Category: Violence

1848 and Now

So what are my take-aways from reading about the 1848 revolutions in France?

The first is that a violent overthrow of the US government is unthinkable. It is, on one hand, easy to see why this is the case. It just about impossible to imagine a scenario in which the military of this country would go over to the side of the revolutionaries. And I think that holds whether the revolutionaries were of the left or the right. Compare to 1861 when over half of the country’s army joined the Southern secession. A revolution cannot succeed without the military, at the very least, sitting on the sidelines. And you would have to be very deluded to think the military would sit a revolution out—or would come over to the side of the revolutionaries.

But, on the other hand, the absence of organized political violence is deeply puzzling. Think of the over 100 years of racist terrorism in the American South, of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, or of the extra-state violence (on both sides) of the American labor wars from 1880 to 1930. The formation of armed groups prepared to fight for political ends is hardly a rare phenomenon in American history. Yet, with the exception of some very fringe right-wing militias, such groups do not exist in contemporary America—and have not existed since the 1980s. Why?

One possible answer is that, even given what seem like extreme political differences, most everyone benefits enough from today’s society to see its complete upheaval, its being cast into chaos, as a worse alternative to the status quo. That doesn’t seem right when we think about 20% of our children living in poverty and other similar signs of deep distress for many. Going down that road, of course, leads to the perennial question of the quietism of the extremely poor and extremely poorly treated. All the social science evidence always suggests that it takes a minimal level of social well-being to become politically active—and that rising expectations and/or recent losses in status or economic well-being are the engines of violent protest. By that measure, the absence of contemporary rebellion is a measure of despair, of a fatalistic sense that it can’t be any better.

The left can certainly be accused of failing to tell a stirring story about how it could be better. Instead, in the US especially, the left always apologizes when it offers policies that aim to the betterment of the least well off—instead of shouting from the rooftops about the glory of a society where we all join together in caring for all.

Anyway, violence is off the table in 2017 America. Random, single person violence—of either the left or the right—does nothing to change basic structures, while concerted, organized violence (for whatever reason) is unknown.

I will continue this thread with subsequent posts on demonstrations, on “movements,” and on electoral politics.

Hatred of Politics, Part Two

I began this blog shortly before the election, that is two months ago. I am not the only one, I am sure, who feels like it has been two years, not two months.

Today I want to complete the thought about hatred of politics before moving on to other things. Perhaps Trump will be good for someone like me by pushing me to attend to lots of other things in this world. Certainly, I fully intend to avoid being Trump obsessed. The media’s all-Trump all the time posture has done its part in helping to insure I will not be Trump obsessed. The coverage is so fatuous, so imbecilic, that it has proved easy to tune out.

Anyway, here’s my thought. Politics is about, on some very basic level, how we can manage to live with one another. Human life is unsustainable without cooperation. We are social animals and, thus, have to develop ways of being together. That is our glory and our curse. The frictions of our close proximity to intimates, the neighbors, and to strangers are all too familiar. It’s hard to get along with people—maybe because of the very fact that we are dependent upon them.

In any case, one way to define politics (as my last post already suggested) is that it attends to the ways we can manage to live together without descending into violence. Such violence is an ever present possibility and all too often a reality. But I want to say that ordinary, mundane, quotidian politics, with all its frustrations, compromises, and less than ideal arrangements, offers our alternative to violence. We rub along as best we can, having to decide again and again if this injustice, this slight, this inequity needs be swallowed—or if not swallowable, how far are we willing to take the fight for what we deem fair.

So mundane, everyday politics is a pain in the ass. It requires the constant vigilance that we are told is the price of freedom, requires always being on one’s guard against others trying to take advantage, and then having to gin up oneself to once again enter the fray. When there are so many other ways that one would like to be occupying one’s time.

