Bleak Thoughts on a Grey Day

We interrupt the regularly scheduled blog posting for some passing gloom. I will get back to Arendt on life tomorrow.

Reading Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. (Harvard UP, 2015). It is sensible and clear and convincing. Except for the continual exposure of “contradictions.” It remains an article of faith on the left that contradictions are symptoms of instability. Yet the contradictions cited are, often, simply logical ones. For example, Butler’s belabored discussion of how soldiers are “dispensable” (i.e. cannon fodder) even while their existence and work is “indispensable” to the nation’s survival. That barely works above the level of wordplay. Even more substantial contradictions—for example, between needing consumers to fuel the economy and failing to pay workers adequate wages—are manageable in both short and long terms. The periodic “crisis” of capitalism have done little to undermine it. We could say, I guess, that capitalism’s ingenuity is endless, or (more to my liking) that power’s ability to withstand both protest and dysfunction should never be doubted.

Power, as Boltanski’s work considers, sometimes yields to critique, mollifying it by adopting certain reforms, and sometimes simply ignores critique, refusing to give an inch. Which strategy is adopted depends on the situation and the calculations that situation elicits. But power does not abdicate. Which is perhaps a way of saying that I have lost my liberal faith. Instead of thinking there is “some justice” to be had, I am more inclined, in these dark times, to say that people find niches, that they find out ways to hide in the interstices of a system big enough and complex enough for there to be corners that aren’t totally colonized. That is, we don’t live in a fully totalitarian world just yet—and a fully totalitarian world would be awfully hard to actually construct and maintain. But the “colonization of the lifeworld” (Habermas’s phrase) proceeds apace.

I usually dislike abstractions like “capitalism” and “power”–and dislike imputing agency to them. But there is something to be said for systematic imperatives. The US manufacturer who must lower labor costs or go out of business because the product can be produced more cheaply elsewhere. The maufacturer’s agency in such a case is so compromised as to be almost non-existent. The same cannot be said as easily for politicians or judges. The Paul Ryans and Samuel Aliotos of the world have much to answer for–and are (this is what hurts) generally immune from ever being held to account. So the theoretical issue is how to adequately account for both human agency and for systematic functionings. I don’t think the notion of “contradiction” helps in either case–and I certainly don’t believe that “contradictions” drive the system’s evolution over time. Tensions between competing goals that require trade-offs yes, opposing forces yes, conflict yes, but contradictions no. All kinds of things can co-exist without compelling change or adjustments.

I met up with a former student yesterday who has been spending time in Ladakh in Northern India, writing a book for school children that aims to help preserve the local language and culture. The community is about 250,000 people and was relatively isolated until recently. Now it depends heavily on tourism in place of its traditional pastoralist economy. 300,000 tourists last year. Eco-tourists, trekkers, but also cultural tourists, so we are in ethnicity inc. territory. Creeping colonization. His work is honorable, but it will also be monetized. How to think about the “contradictions” involved here, that the preservation of a culture is also a means for incorporation into a global tourist industry? Certainly, these contradictions do not imply instability. They just entail different goods, each of which will find ways to accommodate the others. The results will be messy–but so are all social systems, all cultures. The messiness may often our sense of logical coherence or consistency, but it doesn’t mean the result will be short-lived or a source of deep discomfort to those living within it.

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.

Occupy Anarchism

“A kind of anarchism of direct participation has become the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements in America in the last half century. There is a lineage even longer. Decision-making by consensus is of Quaker inspiration, as if to say: Speak and listen, listen and speak, until the spirit of the whole emerges. In its recent incarnation, anarchism is not so much a theory of the absence of government but a mood and a theory and practice of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. Those with time and patience can frolic and practice direct democracy at the same time—at least until the first frost.” Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, The Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (NY: HarperCollins, 2012; pp. 80-81.)

“There was a graver problem with leaderlessness than the fact that it made it awkward for outsiders to know who to speak with. By rejecting leadership continuity, the movement remaining in motion, mobile, able in principle to adapt to new circumstances. But it also rejected the formalities, even the informalities, of accountability. When it made mistakes, it didn’t know what to do about them. It was prone, in difficult hours—and all movements, like organizations and marriages, have difficult hours—to thrash around” (Gitlin, 103-104).

