Month: July 2019

If some scholars (e.g. Daniel Edelstein) still want to declare the Enlightenment innocent of causing the French Revolution, then they need to work harder to explain this piece of historical synchronicity: that the Enlightenment celebrated, and the French Revolution resulted from, what’s probably the moment of peak adulthood in European history. That’s supposing we define adulthood as legal and personal independence, of which the bourgeosie of Europe at that time had more than anyone else in the Western world before or since.

David Graeber talks about this at some length in the superb final chapter of Bullshit Jobs, a book that aims at least in part to deflate our sense of our own importance. He points out that adulthood, in the eighteenth century, meant owning the means of your own support – a privilege now enjoyed by a vanishingly small number of people on this planet. Over the nineteenth century, as capital gobbles up more and more of the means of production, notional grown-ups find themselves increasingly dependent on masters and bosses for their livelihood. People get mad enough about this that they emigrate in vast numbers to America and Australia, where the old kind of independence can still be supported (at least for a while) on land expropriated from the natives. We forget how much of late 19th- and early 20th-century American politics revolved around defending that personal independence against the encroachments of capital.

Politicians on all sides still gesture towards it, with less and less plausibility – cowboys on the right, entrepreneurs on the left. But neither of those categories is now or will be demographically meaningful for most Americans. The continued efficacy of such appeals depends on the sense we all have that we’re being jerked around, that we don’t really have control over our own lives despite living in a country that fetishizes freedom. Would it help for people to recognize what’s happening to them as resulting from a long slow process of infantilization? Maybe; at least this would do something to end the culture wars surrounding notions of “adulthood” that I discussed in a previous post.

This concern with the material conditions of independence is one that’s basically disappeared from political discourse in the US (outside of socialism and communism, the last enlightenment political movements standing). Freedom in the abstract is supposed to be a political worth whatever material goods we might have to give up to sustain it. But that’s a confidence game: as Hobbes pointed out, we’ve already got all the abstract freedom we can possibly have. We’re always free to do whatever we want; the state can only punish us after the fact (which the USA certainly still does, more than most other countries in the world.) Effectively, neoliberals from Reagan to Clinton sold us what we already had in exchange for a base of material prosperity that could have allowed us to be free in a concrete sense as well as an abstract one.

The Romans aren’t the only people to have recognized the distinction at play here, but they made the most fuss about it. The most alien thing about Roman culture – even weirder than slavery, which Romans partly subsume under it – is the notion of patria potestas, the power of fathers over their descendents through the male line, a power effectively mediated by paternal control over family property. For most of Roman history, sons with living fathers simply can’t own anything in their own name; even if they receive a gift or an inheritance, or work for a salary, all that money goes to dad. Not until his father died was a Roman man free in this concrete sense, “in his own power” – though he might have been free abstractly, i.e. liber, from birth.

The full achievement of adulthood thus meant attaining an independence that came from controlling your own means of living. That kind of adulthood is effectively never achieved by most people in the world. The fact that it could be achieved by expropriating wealth from the millionaires and billionaires who claim to have a paternal concern for us is one of the best-kept secrets of American politics. As long as the culture directs our attention to ideals of adulthood that are outdated – the cowpokes – or part of a zero-sum game – the startup founders – we’ll still be haunted by a sense of our own minority.

Capping off his discussion of what Aufklarung really means, Kant says that it’s man’s escape from his self-imposed unmundigkeit. That’s a paradoxical claim, because unmundigkeit in the juridical sense (as, it seems, Kant means it) is a state of legal minority or tutela – something that by definition you can’t impose on yourself. One common feature shared across the family of legal concepts to which unmundigkeit, tutela and minority belong is that those who come under them get stripped of their capacities as legal agents – so, if you impose a tutela on yourself, it’s immediately invalidated.

Of course Kant knows all that. The paradox is intentional, a kind of allegory. When we realize that our tutelage is self-imposed, then we see it’s paradoxical and unreal. We discover that we’ve been acting according to a law that is no law. Now we’re “free” in the sense that we were free all along, but didn’t realize it. That’s one particularly optimistic way of thinking about enlightenment.

