I will begin, as I often do, with a facetious reference to
an old and rather bad movie, viz Demolition Man, starring Sandra Bullock
as a cop from the future and Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes, who have
been defrosted and are going at it.
Early in the movie [which, unusually for Stallone, is a comedy] Stallone’s
character gets flummoxed by the toilet of the future, unable to understand
something that is obvious to every child then.
Are we like Stallone? Are we
oblivious to issues of morality or politics that those of the future cannot
imagine not understanding? Will someone
in 2119 ask, incredulously, “How could Noam Chomsky eat meat?”
Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Let us not ask, Had I been a member of the
Continental Congress would I have accepted a United States based on
slavery? Let us instead ask, Had I been
a slave in 1787, would I have accepted a United States based on slavery? We know the answer to that question, because
we have an historical record of the statements and actions of slaves. The answer is No.
All well and good if you had been Black. But suppose you had been White. What then?
Well, the correct answer, I believe, can be found in that old Pete Seeger
union song, “Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?” You
cannot determine the fundamental principles of morality by reasoning about
them. You must make an existential
choice. Who are your comrades? Who are your enemies? Regardless of the circumstances into which
you were born, do you choose to make common cause with the oppressors or with
the oppressed, with the exploiters or with the exploited? In the end, this is a choice, not an
inference, regardless of what Plato or Aristotle or Hobbes or Rousseau or Kant
says. Trust me, I have danced with all of
them.
Were there White men and women in the eighteenth century who
chose to make common cause with the slaves rather than with their owners? Indeed there were. Thomas Jefferson could have done the same,
had he so chosen.
Let me close with a remark on an entirely different matter,
the Jeffrey Epstein arraignment and associated scandal. It does not surprise me at all that Alan Dershowitz
was one of Epstein’s lawyers, or that the Clintons were buddy buddy with
Epstein. Then again, perhaps it is not
really a different matter at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XEnTxlBuGo
I fully agree. Real social change begins at the bottom with a change in morality, in seeing the social ills and taking a stand against the oppressor. Attempts to impose a social change via a revolutionary clique or a top-down ideology always replaces the current set of "bad guys" with some new guys who are easily corrupted.
ReplyDeleteReal change is a frustratingly slow process. Today's "revolutionaries" are always impatient because they have Truth in their back pocket and can't be bothered to actually sell their ideas. A short cut to power is always tempting.
What interests me most is how changes in material culture/technology and changes in moral/religious/social values work their way through to a new and (hopefully) better future. Right now we are seeing a revolution similar to the 15th century spread of printing and books. The Internet and "social media" are changing how information and disinformation are spread, how politics is enacted, and how social values change. It isn't clear to me that it is "for the better". But it is always hard to understand the evolution of civilization.
I wonder: do you spend time pondering how the artifacts of today and the kind of social relations of today are shaping the future. I would love to hear your thoughts.
I was thinking about this a bit more as I was doing my daily shopping...
ReplyDeleteThere was a dark undercurrent to the emergency of the printing press. Via religion it spread reading, but that led to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century. You would think wider literacy is an unalloyed good. But it had a dark side.
The techno-optimists of the 1990s and early 2000s felt that the Internet would "liberate" us and make true "democracy" possible, e.g. through digital access to the polls. But instead it has unleashed the evil of "social media" where trolls and ideologues reign.
I'm a pessimistic optimist, so I expect that after decades (a century?) of turmoil, the unprecedented access and communication that the Internet has made possible will show an overall positive result. Perhaps a true kind of "digital democracy" can evolve. But my stumbling point (a truly difficult one for an anarchist with a bottom-up view) is that the great majority have neither the time nor interest to properly engage politically. Political parties were a social construct to deal with the wider democracy of the late 18th and early 19th century. But they have proven to be unreliable. But there needs to be some kind of structure that intermediates between a seething mob if ill-informed and the elite self-interest of the top 1%, and the Internet could/should play a role. But I have no bright ideas.
Again... does your mind ever wander over to these issues/concerns? Any ideas?