[I]n keeping with the movement’s anarchist, antiauthoritarian thrust, there was a strong sentiment that, as naturalist Garbiel Willow told a New York Times reporter, ‘Demands are disempowering since they require someone else to respond.’ Demands conferred legitimacy on the authorities. Demandlessness, in other words, was the movement’s culture, its identity” (Gitlin, 110).

“The movement’s great majority rightly understood nonviolence not as negation, the absence of destruction, but as a creative endeavor, a repertory for invention, an opening, an identity. . . .Certainly, the tactics can grow stale with repetition, but committed and creative practitioners can renew it. The Occupy movement has been, so far, a seedbed of creativity. Its future rests in no small part on whether it can continue to learn from experience, deepen its tradition and funnel it into new soil” (Gitlin, 127-29).

“Communities governing themselves in assemblies. . . . The radicalism of the core movement helped explain what baffled so many observers—the absence of formal demands and programs. As a guiding principle, what the radicals wanted was direct democracy. It would have been absurd to demand that the authorities create direct democracy. The authorities have everything at stake in resisting such a demand. If you were going to have direct democracy, you had to launch it yourself, directly. You had to infuse the spirit of do-it-yourself with world-changing zeal, and vice versa. Political-economic decisions were too consequential to be made by anyone but all the persons concerned—the stakeholders, to use the current lingo. The radical core wanted a world run not by exclusive committees but by assemblies of the people” (Gitlin, 133, 138).

“The Occupy movement wanted to win reforms and to stay out of politics. At the same time.

Movements are social organisms, living phenomena that breathe in and adapt to their environments, not objects frozen into their categories while taxonomists poke and prod them. The come, go, mutate, expand, contract, rest, split, stagnate, ally, cast off outworn tissue, decay, regenerate, go round in circles, are always accused of being co-opted and selling out, and are often declared dead. If they are large, they contain multitudes, and contradict themselves. Outsider movements struggle to finesse these tensions, to square circles, striving to hold into their outsider status while also producing results” (Gitlin, 141).

So, if economic life is to be made substantially fairer and more decent, and plutocratic power is to be reversed, an enduring movement is essential. Such a movement may not be sufficient—it isn’t humanly possible to know that—but surely it is necessary. Occupy’s thrust is popular, which is essential, but popularity itself does not change the world.

What does? In the longer run, both institutional change and changes of heart and mind. The movement needs structures that flex and learn, train leaders, generate actions, recruit supporters. It needs to be a full-service movement—one that invites participation at many levels. For overmortgaged and underwater home-owners, it needs campaigns to corral the banks that have them in lock. For the civilly disobedient young, it needs appealing direct actions. . . . Whoever oyu are, it needs to prmotoe activities tailored to you.

In the medium run, say five years, networks of activists—the inner movement—need to devise an infrastructure that sustains them, recruits them, focuses their intellectual and strategic life, generates sustained pressure on power, keeps movement tensions manageable, and not least, make significant progress toward driving money out of the political system” (Gitlin, 165-66).

“Historically, coalitions of outer-movement and inner-movement groups have accomplished what individual groups could not” (Gitlin, 208).

I don’t want to belabor this material. Gitlin wrote his book in the spring of 2012, when Occupy was still alive—if on life support. I will let his comments speak for themselves, with only three observations of my own.

