Author: castoreum

Old lady philosophy derides the gifts of fortune, not the least of which is wealth:

“Or does the brilliance of gems attract your eyes?  But if there’s anything outstanding in that splendor, it belongs to gems – which I marvel at how men marvel at – and not to men.  Of all that lacks the impulse and touch of a soul, what is there that could rightly seem to those possessed of rational souls?”

Since tokens of wealth are not alive, they have less value in the eyes of a philosopher than the most wretched beggar or even, say, a mouse.  The owner is always more valuable than what he owns to such a degree that what he owns adds nothing to his value.  Ancient philosophers were able to see and play with this enigma (cf Socrates’  encounter with a particularly well-dressed horse in Xenophon’s Economicus).  For us, the enigma is structural: the clear division between living owners and dead property plays a central role in capitalist accumulation.

Modern critical philosophers attack this distinction without necessarily being aware of its centrality, but artificial intelligence might actually undermine it in practice.  This is a way in which capitalism could dissolve without having been understood or overthrown.  Or, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro suggests, will the threat of these strange new animae force us to redefine “life” so as to focus on the body, which we share in common with animals, rather than the soul which we would share in common with machines?

Yesterday I mentioned in passing some counterpoints to Amitav Ghosh’s argument that modern bougie narrative can’t handle catastrophe.  Now I’d like to get into it a little more.  Ghosh acknowledges that catastrophism has its place in sci-fi and fantasy, so I’m going to stick to texts that most people would count as “literary” fiction.

First, there’s the earthquakes.  Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” and Wilder’s The Bridge Over San Luis Rey are both wonderful in their way.  Do they show that post-enlightenment fiction can handle catastrophe?  At a distance, sure.  Catastrophe is something that happens elsewhere – in fiction, anyhow.  Both writers are probably looking back to Voltaire’s account of the Lisbon Earthquake – a tremor that helped knock down the ancien regime.  But that’s the kind of thing that happens only in reality.  Novels and short stories are still, as Ghosh suggests, invested in preserving the fiction of a stable world at home.

The other thing is that both these texts are already meta-commentaries on the conventions of bougie novels.  For Kleist as for Wilder, the earthquake is a device for bringing together people from different places and classes in felicitous ways – in short, a source of coincidences.  Since coincidence is the bete noir of “literary” fiction, generally regarded by critics as a narrative shortcut for the lazy, the earthquakes in these stories represent a catastrophe not only for the characters they entrap but also for the form of the novel.  Catastrophe is (only) the occasion for expressions of literate self-awareness.

Coetzee is a more complicated case.  Someday, once I’ve reread it, I’ll post something that sets Waiting for the Barbarians side-by-side with Rutilius’ DRS.  I suspect the comparison would be fruitful – but these are social, not natural, catastrophes, and not exactly what Ghosh is talking about.

Someone that I forgot to mention last time is Colson Whitehead, whose zombie apocalypse Zone One got its claws in me last December.  It’s probably the least well-reviewed of Whitehead’s books, in my view undeservedly.  At the risk of giving away something about the ending that every reader probably suspects from the get-go, the narrator’s knack for outwitting and escaping zombie hordes turns out to reflect his experience as a black man in pre-apocalypse America.  Key and Peele played this conceit for laughs; Colson Whitehead does the other thing.

Post-Trump, it seems prophetic, and I don’t think anyone should now be writing off a novel in which your fellow citizens turn on you en masse as just “genre fiction.”  Whitehead writes social collapse as a natural disaster; it’s global warming in reverse.

I can’t help but think of Zone One in connection with Whitehead’s nonfiction book about poker.  Unlike most people who write about poker, Whitehead acknowledges that he’s a loser.  For him, playing the game is all about learning how to inhabit that role.

To keep on playing the game just so you know how it feels to lose – that must be what it’s like not to have a stake in stability.  The rules are against you, so who cares if they’re radically disrupted?  Things aren’t all that much worse for Zone One‘s narrator after the zombies come that they were before.

Winners write most of the novels that we have a chance to read.  They, and for the most part their characters, are seriously invested in the continued stability of the bourgeois background.  These people aren’t going to capture global warming on the page, but someone with the spirit of Colson Whitehead might.

