Category: Violence

Religion, Sect, and Party (Part 3)

Moving from religion to politics, in Slezkine’s The House of Government, basically entails moving the search for transcendence, the negotiation of the gap between the real and the ideal, from the difference between the profane and the sacred to the difference between the status quo and some projected (imagined) improvement upon the existing state of affairs. Institutional religion—the church—represents the more quietist approach: the acceptance of the imperfection of the fallen world along with the promise of a better world elsewhere coupled with structures and hierarchies meant to insure stability, peace, and order in the imperfect here and now. The compromises of the institutional church are always contested by impatient visionaries who long, with equal fervor, to create a utopian now and to punish those who stand in the way of achieving that utopia.

For Slezkine, the utopians organize themselves into “sects.” Following the work of Ernst Troeltsch, “the distinction between a church and a sect” can be stated as follows: “a church is an institution one is born into. . . . [A] sect [is] a group of believers radically opposed to the corrupt world, dedicated to the dispossessed, and composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion and shared a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness, ethical austerity, and social egalitarianism” (93). In Slekzine’s philosophy of history (I can use no other term for his wild—and world-weary—identification of a pattern he thinks repeats itself over and over) “the history of the new order [humanist post-Christian polities], like that of the old one [Christianity prior to the Reformation], is a story of routinization and compromise punctuated by sectarian attempts to restore the original promise” (107). Sectarians scorn compromise and institutions, are often galvanized into action by a charismatic leader, and embrace violence in the name of the good. When not fighting the reprobate, they are constantly in-fighting in order to insure that only the absolutely pure are members of the sect.

If revolutionaries are best understood as sectarians, Selkzine’s model explains a) their trust in and non-distaste [to use a weird double negative] of violence; b) their suspicion of and hence ineptitude in establishing institutions; c) their difficulty in sustaining trust and working, cooperative relationships once the movement grows beyond a “knowable community” (i.e. they are very bad at “imagined communities” because committed to the intense relationships of a shared oppositional—and doctrinally pure—set of beliefs); and d) their impatience with compromise and their fury when their utopian vision does not materialize (generating the frantic search for people to blame for that failure).

This, of course, is another way of saying that it is easier to be in opposition than in power. It seems fair to say that the Republican Party has become more and more sect-like over the past thirty years. Certainly it is much more prone to expel members who don’t toe the line (RINOs), and is hostile to compromise and to institutional structures/norms. Its contempt for the routines of governance makes it just about incapable of governing; it has ground legislative activity to an almost complete halt, while rendering federal bureaucracies increasingly inept. As many have noted, today’s Republican Party is not conservative; it is revolutionary reactionary. It is out to destroy, not to conserve.

The oddity is that its destructive urges are almost entirely negative. It is not driven by a positive vision, but mostly by a hatred of the elites it associates with anti-American values, tastes, and snobbishness. Yes, there is nostalgia for a certain kind of small-town American culture that was built on racial exclusion and post-War prosperity. But there is no serious—or even non-serious visionary—platform for reestablishing that world. Empty slogans suffice if the joys of hatred are allowed free expression. It really is as if the losers in this neoliberal universe will be content if given free rein to express the animus—most fully expressed in the death threats they love to send to people, but more mildly expressed in the various statements now deemed unacceptable in polite discourse—they feel toward the non-whites and the professional elites they cannot avoid in today’s business world and public sphere. In their heart of hearts, undoubtedly there are true believers who think deporting all the immigrants is a possibility, but surely they are a small minority of those who vote Republican. Similarly, those same voters know that the manufacturing jobs are not coming back.

Contrasted to sects (in Slekzine’s view) are parties: “Parties are usually described as associations that seek power within a given society (or, in Max Weber’s definition, ‘secure power within an organization for its leaders in order to attain ideal or material advantages for its active members’) (58). The key difference here is that the party accepts, has a huge amount invested in, the current institutional and political order. To that extent, parties are all conservative; they seek to preserve the current system—and are oriented to gaining power with that system as the means toward furthering the party’s particular ends. That’s why parties are the “loyal opposition”; they are not revolutionary, but are partners with other parties in the preservation of the current order.

