Month: July 2018

Still rereading Stendhal’s On Love, I came across a really remarkable passage excerpted from the memoirs of the author’s “friend,” Salviati (in fact, a heteronym for Stendhal himself), which likens the experience of turning thirty without ever having loved to that of a soldier kept in the rear throughout a battle.  The point, I take it, is that just as the soldier in reserve “knows” that he’s missing out on the chance of glory that the front lines offer, the non-lover “knows” that lovers have certain emotional experiences the depth of which someone in his position can never match.  The question this raised for me was how “Salviati” came to know what he’s missing.

The answer, I suspect, is by reading, and in particular by reading novels.   The genre, then still relatively new, was one that Stendhal elsewhere credited with miraculous and dangerous mind-expanding powers (cf. The Red and the Black).  Through novels (and at that point in history only through novels), readers were exposed not only to the experiences but also to the internal lives of others far outside their social circles and in situations radically unlike their own.  The FOMO that “Salviati” feels as a result of this exposure will become central to the abreaction of later writers, like Flaubert, against the sentimentality of an earlier novelistic tradition.

Flaubert’s intervention comes at the end of a long debate, now revived by modern critics, as to whether the habit novel-reading had a positive or a negative impact on the minds of those who practiced it.  One side argued that novels created tiess of sympathy among a community of writers and readers; more perceptive minds noticed, however, that vivid and novelistic representations of foreign experience could give rise to a sense of lack, fear and envy on the part of their audience.  In On Love, an essay where novels play an outsized evidentiary role, Stendhal generally seems to bridge the divide between these two positions.  Or rather, he recognizes the split: In his own voice, he demonstrates how novels can produce a sympathetic engagement with other minds, while “Salviati” shows all the symptoms of a more pathological reading culture.

The debate still has urgency today, and not just for historians of European literary culture.   You may have noticed that both parties to it frame their positions in ways analogous to those that have come to structure contemporary debates regarding social media: it connects us, but doesn’t it also fill us with envy and hatred for the other who, according to his or her facebook page, is supposed to be having a good time?

In fact, the debates are the same, and they’re really about human nature.  We want to think that forming genuine sympathetic connections through media is a goal that humans can achieve, so that people who fail to do this, people in whom the mediated other only inspires a sense of envy or lack, should be stigmatized.  But what if that’s not an achievable goal, and sympathy is only a pose that allows us to claim some ownership of the other that afflicts us?  As far as individual psychology goes, I find the latter position much more plausible than the former, which is usually the one adopted by people who are trying to sell you something.

What’s heartening about the novelistic antecedent of today’s debates over social media is this: the world didn’t end then (although subjectivity did, somehow, certainly change), so it probably won’t end now either.  What’s less encouraging is that the successful cooption of novelized subjects into civilization was never a foregone conclusion.  It took hard work, particularly on the part of novelists like Stendhal and Flaubert who knew the destructive potential of the genre in which they were writing, to immunize us against being consumed by the FOMO that had come to constitute us as novel-readers.  I don’t even know what a social media Flaubert would look like, and I doubt anyone else does either.

Utilitarianism is a philosophy simple enough that they can talk about it in the New York Times, and that, as they say, is all the news that’s fit to print.  Simple philosophies are for simpletons, and this one’s about on Ayn Rand’s level: perfect for people who want an “ethical” justification for things they were going to do anyway, but not one that makes them think too hard.  Or, alternately, trolley problems: conversation starters for the workplace and the home!

That said, the real puzzle about utilitarianism is why anyone who doesn’t write for the Times takes it seriously.  I’ve met academic philosophers who identify as utilitarians; they’re usually perfectly smart people until they start talking about their work.  How do they manage not to notice that they’ve dedicated their lives to an intellectually vacuous project?