Well, so much for all that. Kant’s figure still has something to tell us, though, about the dark age to come. It’s a way of addressing the question – “what do they want?” – that comes naturally to me, and to a lot of other people, when right-wing voters and politicians invoke “getting back to the good old days” as a political platform. We rightly think that they don’t mean this literally, in the factual sense of returning to an era before iphones or airplanes or electric lighting. It’s a figural statement. For what? Racism? Reinstating “traditional gender roles?” Fascist authoritarianism? Yes, all those things – but then, why not be specific? Why bundle it all together under the heading of a sepia-toned nostalgia for “the good old days?” The easy answer is that they’re trying to fool you, that “the good old days” are some kind of a dog whistle. It should be obvious by now, though, that they don’t care about fooling you. They only care about fooling themselves.

How does nostalgia work for that? In two ways. First, obviously, it helps Trump supporters not think of themselves as Nazis, which would be uncomfortable even for (most of) them. But it also helps them disguise what they want in another way. Their appeal to a particular historical period as ideal keeps them (and us) from recognizing what might be the most important fact about this historical period: it’s when most of Trump’s supporters were children. What they really want is to get back under tutela. They’d impose it on themselves if they could, but that’s impossible, so they elect politicians to do it for them. Getting someone else to impose tutela on you is, at the personal scale, just a kink; at the national level, it’s fascism.

The views I’ve just expressed fit oddly with the way adulthood works in actual right-wing rhetoric. There, the grown-up in the room is usually some dweeb like Ben Shapiro telling infantilized “millenials” (the unholy persistence of that generational name being another can of worms entirely) to stop throwing tantrums about whatever today’s grievance is. That brings up a real schism at the center of right-wing thought. Trump voters want to be coddled like children – remember, most of them love social programs, and Trump stood out from the Republican field in 2016 by promising to keep his hands off of Social Security – but they also want to be respected like adults, to monopolize adulthood for themselves.

Can they have it both ways? That’s the promise of a uniquely American form of fascism, one that owes as much to Jim Crow and the Antebellum South as it does to 1930’s Europe. For the most part, Trump voters don’t dream of an all-white America – and this is why they can tell themselves they’re not racist. They just want an America where being white entitles you to respect from everybody else, where minorities know their place in line (to borrow Arlie Hochschild’s forceful metaphor) is at the back. Grown-ups first, which is actually how dinner used to be served in most American households (and probably still is in the atavistic swamps of Alabama, or whatever.)

A fantasy of childhood surrounded by a fantasy of adulthood – but they’re both fantasies, and that’s why the Trump movement is ultimately a rejection of the kind of adulthood that Kant talks about. Trump voters want to be deceived about their own value, like children are. Children, of course, don’t generally know that they’re being deceived, at least until they get an obvious signal of that, like a participation trophy, which is why those have gotten to be such a bug up Fox News’ ass – not because they spoil children, but because they destroy an illusion which viewers of Fox News would also like to enjoy. As adults, they know that children get lied-to all the time about how great they are; forgetting that fact would be an essential step toward becoming children again themselves, toward feeling like they were worth something again.

Why take that backward flight? There’s a dark side to Kantian enlightenment from the perspective of our self-worth: our self-imposed tutelage was all about us, but the real world’s nothing like that. One after another, a series of Copernican Revolutions decenters us until we realize we’re not even the protagonists of our own life stories: we’ve been working for some other asshole the whole time. Does it actually have to be this way? Not if emancipation follows upon enlightenment, not if we get the freedom to use the powers of which enlightenment has already made us aware. Capitalism is the blockage that keeps us from full freedom. It forces us into subservience, actually, in a way that strips us of even the real independence that the enlightenment-era bourgeoisie enjoyed (on which, more later.) The result is a form of adulthood that, for most people, seems grim and grey by comparison with the technicolor Disneyland we’ve built for children. No wonder some people want to go back.