Thus, today’s Republican Party seems to exist in some kind of uneasy (unsustainable?) tension between being a party and a sect. It quite obviously seeks power to gain advantages for its active members—the donor class to which it delivers the benefits of tax cuts and deregulation etc. But its appeal to its non-donor class voters is sectarian—and the result is that its elected officials include true believers who embody the no compromise hostility to institutional forms that is a large part of the party’s current brand. These radicals will cheerfully have the government default on its debts (to take one example) and are constantly at odds with the more staid party functionaries who are only interested in power within the current system (Mitch McConnell being the epitome of this kind of politician).

Because of its use of sectarian tactics (tactics which someone like McConnell thinks he can keep safely under control), the Republicans have clearly abetted (by authorizing) various kinds of hate crimes and violence, even as they have given us an authoritarian, charismatic President. The Party has moved far enough toward being a sect that its ability to actually govern is more than questionable, even as its attacks (voter suppression, harassment—and worse—of immigrants) upon outsiders to its “America” increase in ferocity.

All that said, it is hard not to feel nostalgic for a sectarian left. Sects make things happen in the world; I have just finished reading Maud Gonne’s autobiography (of which more in future posts) and she, as well as Slekzine, tells a tale featuring dedicated conspirators, people spending their whole lifetimes committed to a cause of radical change. A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin are American examples. In all these cases, from the 400 or so “Old Bolsheviks” to the 400 or so dedicated Irish nationalists to the 400 or so “race warriors” in the US, mountains were eventually moved. If there exists such networks in the contemporary world, I don’t know of them. Yes, we have the rightist militias. But what do we have on the left: the respectable organizations, the ACLU and the like, fine in their own way, but very much within the established institutional order.

What I guess I am saying is that I want sectarian dedication, single-mindedness and energy, without sectarian violence and constant in-fighting. After all, both Bolsheviks and the Irish revolutionaries, once they had succeeded in overthrowing the existing system, ended up fighting against one another. It is shocking—at least to me—to read anti-Treaty documents in 1922 that casually refer to the Free State soldiers and officials as “the enemy” when those numbered in “the enemy” were one’s comrades in the fight against the British in 1921. Yes, there was some hesitation at the start of the Irish Civil War about killing one’s friends and erstwhile comrades, but that hesitation disappeared with frightening, sickening, rapidity.

Maybe—and just maybe because I may be wildly over-idealizing here—one key factor (hardly the only one) involves careers. Today’s Republican Party reactionary revolutionaries can safely attack governmental/legal/political institutions because they are not threatening (in fact see themselves as reinforcing and protecting) the institutional structures of American capitalism. And it is well documented, there in plain sight for any operative to see, that the right has sinecures (in the think tanks, in lobbying organizations, increasingly in academia, etc.) readily available for those who do the party’s work. That’s one way of saying that the Republicans are between a party and a sect; they are attached to an existing structure that provides a ladder to climb, a route to riches, recognition, and security. It is just that that structure is, they like to believe, non-political, the “free market,” and thus enables a no-holds-barred hostility to political institutions.

The revolutionaries of the left—Lenin, Gandhi, Rustin—had no such safe perch, or secure position at which to aim. They were fully on the outside, existing in a no man’s land where recognition, money, and eventual success were never guaranteed and were (for years) withheld. They were stepping out into a void with no safety net. As I say, maybe I am wrong here, guilty of over-idealizing. I am hardly claiming these men did not have their faults—their vanities and their self-indulgences. But they did not exist within any kind of established institutional order that provided security. Only the intense relations within the sect offered some form of support.

Am I saying that existence within institutions stands in the way of being a true advocate for change? Certainly, concern for the preservation of one’s own slot, one’s own career, for the sources of one’s own income and status, are deterrents to devoting oneself wholeheartedly to a transformation of existing conditions.

I don’t see where the kind of sect, the kind of movement that enabled Lenin, Gandhi and Rustin to live almost completely outside existing political, economic, and social setups, exists on the left today. The Bohemian outside appears to have disappeared. Life in the US has become so expensive, especially housing costs, that the counter-cultural enclaves such as Brooklyn or the Bay Area are the playgrounds of the rich now. At the same time, increased surveillance (both physical and digital) gives a revolutionary counter-culture much less room in which to maneuver.