Let’s start with the basics.  Fifty-plus years ago, Elizabeth Anscombe identified the biggest unsolved problem of utilitarian philosophy (which she then took to be dead in the water) as that of pleasure.  In its nature, pleasure is at least largely unobservable; it often grows or shrinks in anticipation and recollection, making it a shaky basis on which to choose actions for the future; and no perspicuous account can be given of how someone else’s pleasure, as such, could produce practical maxims binding on me, which is what utilitarianism requires to be the case.  For all these reasons, the house of utilitarianism is rotten at the foundations.  Rearranging the furniture on the second or third floor, which is what most academic philosophers now working on the topic do, is pure wasted effort.

What if all these basic failures were supposed to be features, not bugs?  Then, of course, it would be wrong to call utilitarianism a philosophy, but we could still understand it as a rhetoric – one whose deeply flawed account of pleasure might still prove effective in some circumstances.

Utilitarian rhetoric depersonalizes pleasure in two key ways.  First, it desubjectivizes pleasure: in a utilitarian accounting, “infinite” desires – like those that govern, for instance, Iroquois gift exchange or the plots of Greek tragedy – simply have no place.  Generally, the same thing is going to make two similarly-situated people equally happy; or, if not, then someone will be able to give a reasoned account as to why one of the parties is going to get more pleasure than the other out of the good in question.  Second, utilitarianism aggregates pleasure such that it can become an object of planning notionally for the common good and without self-interest.

For both these reasons, utilitarian rhetoric is extremely well-suited to serve for a language of political debate in a liberal democracy like that of the United States, where collective decisions have to be taken usually in the absence of shared norms to guide them.  Utilitarianism is a way of balancing interests without giving self-interest the chance to put its fingers on the scale.*

Utilitarian rhetoric of this sort is, of course, tremendously vulnerable to corruption and manipulation, and it tends to obscure divisions that may later, and to the common detriment, explode.  Take, for instance, the much-repeated claim that intensified global trade benefits the country.  This is true if, as is usually done, we take money as a proxy for happiness; as a collective, the country then appears to enjoy more happiness because of global free trade.  As we know, though, the payoffs were unevenly enough distributed that a substantial minority of Americans have actually suffered from the expansion of free trade even as a handful of people have benefitted enormously.  The utilitarian rhetoric that was used to justify dropping trade barriers, and the people who were being screwed by this turned out to be the ones who, for whatever reason, voted for Trump.  How’s the hedonistic calculus working out on that one?

As much as it would be possible to multiply examples like the preceding, I have to give credit where credit’s due: utilitarian rhetoric was hegemonic in the American public sphere through the period of relative (domestic) peace and prosperity that extended from the end of the Great Depression through the end of the Clinton presidency.  “Better dead than red” aside, arguments about public policy in that era all had to code themselves in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number.   However bad the results of those arguments may have seemed at the time (I’m looking at you, Reagan), the alt-right alternative we’re now seeing looks much worse.  There’s a lot you can sell with utilitarian rhetoric, but at least you can’t sell ethnic cleansing.

I don’t say this in order to defend utilitarianism, even qua rhetoric, in any absolute sense.  As I’ve suggested, I think its limits and flaws are largely responsible for our current situation, where we’ll be lucky if we’re allowed to use any rhetoric at all in a few year’s time.  I’m going to devote the rest of this post to a theory about how we got here.

Like all rhetorics, the utilitarian one is enthymemetic; the audience has to believe certain things, to be a certain way, or else the rhetoric won’t work.  The ideal object for a utilitarian appeal is not necessarily selfless, but s/he does have to be devious: s/he has to be willing to see selfish goals articulated in language that makes no reference to him/her in particular, either as an individual or as a class of individuals.  The audience for utilitarianism is one that doesn’t need to see aspects of its identity explicitly reflected in the mirror of national politics.

You might be expecting to to turn now to a critique of so-called “identity politics,”** but actually nothing’s further from my mind.  The first sign that something had gone deeply wrong on this score – that utilitarian rhetoric was about to go off the rails – came in the weeks following 9/11, when news anchors and politicians started to find that not even mentioning the word “America” at every opportunity was enough to satisfy the public’s ravening thirst for identity-reflection.  That was when everyone started wearing flag pins, not – as people mistakenly thought – to testify to their patriotism, but to articulate that word, “America,” at every moment in a visual idiom, so that they could go back to talking about other things.