It is striking the extent to which Occupy captured the imagination of the left. Its fragility—and its inability to make a dent on the plutocracy it was trying to disrupt—were obvious from the start. Yet the left is so starved for any kind of “movement” that it took up Occupy as a savior. Gitlin bends over backwards to be sympathetic, even as he repeatedly points out all of Occupy’s flaws. His sympathy is to be applauded, not sneered at. But this ember cannot be stoked into a fire. There just wasn’t enough there—and never was.
The point about inner and outer movements is well taken. Some serious pressure from the left on the Democratic Party is sorely needed. So the dilemma remains: when should the radical left stand firm, when should it fall into line behind the Democrats. Disdain for electoral politics is suicidal, as the triumph of Trump shows. But being continually blackmailed by the threat of “their being worse” is a formula for snail’s pace progress.
So the only answer is to organize, to build larger and stronger coalitions. Anarchism is no help in that case. Assemblies are fleeting if they are not constituted as institutions. The people governing themselves in assemblies is a useless, even frivolous, goal. It doesn’t pass the sniff test. It’s a happening, not a politics—and is of a piece with the gestural politics that is so delicious to the avant-garde.

Lives Worth Living

The dilemma: if we adopt a universal, egalitarian, minimalist standard, then every life should be preserved. To say that “every life” refers to all living things on the planet, we are proposing the impossible, enunciating an “ought” that is completely disconnected from “can.” The only real choice is between “letting Nature take its course” or intervening to over-rule what Nature would produce if left alone. Such interventions cannot, however, cannot avoid killing some creatures (whether it is antibiotics killing bacteria or protecting sheep from wolves and thus condemning the wolves to starvation or condemning the creatures the wolves will devour when they can’t get at the sheep). Interventions, in other words, always make a value judgment that some lives are more worth preserving than some other lives. We can’t slip the noose of death, altogether. Death will come—to all creatures in the long run. We can either let it come as it may—or shunt it in one direction or another, buying time for some creatures even as we reconcile ourselves to, or even actively promote, the death of other creatures.

Humanism, at its most basic, presumably, is a prejudice in favor of human lives over the lives of non-human creatures. Such a definition of humanism would make it strictly homologous with racism and sexism—namely the valuing of one category (a particular species or race or sex) over another.

Robinson Jeffers writes “I’d rather kill a man than a hawk.” A radical attempt to slough off humanism. But not a way to avoid judgment or standards. There are, presumably, reasons for preferring the hawk’s life to the human’s. So—to reiterate—it comes to seem impossible to just say that my ethic is to respect all life, to work to preserve every life. Since life feeds on life, some must die in order that others may live.

But there is another problem, one in a rather different register. Let’s assume a full-bore humanism for the moment. So now it might seem the ethic would be revised to say: all human lives are to be preserved, accepting the consequence that all non-human lives are to be sacrificed to the needs of human life prior to any sacrifice of one human life to preserve another human life. This universalist egalitarianism is “liberal” in many ways, although liberals like Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler are made queasy by the thought of animal sacrifice for human life. Still, both of them are adamant that all human lives should be equally valued—or, to phrase it differently, for Nussbaum all humans have an equal right to live, while for Butler all human lives should be equally grievable.

Certainly for Nussbaum (and I suspect for Butler, but won’t pursue here how she would make her case) this equal right of all humans to live is only a minimum, a floor—and, as such, does not represent her full ethical ambitions. It is not just a life humans are entitled to. Each human has an equal claim on the means, resources, and liberty required to “flourish.” Nussbaum offers a detailed list of 10 things—ranging from food, shelter, leisure, and education, to family, friends, and health—one needs in order to flourish. Nussbaum is not arguing that “bare life” (to use Agamben’s term for “zoe”; Agamben is working from similar texts from Aristotle as those that inspire Nussbaum) is not worth living. But she is arguing there are non-minimalist ways of living that are superior to bare life. For Agamben, “bios” in Aristotle’s texts names this life that is more than “bare life.” And one crucial question is what kind of society, what kind of polity, enables the achievement of bios, of flourishing.

But I want to defer that political question for the moment and concentrate on the judgment, the standard, that justifies distinguishing bare life from flourishing. Because now we have a hierarchy within the set of all human lives. They are not all equal. Some are fuller, better, than others. One way of marking this difference would be to say that some lives are more satisfying than others. A life lived without the burden of chronic illness or fairly constant pain would be more enjoyable, easier to bear, even if not necessarily more fulfilling in other ways, than one lived in poor health. Another way of marking this difference would be to say that some lives are more meaningful than others. This second way seems to lead to issues (and ideas) of productivity. A meaningful life is given over to an activity that is deemed important (or significant)—and it has some success in achieving the important aims that it sets out to accomplish. We could say some lives are more admirable than others (in relation to the tasks that life is devoted to advancing and the success of those advancement efforts), just as (negatively) we can think of some lives as “wasted,” as having not made a very productive use of the time that person was allotted on earth.