There is also the left’s almost universal repudiation of violence (the overblown existence of the anti-fa “movement” notwithstanding). Maybe it is hard to have a sect without some kind of commitment to violence. (I want to consider that idea in subsequent posts.)

Add the fact that being a sectarian is tedious. Mostly what the old Bolsheviks did was read, write, and have endless meetings—for which they then spent long stretches of time in prison. The hoped-for moment of transformation is endlessly postponed. How energy, passion, and hope are sustained over such long periods of time is a mystery and a miracle, much to be admired.

Maud Gonne’s life has much to offer in thinking about such issues. So I will go there next

Impasse

George Shulman (NYU prof who is part of the reading group that meets in New York every year) is interested in impasse—basically the feeling that we are stuck in a world we hate but can’t figure out how to change.

Framing it as a question of impasse helps me to state baldly some major themes of this blog’s agonizing over the past six to eight months. First comes the sense that current evils somehow operate under a thin veneer (but an effective veneer) of legality and normalcy. There seems no way within current legal and political institutions to intervene to stop daily operations that are unjust and render millions of people miserable and millions more vulnerable, a step away from misery. The machine grinds on relentlessly.

Second comes the primary debate on the left. At what level should the effort for change takes place. Is electoral politics any use at all? Could we actually vote into office a political party that would effect the changes needed, alter both the ends and the means (i.e. significantly redistribute resources in ways that actively alter balances of political and economic power)? It seems to take larger and larger leaps of faith to believe that the system can be reformed (to use the hoariest of clichés). The gridlock (another cliché) that is another name for impasse seems utterly baked in at this point. Too many veto points, too many established immunities (campaign finance, gerrymandering, voter suppression, lobbying, tax breaks, conservative judges etc. etc.) for those fighting against change. Obstruction is the order of the day.

So the electoral route is only going to work if there is astounding pressure for change from the populace—and the US populace rarely swings left and seems, instead, to cling desperately to what little it has (deeply averse to risk) instead of working to force the system to yield it more.

The alternative, then, is some sort of forced, dramatic change. Two things intrude here. The first is the worry (a big and legitimate one) about forcing a change that the majority does not desire. Anti-democratic (in the core sense of the term’s reference to the will of the people) change is problematic for any number of reasons. So the left’s first work, it would seem, must take place on the battlefield of rhetoric. We must win the hearts and minds, so that the clamor for substantive change can not be ignored.

The second problem is violence. With the possible exception of Terry Eagleton (and even he masks his talk of violence in the “soft” language of Christ-like sacrifice and of Greek tragedy), all the radical leftists I read shy away from talking about violence. In Judith Butler’s book on the performative theory of assembly, she briefly says that activism must be non-violent. Interestingly, the force of that “must” is more pragmatic than ethical. Violence is counter-productive; it calls down repression at the same time that it alienates potential supporters. Non-violence is the winning strategy.

But a description of effective non-violent tactics is missing. Non-violent disruptions of business as usual, of daily life, will be treated almost as harshly as violence. Which isn’t to say that martyrdom can’t prove effective politically. But we seem at this moment pretty far from a place where martyrs will be viewed sympathetically. (Contrast to King’s children campaign.) I fight shy of asking people for fruitless sacrifices; of course, the response is that one never knows ahead of time if the sacrifice will be fruitless. We can’t know what might, against all logic and predictions, galvanize people. The shortness of the current news cycle, the way in which things (even the horrible mass shootings at schools), fade from public attention is just another barrier in the way of imagining galvanizing sacrifices. (This returns me to my obsession with figuring out how to create a movement that has legs, that is sustainable over the long haul.) When today’s anti-liberal, radical leftists write of galvanizing moments, they reference Seattle’s anti-globalization demonstrations and Occupy, neither of which really offers grounds for hope. There is a vast sympathy for the Palestinians, but nobody is calling for the formation of liberation fronts or armies in the West.