And, then, if we move from this everyday, mundane politics, there are two further sources of disappointment, of hatred of politics. The first is utopia. If politics is about the ways we arrange to live with one another, it is all too easy to imagine alternatives that are better than what we currently have. People are just so god-damned ornery, uncooperative, selfish, inconsiderate etc. etc. The everyday is never as good as we think it could or should be. So getting bogged down in the tiresome negotiations that characterize our getting along with others always pales in comparison to the better society we can imagine if people would only be more agreeable. Daily, lived, politics will never be as good as it should be—and so we will always hate it. It’s so difficult, so time-consuming, and the results are always so imperfect.

On the other side of utopia is violence. Within all of our political arrangements, even the most benign, there is the place of violence, the place where physical force is exerted against bodies. The police and the prison. Enforcement of the law. So even for those who love politics, who are attracted to both its theory (how to build cooperative institutions and social arrangements) and its reality (the give-and-take of negotiations and compromises), there is always this haunting by violence, this fact of a fatal flaw in the pursuit. This tainting must afflict our attitude toward politics, must insure an ineradicable ambivalence. At least for me, it is why I keep coming back to the issue of violence, why that issue feels like the one I have most inadequately addressed in my by now voluminous writings on political questions.

I do want to make one, final, unrelated point. There are those who love politics because they love the thrill of electoral contests. Certainly, our media plays to the “horse race” side of politics while under-reporting the details of actual political negotiations. Given the winner take all nature of American elections (as contrasted to proportional representation schemes), the thrill of annihilating your opponent can be attached to winning an election. So the very attributes that would lead one to be a “political junkie” in relation to electioneering are exactly the wrong attributes for doing the day-to-day work of politics—which is finding a way of enabling people in a pluralistic society to get along and even to manage to accomplish some things collectively. That’s why the Republican Party strategy of “if Obama is for it, we are against it” is so distressing. It turns politics into perpetual contest, with no attention to what it might be good to do, but only attention to thwarting one’s opponents at the polls and in matters of policy. And, as others have noted, that strategy generates hatred and disgust of politics—which serves the end of getting people to tune out, thus allowing the robbery of the public good that many Republicans aim for.

I feel rather condemned by this paradox. To hate politics today is to cede victory to the Republicans. They have worked hard to make Americans hate politics—and that hatred provides cover for their rearranging our society to benefit only a very small elite. So the obvious response is that I should fight against that hatred; I should keep my head in the game. But it is so dispiriting, so ugly, so soul-destroying. The temptation is not to touch this pitch, to save oneself since the general conflagration appears unstoppable.

I am going to address another version of this worry when I turn to discussing Christopher Newfield’s extremely important book, The Great Mistake, in my next few posts.

Self-Sufficiency (by Dustin Ells Howes)

gandhi

Here’s is Dustin Howes’s first response to my thoughts on his book. More to come, as I will also continue my posts on the book–and will respond to his comments when I feel moved to do so. (Dustin’s comments here connect to the post: Freedom without Violence). This first response seems to me not to call for any comments from me; it very clearly lays out a key argument of Dustin’s book and what is at stake:

Self-Sufficiency

The two figures I draw upon to understand the roots of the idea that violence expresses freedom are Pericles and Aristotle. Pericles argues in his famous funeral oration that Athenians are distinguished from others by their capacity for politics. The fact that they decide together what to do and know how to rule themselves makes Athenian men free. The highest expression of this freedom is the courage they display in warfare. When the Athenians lost the Peloponessian war, philosophers and women called the connection between freedom and violence into question. Aristotle is a nuanced reactionary to these critics, who attempts to resuscitate the freedom violence connection without celebrating empire for its own sake.

What I had not realized until John raised the issue is how this is baked into Aristotle’s definition of the polis. Aristotle says that what distinguishes a city-state from a family or a village is a word usually translated as self-sufficiency. To be clear, the “self” here cannot refer to the individual. Indeed, one way to interpret his argument is that freedom is only possible with the company of a certain number of people. Freedom and politics proper are collective. The only way to be free of dependency is to come together with others to exercise our uniquely human capacity for talking about and ruling with justice. This is contrasted with and requires the dependency of slaves and women, who are ruled by free men. The horizontal relationship among a collective of equals is founded upon a vertical relationship between the free and enslaved largely defined by violence. As John mentions, most slaves were women and most were acquired in warfare.