The problem, then and now, is honor.  We’d been attacked physically, sure, but the real problem was that our national honor had been besmirched.  Why else would a bunch of Middle Americans who couldn’t have cared less about 3000 dead New Yorkers and whoe own hometowns could in no possible world become the targets of terrorism have gotten excited enough in the wake of 9/11 to launch us into (now) 15 years of disastrous, fruitless war?

If you’re mad at someone, you get them by any means necessary: maybe you bribe Osama bin Laden’s chef to poison his french onion soup, say.  If your honor’s at stake, you still want to get them, but even more important is that they know it’s you what got’em.  That, and not concern about possible treachery, was why we couldn’t tell Pakestan that bin Laden was hiding there and politely ask them to put him under arrest.  Americans had to do the deed themselves: honor is only satisfied with public revenge.

Put that way, it’s a sad story.  We wasted ten years and tens of thousands of lives just to do publicly what we could almost certainly have done faster and with less bloodshed if we’d been willing to employ covert means.  Unfortunately, that story ended up becoming the type-narrative for a newly honor-driven national politics.  The Tea Party insisted on being recognized and served explicitly by its representatives as a group deserving of special privilege and power; what got them so mad – irrationally, to our eyes – was an act of legislation, the AHCA, that by its very ambition to help everyone denied that such special groups exist.  In the face of charges that they were applying violence in racist and unjustified ways, police throughout the country insisted on being recognized publicly as a special group of individuals who have the privilege of applying violence wherever they see fit and deserve our thanks for it – so, instead of much-needed controls on policing, we have legislation in many states that makes assaulting a cop a hate-crime.  Then came Trump, who not only spoke a language of honor that appealed to our nation’s most vile constituencies but actually embodied their self-image.  Of course they were going to elect him president.***

Montesquieu took honor to be a character trait that thrives under monarchy and withers under democracy.  Though he had no reason to consider a state of affairs like the present one, I doubt it would surprise him.  Democracies, he’d say, can also die through the corruption of their citizens.

* From within this rhetoric, since consideration of values other than pleasure has been excluded a priori, any principled stance at all will end up looking like self-interest.

** And if you were excited about my doing that, you’re a villain.  This blog isn’t for you; go read the Weekly Standard, supposing you can afford to get past the paywall.

*** The reason that all the examples I’ve cited of malignant honor politics come from the right of the political spectrum is that that’s where the examples live.  Right-wing commentators have gotten so accustomed to speaking this language over the last 15 years that they now misinterpret left-wing movements, like Black Lives Matter, as being about group honor in the same way as most Republican politics now is.  Only thus can the response of right-wingers, “all lives matter,” be understood: they took the protesters to be demanding privileged protection for black lives, when in fact BLM only wanted the same defense against arbitrary, extrajudicial execution that everyone’s supposed to enjoy in this country.  Not that the “all lives matter” crowd would be prepared to grant them even that, since even equality with black people would appear to them as an attack on their honor.

Anthropologists are always reminding us about the basic equivalence between the cultures they study and our own.  Sociologists tell us to mind the gap: our post-agrarian, hierarchically organized societies are, for those very reasons, comparable with each other but not with hunteer-gatherer or nomadic societies that lack these traits.  The sociologists are wrong, the anthropologists are right, and we’re going to pay a steeper price the longer we fail to confront the consequences of this fact.

I’m writing (as pretty often) with particular reference to the problem of so-called “post-truth:” we’re apparently living through a moment in history when people who know the facts no longer have the authority to command the agreement of other, less well-informed sectors of society.  The problem with this account is that, for the very reason it appeals to the sort of people who would describe themselves as “knowing the facts,” it fails to capture a deeper substrate of the problem.  When the question of who really “knows the facts” is under debate, as I think it is now, then it’s meaningless for individuals or groups to cite their “knowledge of the facts” as a justification for their authority claims.  The status of that knowledge is, after all, exactly what’s being disputed.