Eschewing violence has much going for it. Calling for large-scale, systematic transformation, however, and refusing to think hard about the means (including violence) toward that change seems more wish-fulfillment than productive thinking. King’s non-violence was paired with the urban riots of the 60s; the anti-war demonstrators were beaten by police and they didn’t end the war, although they did makes its prosecution more costly for our benighted political leaders. The system (I keep using that word for lack of a better shorthand at the moment) is violent through and through—under the cloak of legality. The left keeps coming to a gunfight with a knife—and keeps refusing to even consider the fact that it might be in a gunfight.

Within this set of dillemmas/delusions, the left’s most characteristic move is to argue that the majority really is on its side, that if we just offered the populace full unadulterated leftism (some kind of democratic socialism presumably, although the left gets fuzzy on those details as well), we would win elections handily. Bernie Sanders would have swept to victory. It’s pretty to think so, isn’t it? And it gives our dissident leftist so much to do—fulminating about those liberals who queer the pitch, instead of thinking about the really hard work that would be required (especially in addressing that populace he is convinced secretly agrees with him) to break the ongoing impasse.

Do I have anything constructive to offer? Not all that much since it wouldn’t be an impasse if we weren’t stuck. But I will say that I much prefer loud denunciations, usually on moral grounds but sometimes on pragmatic ones, of the right’s constant enactment of petty and major cruelties. The internecine fights on the left (of which I guess this post counts as one) are tiresome and not very useful. True, the temptation to go that way is reinforced by the fact that such arguments may even gain a hearing and a response, while one’s jeremiads against the right seem cast out into the void, aiming to reach a general public that is nothing if not absent more than present, and certainly not going to move a right that has proved itself, again and again, without conscience and beyond shame. Still, better to be a witness to infamy, than a nit-picking polemicist within one’s own tribe.

And better to be a clear thinker about ends and means than to throw blame about indiscriminately (those nefarious liberals!) and talk as if political victory was a matter of just snapping one’s fingers.

Honor

Arendt never appeals to honor—and, no doubt, she would find the concept antique. But both her celebration of “public happiness” and her comments on the desire to excel in public, to live a life worthy of becoming the stuff of stories, point to her desire to find some account of motives that transcend the desire to satisfy material, bodily needs. On the one hand, denigration of the body has a long history in Western thought, with both Greek and Christian variants. On the other hand, that suspicion of the “material” gains a new impetus in the 1950s from the twin perspective of Arendt’s anti-Marxist repudiation of materialist philosophy and her equally ant-consumerist suspicions of “materialist” consumer culture.

Love of the world, then, is meant to describe a commitment that extends beyond the selfish desire to accumulate material goods, just as her resolutely non-material “action” and its production of an ephemeral “space of appearances” introduces something utterly distinct from the necessities connected to “life.”

What I am pursuing here is her account of what motivates “action” (understood in her strict sense of the term). The good action directly strives for is called, at various times in her work, “freedom,” or “renown.” Actors want to win the admiration of others even as they also (in Nietzschean fashion) simply enjoy the expenditure of energy that is action.

I see a double problem here, a Scylla and Charybdis, if you will. Scylla is the contempt for the body, for mere life. We have already seen this with Ruskin declaring “life is the only wealth” and then going on to tell us the terms upon which different living creatures should accept death. Arendt’s version of this line of thinking comes in her meditations on Socrates in her late work. Living out of harmony with oneself, sacrificing one’s integrity and moral ideals simply in order to survive in a despicable regime like Hitler’s, is to win life on terms where it is not worth having. So we get two things here: a standard by which some lives are ruled deficient, and a denigration of the bodily as (at best) an insufficient basis of value judgments or (at worst) a positive detriment to making value judgments. In the second case, whatever pertains to the body and its needs should be ruled out of court when considering the worth of a human life. Pushed even further, to the Hegel master/slave phenomenon, the person who would prioritize “life” over other (more worthy) standards ends up a slave—and (perhaps) rightfully so. This final bit is not Hegel because he has his dialectical reversal coming, but it is not clear that Arendt offers any such escape. She seems simply contemptuous of the modern consumer who has no sense of or taste for the joys of public life. Such people are living swinish (Mill), unfree (Arendt) lives.