The criterion of asking which side one is on is excellent when it's a question of slavery or whether one prefers Trump or Bernie Sanders, but at times it gets more complicated seeing which side is which.
ReplyDeleteLet's take Venezuela. UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet recently issued a report condemning Venezuela's Maduro government for serious human rights violations including torture and thousands of extrajudicial murders as well for the serious food shortage, which is not entirely due to Trump's sanctions according to the report. Bachelet, by the way, is progressive, although not far left.
The more leftwing elements in Chile here reacted to the report by accusing it of bias (why didn't she point out that Saudi Arabia is worse?, etc.) and of objectively aiding U.S. imperialism, since anything that weakens Maduro paves the way for a U.S. takeover of
Venezuela's oil riches. In addition, they point out that if Maduro goes, the Venezuelan opposition leaders who take over will be from the far-right, friends of Trump from whom they have already received lots of cash to finance their activities and they will privatize everything, end key social programs and turn the country over to the International Monetary Fund.
The discussion about Venezuela echoes one found in Simone de Beauvoir's novel, the Mandarins, where French intellectuals in the period after World War 2 argue whether they should make public information about the Soviet gulag, since doing so will weaken the Soviet Union, in their mind the home country of socialism and strengthen the U.S., an imperialist power which just dropped two atomic bombs on innocent people in Japan and which seeks to control the world in the name of General Motors and Coca Cola.
So do we defend human rights if doing means strengthening the evil empire, the U.S.A. or any other evil empire or do we give preference to defending anti-imperialist countries such as Venezuela or Cuba, even if they violate human rights?
I tend to opt for defending human rights, but it is not so clear in the above examples which side is the left side or if so, if the left side is necessarily the good side.
Wallerstein is right in pointing up moral ambiguity. But it is always there.
ReplyDeleteThe classic, which Robert Paul Wolff has discussed, is whether a Kantian moral imperative of "always tell the truth" is right, especially when the Nazis are at the door demanding "do you have any Jews here?".
The sad fact is that we all have to make moral decisions in the light of limited knowledge. But my argument with ideologues is how they self deceive themselves "for the sake of the cause". It was clear in the early 1920s that the USSR was an oppressive regime. The February revolution with Kerensky was not idea (from a left perspective), but it had the possibility of evolving toward the left. This was pre-empted by the "self appointed" Commies with their top-down "revolution".
On a slightly different question about right & wrong, I was reading this article today and enjoyed its discussion of "What the Measles Epidemic Really Says About America":
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/measles-as-metaphor/592756/
It is merely one example of many that you might have chosen, I know. And I do not want to derail the conversation. But some of us *already* ask, “How could Noam Chomsky eat meat?” His replies are, to my mind, underwhelming.
ReplyDeleteJudge for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPOzMR0nkq4
However, he is, to his great credit, a signatory on the Open Letter on Industrial Animal Farming:
https://openletteranimalfarming.com/welcome/
So in 1776 (or when exactly?) we ask slaves if they will accept a United States with slavery. Can they see the future? Was UK clearly committed to abolishing slavery at that point? If morality is not based on inference but choice, what is the grounding for your realism about morality?
ReplyDeleteI just left a comment on the other post, but to continue the conversation here:
ReplyDeleteYou asked if in a hundred years we might look back and think our consumption of meat was incredulous. That's almost certainly true, but the question is bigger than that, isn't it? We can imagine a world where meat might be considered vulgar.
But imagine how the world was before geniuses like Freud, before anyone had even imagined the concept of a subconsciousness, or before Newton or Darwin introduced their revolutionary ideas. They changed the way even young children perceive the world in ways that couldn't have even been comprehended before then.
Now, Orlando Patterson, the sociologist of slavery, shows us another one of these revolutionaries: Jesus Christ. Before ancient Rome and Greece, the concept of slavery was just taken as given. More importantly, the opposite concept of freedom... Freedom wasn't even a word. When Paul wrote his biblical scripture, he put into words a concept that Rome was just starting to come to grips with, a concept of "redemption" and "liberty." Before then, the closest words you would find had a negative connotation to them. A "free" person was someone who was lost, lazy, and didn't contribute to society. As ancient Rome required a more critical mass of slaves to replaced indentured servitude, the concept of self determination was born in a way that it had never existed before. It was born just like the idea of subconsciousness, or evolution, or modern physics. Arguably, it led directly to the revolutionary ideas of Jefferson and Marx.