 

I sometimes publish things about Rutilius Namatianus.  Since nobody knows who he is, I’ll just link to the wikipedia entry, which is a little out of date but basically fine.  As far as we know, he only wrote one thing, which is a long narrative poem about his trip from Rome to Gaul in 417.  The title, De reditu suo, is a little misleading, since Rutilius claims to be “returning” to a place he’s never been before.

My girlfriend edits these pieces and says they’re incredibly depressing.  I’d say that’s about the biggest emotional response anyone’s ever had to my scholarship.  Rutilius himself is about as chipper as they come, but if you dig a little bit – and it’s not just me who’s noticed this – you hit a rich vein of something else.  He knows a change is coming to the Roman world, and he’s kind of anxious to get out ahead of it (as I see it, by reinventing Rome as a network of rural aristocrats – descriptions of aristocrats and their estates take up more than half of DRS).  What makes this depressing is that he doesn’t seem to realize what deep shit the Empire is in.  His world republic of letters is going to get blown to pieces over the next sixty years.  Imagine monks in abbeys, not learned scholars in villas.

This is a retrospective view.  Still, the question everybody asks – what’s wrong with this guy? – is hard to avoid.  It seems like anyone who can claim, in 417 CE, that the Western Roman Empire has another thousand years ahead of it must be dense.

There’s an argument to be made that this isn’t so, since Rome hadn’t lost its major grain-producing territories in Africa yet and since it could still, even now, put larger armies into the field than anyone else.  Maybe Rutilius’ optimistic guess might have turned out right, if things had gone a little differently.

Well, whatever.  Writing in a non-academic vein, I still wonder why no fourth-century author – not Rutilius or anyone else – seems to have been able to imagine that the Roman Empire might just up and disappear.  Even Augustine, who tended to be deflationary about Roman power, wrote as though things were going to go on in pretty much the same way forever.  He was also deflationary about his parishioners’ apocalyptic expectations.

Now I’m reading this extremely excellent collection of essays by Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement.  The question that gets him going is why modern fiction hasn’t been able, for the most part, to respond to or incorporate climate change.  His brilliant answer, to simplify things a lot, is that the bourgeois novel has a stake in things staying the same as they’ve always been.  Novels represent the travails of normal individuals against a background of normalcy.  If what happens to or within the protagonist is going to matter, there can’t be too much going on in the background.

There are some obvious counterexamples – Coetzee, Stendhal, even (for god’s sake) Thornton Wilder – but for the most part Ghosh’s argument holds, especially when it comes to the kind of ultra-contemporary world-lit you see self-consciously educated people reading on airplanes.  It even holds for Ghosh’s novels.  I think it holds for DRS too, though for different reasons.

What are the conditions of possibility for writing a poem in Late Antiquity?  In Late Antiquity, what is a poet?  He’s a person who knows things, and the condition for his poetry is that the world needs to respect what he knows.  The DRS isn’t so much a tour of the coast of Italy as it is a rag-picking expedition through the attic of the Roman encyclopedia.  Rutilius knows (and tells us) something about everything he sees.  Salt-pans work by evaporation.  The hot-springs at Thermas were unleashed by a bull sticking his horn in the ground.  The city of Cosa was once depopulated by a plague of mice.

These are all basically Roman histories.  Without Rome, they don’t scan; only a Roman audience would recognize Rutilius’ tall tales as a form of knowledge.  For us, it’s basically impossible to take this poem as seriously as it was meant to be taken.  Without Rome, there’s no Roman audience.  Rutilius writes within a certain horizon of epochal stability and can’t see beyond it to Rome’s fall.

So that’s another way that a literary form can resist catastrophism.  I wonder if it too isn’t operative in the present, and beyond the genre of the novel.  You might even say that our everyday spoken discourse depends (though obviously to a much lesser extent than the DRS) on certain fixed forms of knowledge as its conditions of possibility.  To talk about certain catastrophes would be to talk about ourselves talking nonsense.  This characteristic of discourse might even render us incapable of speaking about catastrophes that have already come to pass.