The Charybdis here is trying to identify a non-pernicious standard of value that doesn’t simply reduce to supplying material needs. We certainly seem to need a non-utilitarian, non-economic, set of motives—and those motives should, in some form or another, include moral considerations addressing our desired relations to others and to the planet. Reductionism (Kenneth Burke’s “debunking”) can only lead to cynicism. If everyone is always out for the main chance; if it’s the struggle for life that overwhelms all else, then we get the macho “eat or be eaten” with its concomitant scorn for all the sentimental claptrap about decency, rights, love, altruism etc. Yesterday’s New York Review of Books offers a poignant example. James Shapiro reviews a new interpretation of Hamlet that basically argues that the play shows Shakespeare revealing humanist claptrap to be the hot air that it really is. Hamlet delays because he can’t face up to the realpolitik of courtly life, while spouting half-baked humanist truisms that he has neither mastered nor believed. Hamlet is a fatuous young fop—and the play reveals his fatuousness. And Shakespeare is a complete nihilist. A perfect reading for our current political moment. There are no barriers of any sort (religious, moral, humanist) against sheer brute power.

When Arendt comes to this point, in her meditations on morality under the supreme conditions of Nazi rule, she can only conclude that the kind of integrity, the felt need to live a life in accord with the moral principles one had understood as one’s own, is rare, but not impossible or utterly unknown. She famously says that the Nazis showed that most people will change their moral code as easily as they will change their table manners. (She probably should have said as easily as they will change the kinds of clothes they wear in response to changes in fashion. We also have Shakespeare’s marvelously cynical statement in The Tempest –spoken by the villain Antonio—that “For all the rest,/They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk;/They’ll tell the clock to any business that/We say befits the hour” (Act 2, sc 1, 289-92). Most people will say what the powerful tell them to say.) In short, Arendt has only a very thin reed to offer us; there will be some who will die rather than live the life totalitarianism puts on offer, but only “some” and they will not be effective in face of the ruthless totalitarians. A very short step from cynicism—or maybe the better term in despair.

Despair is certainly one quite understandable response to our dark times. And maybe the long bloody track of human history makes a sensible response altogether to “the human condition.” For we can consider one last twist of the knife: honor (or morality) might seem, if it exists, a bulwark against sheer power. But then honor and morality themselves are so often used to justify violence. Honor killings, as well as the fact that “honor” is so central to warrior cultures, reminds us that the “doux commerce” of the bourgeoisie was supposed to usher in a kinder and gentler era. The bourgeois critique of honor is hardly entirely off-base; the same can be said of the atheists’ critique of sectarian violence. The Nietzschean conclusion that humans can turn anything into the occasion for oppression and violence appears to hold. Despair and misanthropy seem to follow in course, accompanied by a fierce sarcasm about all the high-falutin’ words with which humans dress up their shitty behavior to one another—and to non-humans.

I want a standard of decency that will hold, some kind of barrier against the flood of exploitation. I don’t see one on the horizon at the moment.

Population Control and Violence

To go back a few steps, one puzzle is why Arendt, Foucault, Taylor and others believe that taking “life” as the primary value leads to states that kill (in large numbers?)

James Scott’s Against the Grain (Yale UP, 2017) (which I have just about finished reading) offers some ideas along that line. Scott accepts that both slavery and war existed before the emergence of the state. But he sees the state as obsessed from the start with population control. So much for Foucault’s bringing the question of population on board somewhere in the eighteenth century. For Scott, it is all about people, and almost nothing to do with territory, when considering the underlying motives of war.

Life, in its barest form, is about subsistence, about producing enough to sustain life. (In that sense, Scott is a materialist of a fairly straight-forward Marxist/Darwinian type.) The state always creates classes of people who do not directly (or even indirectly) produce the stuff needed for subsistence. Thus, any state must 1) organize production in such a way that a surplus is produced, and 2) appropriate that surplus for distribution to those who do not produce the basics (food, clothing etc.) Furthermore, states create a need for non-subsistence goods (metals, luxuries, the implements of war, the ceremonial architecture of hierarchies) that necessitate 1) trade and 2) even more laborers who are not directly producing subsistence goods and who must be fed.