The “liberal” solution to this dilemma, which introduces troubling (because unequal) distinctions among lives, is a) to try to distinguish between what is freely chosen by the individual and what is imposed from without, and b) to acknowledge a pluralism that realizes that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” The sum result of these two tenets is, basically, to say that material and other deprivations that limit the range of an individual’s life chances and choices are unacceptable—especially if others receive the material goods and social/educational/psychological opportunities denied to some. In practice, this usually comes to rest in the assertion that a strict equality of material goods and other kinds of opportunities is neither necessary nor achievable. But we can identify a “floor” of necessities (that is what Nussbaum 10 point list aims to do) that any “good” polity must provide if its citizens are all to enjoy a decent prospect of creating a flourishing life for themselves.

And the pluralism point says that—once that floor has been provided for all—the polity has no right to intervene in the choices people make about how to live their lives. Full bore tolerance is the only sensible approach to the variety of values that underlie people’s choices. Attempts to impose notions of meaning and importance can only lead to conflict. People are incredibly, perhaps congenitally, stubborn—which means that efforts to dictate how they should behave cause way more trouble than they are worth (because such efforts are rarely successful).

The Nussbaum position seems to me fairly unassailable. A good society should make available the means for flourishing. And her list of basic means is pretty convincing. A simple Kantian test works well here, in my opinion. Look at her list and consider which of its items I would willingly dispense with. Then consider on what grounds could I possibly deny to others any of those items. Why do I deserve something I would begrudge to others or, worse, claim that they did not deserve?

The most common candidate, of course, is work. I deserve something because I work for it. That slacker doesn’t deserve it. Don’t work, don’t eat. And that self-righteous distinction between effortful me and slacker him slides into the thrill of meting out punishment. If conservatives are obsessed with envy as the poison pill vice that afflicts all liberals, then leftists need to become equally obsessed with the sadistic desire to punish that is barely hidden within so much conservative moralism.

I want to finish up today’s thoughts by going in a different direction. What are we to do when the basic requirements for a flourishing life are not withheld by social and political arrangements, but by Nature itself? I speak out of personal experience here, but out of an experience more and more widely shared: witnessing old people outlive their lives, lingering on in debilitated physical and/or mental condition in ways that cruelly condemns them to live a life not worth living. Our humanist commitment to fighting against the death that Nature will eventually dole out, to delay as long we can, has the effect of sustaining a life that is worse than death. The values get completely inverted here. There are circumstances in which death is better than life. (Arendt made this point in her totalitarianism book in a most chilling way when she reminds us that certain kinds of torture can also make death preferable to continued life.)

I understand all the complexities of euthanasia and also understand all the legal safeguards put in place even in jurisdictions that allow assisted suicide. I don’t want to get into how to create a good euthanasia program here. What I want to assert—and I think this should be fairly uncontroversial although many would disagree—is that some lives are not worth living. We can—and should—be pluralistic here as well. A life that would be intolerable to me still might be well worth living for another. And maybe there are some people wo are—and can be—absolutists on this score. For them, any life, no matter how dire its circumstances and its debilities—is better than death. But it is certainly the case that there are also many people who find death preferable to certain lives.

This all makes me unhappy. I would like to take life as an absolute standard. But I am compelled by this logic to accept a) that we do judge among lives, finding some more satisfactory or significant than others (even if we want to protect against the polity devaluing some lives below a minimalist floor because other lives are worthier), and b) that in certain circumstances death is better than life.

In short, we can’t just leave it at “bare life” as a good all should have protected and preserved. Bare life is too bare—and in some cases so extremely bare that death is preferable.