Democratic freedom as collective self-sufficiency underwritten by violence that subdues the unfree is both familiar and unfamiliar in our time and the past century. Nationalism and socialism both assert a brand of collective freedom often expressed through violence. Independence and secessionist insurgencies all over the world assert that collective freedom requires a particular collective be unhampered by association with others.

Yet in the Anglo-American context, the idea of collective freedom is complicated by an individualistic understanding of self-sufficiency. In the book, I place the liberal individual squarely within a tradition that claims violence is only legitimate in the defense of freedom. Every individual has the ability to enforce the natural law, which reason tells us demands the preservation of life and liberty. The dynamic John describes where individuals find the actions of others frustrating and the potential for eliminating or dominating them liberating, is one liberals reject in theory. For thinkers like Locke for instance, any reasonable person will recognize the rights of others. However, not everyone is reasonable, some will take license (Locke refuses to call it liberty) and this is when violence becomes necessary. We might say that liberal individuals must defend liberty from those who mistakenly believe it can be expressed through violence.

But in practice, the figure of the self-sufficient individual is so wedded to his enforcement powers, that it is hard to imagine his identity without them. The sources informing the figure I have in mind are many, it may not even be one figure, and is almost exclusively masculine. The individual in the state of nature cultivating and defending his property, the republican militia man defending his free state, the frontiersman who survives with his wits and his musket, the cowboy who draws fast but only when needed, the cop who is tough but fair, the homeowner who stands ready to defend his family. The line between violence as expressing freedom and violence as defending freedom is blurry in these archetypes. Some also blur the line between individual and collective self-sufficiency. The militia man is part of a militia, the cop represents the state. In just war theory, states themselves become liberal individuals in relation to other states. Historically, certainly in the American context, rugged individualism and the free state have been set against the dependency and unreasonableness of savages, women, slaves and foreigners. So self-sufficiency does a tremendous amount of work here.

Our first response from the perspective of nonviolence might be to challenge the very notion of self-sufficiency and point to the undeniable interdependence of human beings. The purveyors of violence may wish to stand alone but they will need the help of others, and in particular, find that how others respond to their violence will largely determine its impact. This holds true for the violence of peoples or individuals.

But even while emphasizing our interdependence, advocates of nonviolence are keen to offer a quite different vision of self-sufficiency. Gandhi in particular argues that every single individual is capable of creative nonviolence and self-rule. Self-sufficiency and swaraj involve confronting violence and having the discipline to refrain from violence but encompass a great deal more as well. The spinning wheel as the symbol of independence and the centrality of home spun cloth to the movement are the most prominent examples but the entire system of cottage industries Gandhi sought to promote was inflected with the idea that individuals, villages, and nations ought to be self-sufficient.

Gandhi challenges the presumption that human need stands opposed to freedom. The labors of the ashram could be performed in conjunction with politics. He would sometimes spin while hosting prominent dignitaries. His public experiments with the mortification of his body and his glorification of self-sacrifice stand in a complicated relationship to socialism and feminism. But on this particular issue of self-sufficiency, he shares much in common with certain versions of both. He collapses public and private, individual and collective self-rule, and the labor of the household and political action. Self-sufficiency stands in stark contrast with Aristotelian patriarchy and liberal individualism. He offers a vision of freedom where interdependence is acknowledged and valued while the capacity of individuals to provide for themselves is emphasized equally. This raises issues of political organization that I will address in other responses. (BY Dustin Ells Howes)

Sacrifice/Self-Sacrifice

Anyone who thinks about violence has to, at some point, attempt to come to terms with sacrifice. The staged killing of a victim (whether animal or human) is part of just about every known religion. So here is a violence deliberately chosen and carefully scripted. What it its logic? Why has it been seen as necessary and/or beneficial in so many cultures?