As usual, I’m going to bring this back to politics.  After last year’s election, a friend of mine wrote that history wasn’t a moment towards progress but rather a “wheel of fire.”  True enough, but it’s usually a wheel that judders back and forth; only rarely does it really get to turning.  When it does, we, like Rutilius, probably won’t be able to recognize or at least to talk about what’s going on.  To do so would require us to abandon our very language, which would in a way also be an admission of defeat.

The likelier alternative, as I’m arguing in an article I’ve been working on for a few months now, is that we’re going to have our language taken from us.

Is there actually something interesting by Isocrates?  I’m as shocked as you.

It’s a show-piece.  Here’s the setup: Imagine you’re the king of Sparta (one of the kings, if you have to be finicky) and you’ve just been rolled by a Thebes-led coalition of people who hate you.  On top of everything else, they’re now demanding that you surrender Messene, which has been, like, your top source of peasant-slaves for the last four centuries.  They’d like to rebuild it as a polis, which is going to cause you all kinds of problems.

This is Isocrates’ jam.  For form’s  sake, he makes all the usual complaints about how Sparta totally has a just title to Messene (why?  Because the Spartans put its royal line back in power after the demos rose up five hundred years ago, and naturally the kings just gave the city to Sparta out of gratitude.  Funny how, in Spartan myth/history, people are constantly giving Sparta things) and how the Thebans are such hypocrites for wanting to resettle Messene after having ruined Plataea.  Obviously, it’s necessary for Isocrates to point out that the helots hate freedom and won’t even know what to do with it when they get it, so they’ll just end up asking Sparta to run their shit again anyhow.

None of this really gets to the point at issue, which is that Sparta has to choose between giving up Messene and getting destroyed by the rest of the Greeks.  That’s a practical problem that no amount of talking about justice is going to solve.  So here’s where Isocrates comes up with something so brilliantly wacky that you can’t help but think he might have been as smart as everyone in antiquity thought he was.  He says, hey!  Why don’t we just abandon the city, send all the wives and kids abroad, and go pillage the rest of Greece!  We’ll be eating their lunch every day, and since we won’t have a city to attack anymore (because we pillaged it ourselves) they won’t be able to do anything about it.  Fight us with an army of their own?  Come on, we’re Sparta – we’re basically invincible, never mind how Thebes just beat our ass down.

Obviously – Isocrates being an Athenian – this idea owes something to what Athens did when the Mede came down.  They sent their wives and children to the islands, then abandoned the city and spent most of the rest of the War on board their ships (or camped on the beach, if you’re particular).  Archidamus’ plan is pretty much just a Spartan version of that.

Still, it taps into this deep-seated (I think) Greek fantasy about being able to do without the polis.  Everyone loves being part of a political community, but the polis is kind of a hostage to fortune, just sitting there waiting to get sacked.  People worry about this, a lot.  At best, if someone sacks your city, everyone ends up a refugee; at worst, the adult males get killed and everyone else gets enslaved.  Escape in advance seems like an attractive alternative.  That’s why Herodotus, after calling the Scythians the most ignorant people in the world, says they’ve got one discovery which is most wise: they know how to live without walls and cities and all that, so it’s impossible to capture them.

 

Isocrates doesn’t get better the more you read of him, but he doesn’t really get worse, either.  That’s because, more than most Greek orators, Isocrates goes out of his way to say old things in new ways.  Here, for instances, from Panegyricus 24-25, is his fresh spin on Athenian autochthony (Greek from Perseus, not sure why the grave accents don’t integrate):

ταύτην γὰρ οἰκοῦμεν οὐχ ἑτέρους ἐκβαλόντες οὐδ᾽ ἐρήμην καταλαβόντες οὐδ᾽ ἐκ πολλῶν ἐθνῶν μιγάδες συλλεγέντες, ἀλλ᾽ οὕτω καλῶς καὶ γνησίως γεγόναμεν, ὥστ᾽ ἐξ ἧσπερ ἔφυμεν, ταύτην ἔχοντες ἅπαντα τὸν χρόνον διατελοῦμεν, αὐτόχθονες ὄντες καὶ τῶν ὀνομάτων τοῖς αὐτοῖς, οἷσπερ τοὺς οἰκειοτάτους,τὴν πόλιν ἔχοντες προσειπεῖν: μόνοις γὰρ ἡμῖν τῶν Ἑλλήνων τὴν αὐτὴν τροφὸν καὶ πατρίδα καὶ μητέρα καλέσαι προσήκει.