My favorite part of Works and Days is the bit where Hesiod patiently explains how, even though fish and beasties and birds eat one another, we don’t do that – because Zeus gave us justice, which is way better than cannibalism (δίκην, ἣ πολλὸν ἀρίστη γίγνεται.) Sure – but what are the hors d’oeuvres like?

I take this kind of closely with my favorite part of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is where Aristotle starts talking about things that we’d probably characterize as tabloid headlines or urban legends. The one that sticks out in particular for me is the story about the slave who ate his fellow-slave’s liver, just because of the effort you would have had to go to. That’s one of a few in this section of the EN that feature cannibalism, a practice that was supposed to be limited to other, non-human animals. And what’s the heading that brings all these stories together? The vice that Aristotle’s trying to illustrate is theriodes, or beastliness.

It’s true that, maybe, sometimes, humans can be a little animalistic too. That reminds me of a story about Mt. Lykaion, first told by Plato in the Republic and recently sort of confirmed by archaeological evidence. Every year, people go up to the top of the mountain and eat some stew, but it’s a bit of a lottery, because some of the meat is from human sacrifice. Whoever eats it gets turned into a wolf; the only way for them to turn human again is to abstain, as a wolf, from human flesh for a period of about ten years. If eating people makes you an animal, not eating them, in turn, makes you a human being.

There’s a kind of a puzzle here, though we (modern, Western observers) may have to look pretty hard to see it. Herodotus can help: he tells a story aobut Darius getting some Greeks together with some Kallatians (a tribe from India) and asking the former how much money they’d take to eat their dead parents. Of course, they just won’t do it. The punchline comes when Darius asks the Kallati, who eat their parents as a matter of custom (οἳ τοὺς γονέας κατεσθίουσι), how much he’d have to pay them to cremate their parents like the Greeks. They’re just as freaked out about that possibility as the Greeks were about endocannibalism. From some points of view, not eating people looks weird. Why do the Greeks make such a big deal out of it?

One possibility is the kind of social nightmare (I think) envisioned by Hesiod and Aristotle, where we’d just be eating each other all the time if we let ourselves do it one. Giacomo Leopardi works out this fantasy in a short work called “The Wager of Prometheus,” where the latter finds out that humans in general weren’t really worth sacrificing his liver for. At one stage, he travels to the New World and finds it almost entirely depopulated by cannibalism: human flesh is too good to resist once you’ve tried it, so gluttony takes over and everyone gets eaten.

The worry is that cannibalism might turn out to be a natural desire (like any other kind of eating, some Greeks think) rather than a social practice. In other words, you might not be able to make distinctions about who to eat. Cannibalism might be like man being a wolf to man, which is no basis for a social collective. There are, of course, some pretty important counterexamples in the Odyssey, like the Cyclopes and the Laestrygones, both groups of giants who eat outsiders while sparing their own, but these are basically represented as monsters.*

We know from those stories, as from others (the cosmogonic fable in Plato’s Protagoras, any number of maiden/sea-monster myths) that the Greeks thought of themselves as maybe especially delicious. In any case, they thought that animals and monsters were always out to eat them. Was a sense of their own nice flavor actually part of Greek identity? And did these beliefs about human deliciousness make cannibalism seem more taboo than other taboo activities? You get plenty of incest on the tragic stage, e.g., but not much cannibalism.

However that may be, we now know quite a lot about the effectiveness of cannibalism for mediating social organization. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in particular has written extensively about how exocannibalism, the hostile kind of cannibalism which the Greeks most feared, contributes to forming affinal or potential-marriage bonds in Amazonian societies. Socialized cannibalism is all about making choices: whom you can eat, whom you can’t. As such, it’s also a way to recruit new socii.