Bruno Latour has it largely right in his recent work on climate change: scientists can’t (any longer) complacently dismiss anyone who contradicts their account of the facts as out of touch with reality, they need to offer an aggressive defence* of the claims to authority that would justify their “knowledge of the facts” as such.  Where Latour gets it partly wrong is in his assumption that conflicts like the one now ongoing about climate change can be “won” anymore in a meaningful sense.  If by such “winning” Latour envisions, as he often seems to, a political victory that results in certain actions being taken by whatever collective agency still inheres in the government, then the concept still has a sense.  If, instead, as he also sometimes appears to do, Latour means “winning” in the debating sense of convincing the other side or assembling a consensus, then the concept seems to me to be a thing of the past.

Since Socrates, this style of debate has assumed a set of shared definitions that ensure we’re talking about the same thing in similar ways.  That we do share such definitions is so far essential to the institutions of liberal democracy that we’ve even become habituated to debating those fundamentally private topics, pleasure and pain, in a utilitarian framework that pretends to treat them ostensively and objectively.**  As Socrates also knew, however, consensus definitions can only exist at the cost of close policing of public discourse – a task that was possible even a decade ago, when that discourse really was public and under the control of a relatively small number of people, but which facebook and twitter have (wisely or not) abandoned.

The truth is, the existence of consensus definitions has always been an effect of hierarchical society that was essential for the reproduction of that society.  What else is a monarchy, for instance, but a society where everyone roughly agrees about who (but more importantly what) the king is?  In retrospect, the first sign of our present predicament may have been the appearance under Bush II of bumper stickers claiming that Bush is “not my president,” a trope that’s repeated itself in ever-wider generic contexts for every president since.  The speaker of a phrase like that is either delusional (sometimes), a declared political rebel (unlikely), or someone who means something different by “president” than what the word meant for the first 230 years of American history.

That division is symptomatic of a series of growing splits in American society, not just over what should be done with X, but about what X actually is.  To take probably the least politically noxious example, there was widespread consensus as recently as five years ago about the shape of the Earth; now you can find communities to support your claim that it’s round, flat, toroidal, and many alternatives other than these.  Just search on youtube and go down the rabbit hole.

People understand that the modern internet tends to build communities around shared beliefs, then insulate these communities from evidence that would seriously challenge such beliefs.  What’s been less appreciated is the potential depth of the divisions that result.  There’s no reason to think that this echo-chamber effect will stop (or has stopped) short of what anthrolopogists call cultural fission, the splitting of one group into two that share no particular loyalties or concepts.  The facebook algorithm’s practice of showing us content that “generates engagement” by giving us an outrageous representation of the other may even accelerate this process by providing material for a chiasmatic schizmogenesis through which we construct our own identities in direct opposition to a cultural other.

The groups that result don’t just disagree about certain issues, which would hardly anyhow justify my calling them different cultures.  They don’t even agree about the objects of agreement.  Never mind whether we should cut CO2 emissions to limit climate change: is it carbon dioxide we’re talking about, or dephlogistonated air?  When we talk about saving our national parks, are we talking about preserving remarkable geological phenomena or the stumps of titanic ancient trees, cut down and harvested by Luciferians?  Your evaluation of Trump’s policy choices might actually change depending on whether you think he’s governing a nation or, as QAnon maintains, trying to hunt out a global cabal of child sex traffickers.

That these discussions are even being had is evidence that, intellectually at least, we now live in a fissional culture for which government, in the classical agrarian-state sense, has no meaning.  There’s no one who can tell us we need to grow grain for Marduk; there’s not even anyone who can tell us the earth is round.

In a practical sense, obviously, “government” still does have meaning for these United States.  Even if we can’t agree what a president is, we’ll (probably) all participate in the ritual of electing one in 2020.  But what does democratic politics actually mean over a territory in which there are dozens or hundreds of different cultures, none of whom can agree on what the objects of political struggle really are?

One thing it means is that, for any particular culture, the outcomes of political struggle take on a cosmological significance, not as policies rationally articulated according to some set of values but as an incomprehensible evil forced on us by a hostile other.  This is why politics is now immensely depressing for practically everyone, and, if the current situation ends violently, then politics itself is going to be to blame.  For a hierarchical society, politics is the field of peaceful struggle; for a fissional society, politics is what generates hostility betweeen cultures that would otherwise have remained closed off unto themselves.

