novel this time, I found it meandering. True, I now find E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End too formulaic in its presentation of the alternative paths open to England in 1910. Turgenev, like Forster, is writing a “condition of the nation” novel that ponders its future in relation to question of who shall inherit it. (Hence the generational focus of the title.) Unlike Forster, Turgenev offers a much more muddled portrait of the issues. His characters are harder to allegorize as representatives of concrete alternatives, and his interest in thwarted love affairs undercuts the analysis of larger social questions. In short, Turgenev can seem as baffled as his characters, lacking himself a clear vision of the social scene he is trying to portray. Since, like Chekhov, he mostly presents characters who are unable to act, and unlike Joyce in Dubliners, he suppresses any contempt for his paralysed protagonists, the result is a wide-ranging sympathy that seems ineffectual both as a narrative stance and as a political one. His novel, I think, is not angry enough, is not shot through with indignation. Even Bazarov tends to me more angry with himself, with his failures to be as tough in reality as he is in imagination, than he is with his society.

Joyce seems cruel because he blames the victims in Dubliners, never really zooming out to consider the social conditions that feed their paralysis, their despair, their pathetic stratagems for getting through the day. What Turgenev gives us instead is a kind of melancholic despair; he can see the social mess clearly, but sees no way to amend it, and is not inclined to blame anyone for it. Most everyone in the novel is well-meaning even if ineffectual. His satire is reserved for social climbers. And he quite frankly–in a remarkable passage–admits that the peasants are completely incomprehensible. They exist in a separate universe, their motives and psychology an utter mystery to their betters–and to the novelist himself. That gulf is unbridgeable in either direction–and seemingly insures that no progress, no planned change, can ever be achieved.

The parallels to our own time are real enough. There is certainly a gulf between Trump voters and the social worlds that I inhabit. The economic powers that be have managed to date to reap the whirlwind of racism, xenophobia, and class resentment, have managed to keep the essential structures that underwrite their power in place. I dislike apocalyptic scenarios, the ones that rely on a day of reckoning to give the “establishment” (as we used to call it) its comeuppance. Climate disaster is only the latest in a long list of such apocalypses that radicals look toward. Yet it is impossible to read Turgenev and Chekhov, to inhabit their tales of social paralysis, without thinking of how that paralysis led to 1917.