I have hardly got good answers here. Everything I have read on sacrifice–from Mauss to Bataille to Girard–has puzzled me. I only want to say two thing here.

Like Waldo everywhere present but never center stage, the notion of self-sacrifice lurks throughout Howes’s book. (There is an index entry on self-sacrifice, so Howes clearly knows this is an element of his whole position.) Here’s one instance: “[F]ollowing the moral law may require self sacrifice. Given that others often fail to practice self rule, the immediate consequences of doing so may be physically harmful to the person who acts according to their duty. Gandhi was more clear about how this public demonstration of self-sacrifice might affect others. By holding fast to the truth and refraining from destroying or attacking others, the satyagrahi would offer a model of self-rule and moderation that might change others” (185). This passage points toward both of the things I want to say.

First, I think we reach here the nub of the resistance to pacifism. Why should I submit myself, sacrifice myself, to the violent other? Do we really believe the rape victim should sacrifice herself instead of acting in self-defense?

But let me hasten to add that this is not some kind of reductio. Just the opposite. It indicates how profound and radical pacifism is. The logic of self-defense is congruent with the logic of much violence: i.e. some people, because of their behavior, deserve to be physically harmed or otherwise restrained/punished for their actions. In forgoing this logic, pacifism is revealed to be “beyond good and evil.” It is not concerned with separating out the worthy from the unworthy, those who are to be shielded from violence and those who are to be subject to it. Pacifism refuses to legitimate any violence. And in the name of that all-inclusive vision, and in the attempt to bring about a world of non-violence, it accepts that victimage may be imposed on the pacifists.

So I do not think you can have a full-bore pacifism without accepting the terrible, yet sublime, consequence of self-sacrifice. Instead of violently attacking the other, the pacifist accepts the violence inflicted upon her by the other. This seems close to insane–and makes pacifism a path that appeals to very few.

But the pacifist can hope that her actions are exemplary, are an illustration of a different way to live with others. She may not live to see that new day, but her voluntary acceptance of victimage might enable that new day to dawn.

Which brings me to my second point. Sacrifice is meaningless if not publicly staged, if not visible. There must be spectators. This is true both practically and theoretically. Practically, it means that non-violent social movements will only succeed when their stoic acceptance of violence inflicted by their opponents is broadcast to the body politic as a whole. Protest is theatrical and rhetorical. It is aimed toward winning hearts and minds, at converting those who currently have not chosen sides. The protesters say two things: one, come join us, and two, we occupy the moral high ground vis a vis our opponents. (I think it is almost always “the moral high ground”; protests work very differently–and usually not non-violently–when it is a question of advancing or defending particular interests, not moral principles). If a regime can succeed in keeping the protestors out of the media, out of general sight, the protests do not have much chance of succeeding.

Theoretically, this theatrical nature of sacrifice connects up to ritual and to tragedy (understood here as the plays put on during the Greek Dionysian festivals). This may connect as well to public executions and to lynchings. The point is about public displays of violence–where the violence is scripted, mostly contained to a few chosen victims, and allows for some kind of participation by the congregated public. Here’s where I lose the thread. The persistence and near-universality of such public stagings of violence is obvious. How to explain their omnipresence baffles me. Just why have they proved so necessary to social cohesion?

Self-sacrifice, it seems to me, would stand as an attempt to intervene in not just generalized violence but also in particularized sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is an attempt to rewrite the scripts of such rituals. Self-sacrifice seems to require publicity in exactly the same way that sacrifice does. But if sacrifice constitutes a public through its shared animosity toward the victim, self-sacrifice tries to constitute a public based on a repudiation of the dividing line between us, the outraged innocents taking vengeance, and them, the unworthy ones who have called forth our righteous wrath.