* The phrase “aggressive defense” is only apparently an oxymoron, but the incongruousness of the phrase does point toward a tactical difficulty that status-quo institutions and opinions are confronting everywhere right now: to mount an attack on rival positions is to admit that those positions are rivals and, accordingly, to sacrifice the fetishized “unquestionability” of whatever’s being thus defended.  Nevertheless, this is a sacrifice that will have to be made.

** On the subject of utilitarianism…

Charles MacKay isn’t much of a sociologist or even a particularly good historian, but he has a fantastic eye for anecdotes.  A story that’s always particularly stuck in my mind from his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the  Madness of Crowds is this one, from his chapter on alchemy, totally orthogonal to that topic but irresistable.   A young Raimond Llull, Catalan philosopher and original Wheel of Fortune fan, keeps hassling this lady who’s absolutely not interested.  She tells him as much, over and over again, but it doesn’t matter.  So her radical solution is that she just tears open her blouse in front of him, showing him her breasts but also that she’s got a nasty-looking cancer on one of them.  “This is what you love,” she says, and suddenly it turns out that Llull doesn’t actually love that – he’s totally cured.

I thought at the time that this was a tactically pretty remarkable gambit.  To destroy an unwanted affection, you sacrifice your own image in the eyes of another, not by being self-deprecating – which the other can always regard as a lie or, probably rightly, as an invitation for affirmation that makes the other’s affection valuable to you no matter how unwanted – but by giving the other exactly what s/he wants.  You expose the bare reality of yourself, exactly what the other wants to see, but in so doing you expose that reality as not desirable – as marked by a physical flaw or, as moralized in the account from which MacKay takes the story, by the curse of mortality.  The other’s desire recoils in horror (and ideally, in this particular account, gets caught by Jesus on the rebound*).

I was rereading Stendhal’s On Love the other day and it changed my thinking on this.  I hadn’t really grokked before that the process of “crystallization” he describes – the process by which our imaginations turn a regular person into the only object worthy of love – can operate on literally any trait, beautiful or ugly, transforming it into a virtue uniquely possessed by the beloved.  Suppose, as Stendhal does, that the transvaluations produced by this process have a lasting effect on our sensorium, and you have an early theory (more complete than Rousseu’s practice) of perversion.

From this point of view, the gambit employed by Llull’s stalking victim looks especially risky.  What prevents Llull from turning her cancer into a beauty mark, which is what the troubadour next door would have done?  What prevents him from reconfiguring disease and mortality as desirable in themselves, rather than as disgusting?  Again, Stendhal provides the answer: Llull isn’t in love, he’s just DTF.  Amour-physique, not amour-passion or any of the other, more complex amour-flavors.  In this case, crystallization may fail to take place simply because the lover doesn’t actually love this person in particular; s/he loves bodies in general.  If a given love object turns out not to have the kind of body in which Llull’s interested, his desire recoils.**   So, a good gambit for filtering out people who only love you because you have a body; but, if they’re actually in love with you, if they’re already (as inevitably in such cases) imagining what you are, then you’re only going to get yourself in deeper.  Si tu es pris(e) dans le reve d’un(e) autre, tu es foutu(e).

* Note, this means that Jesus is Llull’s second choice: he would rather have had the girl, but she (and all flesh) turns out to be mortal and thus liable to  abandon you (by dying).  Jesus isn’t as pretty, but at least he’ll stick around.  That’s an attitude shared by a lot of Medieval Christians, who have already lost faith in their god as the highest good.

** Llull’s physically normalizing rejection of the cancerous body is about what we would expect.  Again to take the moral that MacKay’s source draws, though, what kind of culture trains someone to desire only bodies that are going to be around forever?  Medieval Latin Christendom, I guess, but also one that presents (via film, TV, etc) the images of beautiful young people long after those people have ceased to be young, or alive.