With the Greeks, it’s basically the opposite: cannibalism is how you recruit enemies. Or rather, since all forms of socially-acceptible eating are by definition not cannibalism, that is not the eating of a being like you, eating something is a way of making it an enemy, an outside to your society. In most cases, that’s a state of affairs rather than an etiology; where it does become etiological, as with Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave, the enemy eats you first. How to justify our eating of sheep and goats and things, which can’t possibly have tried to eat us first? They ate our crops, so we escalated proportionally. The Cyclops, however, might want to take advantage of that logic by asserting that Odysseus ate his cheese before he ate Odysseus’ men, also a proportionate escalation.

In the end, there’s no consistent logic behind these social structures. The point is just that the structures themselves can be used as a logic, recruited for talking about other things – justice, for instance, or vice or gift-exchange. To the extent that you can support them with the threat of cannibalism, you’ve managed to sell them to the Greeks and, pari passu, to us. But you have to wonder what a cannibal would make of Hesiod’s plea on behalf of dike. Would he be forced to assume that fish, beasts and birds were somehow human, and that the non-cannibal anthropoi in this passage represent quite another species?

*interestingly, Aristotle in the Politics seems to read the cyclopes as particularly isolated human beings rather than as monsters. But then, pace Homer, he denies them any social cohesion.

In most of the world, pretty much no one displays the flag. The only people who do are psychotic nationalist/fascists, e.g. Spaniards who want Franco back. By this standard, obviously, the USA stands out as strange. Not only do plenty of us fly the flag on our houses; up until a few years ago, politicians couldn’t even go on television without displaying the flag somewhere on their persons. So, what’s wrong with us?

One right-ish but over-simplistic conclusion to draw would be that we actually are, for the most part, psychotic nationalist/fascists. That’s true, but the value of the flag as signalling that in particular gets a bit worn down when everybody wears it. The US equivalent of that kind of flag-waving, the kind that outs you to your neighbors as someone to keep the kids away from, would be flying the Nazi flag (or the thin blue line flag, which is basically the same thing). That’ll make you stand out; just flying the regular old American flag is too commonplace to mark you as a real weirdo.

Some people might say, too, that people picked up on the flag as a sign of resistance to whatever it was that 9/11 symbolized. That gets the timing about right, at least for politicians wearing flag pins. But then, since that “trauma” has “faded,”* how come the flag epidemic just keeps getting worse? And how come people are, more and more, just openly and aggressively patriotic, like being from America should get you some kind of fucking prize?

Like most things in American life, I think this trend is generally connected to the economy and more specifically connected to the recession that started in 2008. Patriotism in the US has always been kind of a rube’s game, the thing they use to get you to die overseas so that GE can keep selling fridges on the Korean peninsula. After Vietnam, this got pretty hard to deny: from the way that patriotism got used to exploit people, people drew the correct conclusion that only an idiot would be patriotic. So why return to it? Patriotism’s a last resort when you don’t have anything else; maybe you finally would like that long shot at getting a prize just for being born in the US of A.

As long as people couldn’t see through it, patriotism was the last resort of scoundrels; now that the jig is up, it’s the last resort of losers. The new patriotism isn’t so much about getting other people to do stuff as it is about getting yourself to do stuff, like get out of bed in the morning. It’s cheaper than antidepressants. That’s the booby prize for living in a rigged economy that’s iced you out of a real wage increase for going on 50 years and is really just about to get around to replacing you with a robot.

I talk about all this like it’s a bad thing – which for me, as an internationalist and someone who clings to an ethical standard beyond “my country, right or wrong or building concentration camps,” it obviously is. But it’s not like I can’t see the appeal. If I got a little thrill of validation every time the state applied violent solutions to imaginary threats, I’d be feeling great right now. If you have no inner resources, patriotism is a great solution to the problem of being unemployed or underemployed at the end of time. And the dominant form of psychic warfare in America right now, as I’ve argued before, hinges on whether we can just ignore our neighbors’ patriotism or whether we have at least to pay attention to it, if not take it seriously. In that fight, the flag isn’t just a symbol but also a weapon.

*i.e. we’ve lost the initial buzz of national solidarity, but kept all the bad parts like airport security lines