For we inhabit this his [our city], not having thrown others out or seizing an uninhabited place or coming together as a mix of many peoples, but we have come into being in such a noble and genuine [as opposed to bastard or illegitimate] way that we have gone on holding, for all time, the place where we were born, being autochthonous and able to call our city by the same names with which we call those nearest and dearest to us.  For us alone of all the Greeks is it fitting to call the same [feminine] thing “nurse” and “mother” and “fatherland.”

“Fatherland” here is patris, a noun formed in much the same way as patria by the addition of a feminine to the word for “father.”  In English, of course, the gendered connotations are lost, but Isocrates is certainly aware of them – at least as a grammatical problem.

Because most of our kinship terms have straightforward translations into Greek, we tend to think of the Greeks as thinking about kinship in much the same way we do.  This can be sometimes get us into trouble, as for instance with theories of autochthony.  Unlike us, the Greeks didn’t extend their genealogies indefinitely back in time through patterns of sexual reproduction; many of them (not just Athenians, but also Thebans and others) saw themselves as having emerged out of the earth at some point in what was for them a historical past.  Greek ideas of kinship thus included the possibility of a “natural” kin relation to things, not just to people.  To places as well, since what mattered for the Athenians wasn’t just that they’d come out of the earth, but that they’d come out of the earth in Attica – this being just one of many “politicized” forms of kinship through which the polis established solidarity and internal organization.  The phratry, which is the only trace in Greek of the PIE root meaning “brother,” would be another.  Historians have tended to assume that phratries originated as biological kinship groups, then developed their “artificial” civic function later – but why should we assume this?

In important ways, then, the Greek kinship system is closer to that of pre-conquest Hawaii or Mexico than it is to modern family values.  Still, though, there’s something that makes all these systems seem “of a type,” and that’s the presence of words that describe the same “natural” kin relations as English “father,” “mother,” “brother.”  This set of terms is not universal among languages or cultures, but it is widespread.

One obvious explanation for that fact would be that biological kinship is in some sense “natural,” the most widespread and also the original way for humans to conceptualize family life.  This seems to me to be a rather stupid way to approach the problem: calling a social fact “natural” is just a way of avoiding giving an explanation that masquerades as an explanation.  In any case, what matters about kinship vocabulary isn’t what it “is,” but what you can do with it.

From a functional point of view, every word might be thought of as a kind of a shortcut for avoiding circumlocutions.  You can say anything you want in any language, but you might be able to say it more quickly in some than in others.  Some Inuit languages, for example, have a single word for sea ice, but English needs two, and Arabic, which has a single root covering ice, snow, and other frozen things, might need an even more complex expression.

The principle holds for kinship vocabulary as well as for anything else.  “Father,” for instance, is a shortcut that helps us avoid having to say “one who inseminated my mother, leading to my birth” whenever this is what we want to mean.  Since many of us would probably find saying this longer phrase not only cumbersome but actually embarrassing, it’s fair to describe “father” as a euphemism.  Mutatis mutandis, the same holds true for the other basic elements of “biological” kinship vocabulary.  They’re timesavers to be sure, but they also help us avoid saying something gross.

As stated, this isn’t an analysis that can be extended to other languages without substantial argument.  Where an English speaker, for example, would be uncomfortable saying “the one who gave birth to me,” a speaker of ancient Greek has no trouble saying tekousa and a speaker of classical Arabic unproblematically says walida.  Arabic sometimes even uses raham, “womb,” to mean kinship in general, and adelphos, the Greek word for brother, must at some point have been transparently analyzable as “womb-sharer.”  Both Greek and Arabic nonetheless have “shortcut” words that translate English “mother,” “father,” “brother.”  Our own hesitance to speak openly about the “biological” elements of reproduction has obviously not been shared by every historical society.