Orlando Patterson argues that it was necessary for the founding fathers to have owned slaves, for they could not have even imagined liberty in the way that they desired it otherwise.
“Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?” You cannot determine the fundamental principles of morality by reasoning about them. You must make an existential choice.
ReplyDeleteI have recently been reading the (in)famous work _The Concept of the Political_ by Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, and will admit that this sounds uncomfortably close to his take on politics as based around an a-rational friend/enemy distinction. I don't mean this to be a guilt by association claim, and it's not that I think that Schmitt's views are false because they are dangerous, but rather that they are dangerous because they are false - it's not the case that these choices are a-rational, or existential, or based or necessarily based on this sort of "friend/enemy" basis. It's a choice to see and base politics that way, and an optional one. But, seeing it that way very predictably leads to bad results, even if you're on a fundamentally good side. wallerstein's example of people being hesitant to criticize Stalinism is a fine example of it, I think. If you see politics this way, you'll tend to see anything done by "friends" as good, and anything done by "enemies" as evil, and will see the other side as something that needs to be crushed. But, the other side will see the same, leading to endless conflict, needless repression, and so on. There are other ways to see politics - as looking for ways that people with diverse conceptions of the good and nonetheless live together, for example. This seems to me to be a better approach. This need not mean that you accept anything. People who reject the idea of living together in some way must be, at best, quarantined. But, it does mean rejecting the decisionist, a-rational, approach to politics.
Orlando Patterson argues that it was necessary for the founding fathers to have owned slaves, for they could not have even imagined liberty in the way that they desired it otherwise.
ReplyDeleteWell, not all of the "founding fathers" owned slaves - Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Pain (if we count him - not crazy, but not obvious), John Jay, Stephen Hopkins, Ben Franklin (had slaves at one point but freed them and helped form an abolition society before the US started), Samuel Adams, Ben Rush, etc., so this obviously cannot be a claim of "necessity".
imagine how the world was before geniuses like Freud, before anyone had even imagined the concept of a subconsciousness
Nietzsche would like a word about this!
The question for me is not which side am I on now, but which side would I have been on then? Why is it that so many otherwise seemingly rational, humane, even admirable people--e.g., Hume,Kant--held such views that we find abhorrent? Think of the progressives and eugenics. Why should I think I would have been morally superior to them had I lived in their world?
ReplyDeleteAs Matt points out, political commitment can and does easily degenerate into something like rooting for your favorite football club, right or wrong, unconditionally, go-team-go.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I do believe that basically the left is right, it isn't always right on all issues.
So "which side are on you on" has to do with one's basic commitment, but it doesn't always work as a criterion on specific issues.
Orlando Patterson's Freedom is on my shelf and has been on my reading list for some time. Alas, I've never succeeded in getting very far into it. I therefore appreciate the effort to summarize it by commenter Sonic, above. Frankly I don't find the summary entirely helpful, but that may be me. (Anyway Sonic gets kudos for effort at least, IME.)
ReplyDeleteOn principles of morality and reasoning: not sure what I think about this. I do think there's a place for reasoning and reflection at a certain level, but at the most basic level some temperamental if not existential choice may be involved. Argument, reflection, and reasoning probably esp. come in at the point where one needs to clarify disagreements and/or think about particular policies or the perennial question of the relation between means and ends. Some going back-and-forth between intuitions and argument, as in (a version of) 'reflective equilibrium', may be indicated.
Anyway RPW made up his mind about this the day that student at Columbia, as he has recounted several times here, asked him the "which side are you on?" question. RPW is, of course, not going to change his mind about this, and I'm not sure there's any esp. strong reason why he should, frankly.
I also think, as D. Palmeter suggests, that the historical surroundings (deliberately avoiding the word "context") matter, but don't have time to comment further on that now.
ReplyDelete