The problem with life—if we think in Arendt’s terms—is that it requires “labor.” The problem of the state, in Scott’s rendering, is that it amplifies the need for labor because states invent so many more things to labor on. War is a primary means to gain access to more labor. The most important prize of a successful battle is prisoners who can be turned into slaves. Or, alternatively, the threat of violence can make a neighboring society agree to pay tribute.

The state, then, has a stake in keeping its slaves alive, in increasing its population in order to secure an adequate supply of labor. But it also has to coerce people into doing that labor because there is no good reason to voluntarily do the work. It’s economic exploitation and appropriation from the get go—and all the way down. States are always kleptocracies—and taxes are the form that robbery takes.

Scott has written a book called Two Cheers for Anarchism that is not very good. His other work is off the charts fantastic. (Seeing Like a State, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Weapons of the Weak, and The Art of Not Being Governed.) He comes down squarely on the side of organized violence is far worse (because more effective and more systematic) than the sporadic but ever-present violence found in non-state societies. Far be it from Scott to accept Steven Pinker’s insistence that the rule of law curbs violence. If we go by the numbers, the legitimate violence of the state always claims more victims than free-lancers.

Still—does a state that claims to be working in the service of life inflict more death than a state that locates its raison d’être elsewhere. And does it even make any sense to think in those terms? What would a state look like that did not claim to be enhancing, protecting, sustaining the life of its subjects? Even the most brutal regime, one that accepts, without putting any kind of pretty face on it, that power must be deployed ruthlessly and continuously, still sees that power as enhancing and protecting the lies of the powerful. The wielders of power don’t will their own death.

The alternative is a sacrificial culture, one centered around a death cult. The Nazis approach that elevation of death over life. “Balanced against this life, this death.” (Yeats). It seems plausible to me that, in certain circumstances, a kind of fatalistic embrace of death, an even joyful embrace of destruction including destruction of the self, would be possible. In all the stuff about killing that I have been reading, about the ecstasy, the “high,” of battle, I haven’t seen anyone talk about the ecstasy of embracing one’s own death in the general conflagration. Surely, however, that’s an ecstasy of submission, not one of power. (The ever presence of those two sides of Nietzsche, his celebration of the “beast” who acts unapologetically out of the will to power shadowed by the masochism of the Dionysian figure who glories in suffering and in willing to live his whole painful life over and over again.) To embrace death is an odd combination of hatred for life and never feeling more alive than when the end of life is imminent.

The point, if we take the Darwinian perspective that also appealed so much to Engels, is that the preservation of life (enabling its reproduction) is the first requirement imposed upon us by biology. No state could possibly escape that imperative. Scott is simply arguing that the state is not necessarily the most efficient and preferable (according to a variety of criteria) means for preserving life—and employing the state as the means for subsistence comes with some very high costs. He clearly believes that non-state solutions to the problem of subsistence are actually better for most involved (if not for the elites at the top of state hierarchies.)

Scott’s conclusion is driven by his not valuing the achievements of “civilization” very highly and by his firm belief that “culture” (as opposed to “civilization”) is preserved (and can ever flourish) in the stateless conditions that we have mistakenly thought of as “dark ages.” Arendt’s take, it seems to me, would be the exact opposite. She sees the polity—and politics—as the pinnacle of human achievement precisely because it transcends labor and the necessities of subsistence. “Man’s life would be cheap as beasts” (King Lear) if we didn’t aspire to—and actually achieve—something more than mere subsistence. “Freedom” is only granted to us by the polis and precisely means escaping from the bonds of necessity, of being able to indulge in the non-productive “action” that politics enables. Arendt is motivated by a horror of production, of doing something for the sake of securing or making the means to life. She values those things that are not conducive to preserving or sustaining life.

Thus, she also wants a state not oriented toward life. Instead, her ideal state (just like her ideal political actor) is motivated by a “love of the world.” That’s where I will pick it up tomorrow.