In another way, though, these words have a euphemistic value that may be more widespread.  What we see as the polite obscuring of our pudenda origo is at a deeper level the covering up of the conditions of possibility of that origo, namely that our parents are (or were) sexually active individuals capable of engendering a child.  From this fact follows the possibility of parent-child incest, something that all the kinship systems so far discussed raise strong prohibitions against.  A circumlocution like “one who inseminated my mother, leading to my birth” is a syntactic chain in which the pronouns can easily switch places.  “My father,” by contrast, is opaque to that kind of inversion.  “Father,” in this case, is a euphemism that protects not its own content, but the mother, from the child’s unwanted attention, and vice versa.

To show that what I’m saying goes for the Greeks as well, it might suffice to look at the end of Oedipus Rex and see how, as Oedipus solves the riddle of his birth, the words “mother” and “father” rupture and spill out into ever more detailed circumlocutions.  Sometimes, not to “know” the meaning of certain words is safer than knowing their meaning too precisely.

“Mother” and “father” have always been subject to what believers in a natural order of kinship would call uses by extension, such that one can have two mothers or two fathers or a mother and/or father to whom one is not biologically related.  Our tendency to see such usages as “inauthentic” is strong enough that people will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce biologically-related offspring in difficult circumstances rather than adopting.  If the functional value of these terms is actually to block certain sexual possibilities, however, then these extensional usages are in that sense no less authentic than the “original” ones, the need for such lexigraphic regulation simply being felt in more circumstances as different types of family units form.

Isocrates’ patris (to get back around to the passage that started this discussion) is one such extensional usage.  As such, and according to the foregoing analysis, we should expect this “fatherland” to do the semantic work of “protecting” the mother.  And indeed we do find something like this going on.

Greek scholars know that one of the Athenians’ favorite metaphors for sex is that of a ploughman (the male) working at his field (the female).  So many nasty things about Greek life are embedded in this figure that I could spend another two posts unpacking it.  All I want to point out, for now, is that Greek thought conventionally associates the land with (potential) mothers, not fathers.  By this logic, the word “fatherland” “protects” the motherland (and the mothers who are analogous to land) from incest much as the word “father” does.  In a patriotic context, why bother?  Is it because Isocrates’ call to arms is trying to motivate people to choose to kalws apothnhskein rather than reproduce and live family lives in the usual way?  In that case, the looming figure of the fatherland would be such as to recharacterize any sexual intercourse as incest.

I’m returning to something I wrote about a couple of days ago, Tolerance as she is Actually Practiced.  This is essentially an American phenomenon in the sense that America has always been a singing, dancing parody of enlightenment thought, but I bet what I’m saying goes for England, too (witness Blur, c. 2003: “Being British isn’t about hate, it’s about disgust.  We’re all….disgusting).

Freud tells us that love is actually the last thing anyone should expect us to feel for our neighbors.  This isn’t really a psychoanalytic insight so much as a “home truth” that belongs to the body of faux-sage folk anthropology (so ably analyzed by Sahlins in The Western Illusion of Human Nature) that makes man out to be a wolf who needs to be saved from himself (really, from his other) by the state.  But the fact that this version of human nature is socially constructed doesn’t mean you can’t build a society around it.

We’re living that dream, pretty much, except that in this mediated world of ours we can pick from any number of neighbors to hate.  When Nina Simone sang “you don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality,” these words still made sense; now, everybody lives next to everybody, and everyone hates his neighbor.  I don’t think this is something that anybody wanted, but spend five minutes on Twitter or near a television set and you’ll know that it’s true.  Hate links us together and helps us imagine our community, which, in the American case, is always an “us” that includes a “them.”  Hate, too, is a social glue.

But is “hate” the right word to describe these arrangements?  Almost nobody self-describes as a hater, after all, not even actual nazis.  People usually frame their relationship to a hated other in terms of injustice, particularly in terms of an unjust distribution: the other is getting more than his fair share of something of which we, ourselves, have been unjustly deprived.  Another name for the animus that drives such claims is envy.  You can recognize envy at work whenever a justice-claim of the sort just described doesn’t respond to factual arguments about the good whose distribution is in question.

An example: rural whites think that they can’t get a job because all the jobs have gone to inner-city blacks.  You can remind people who think this that urban blacks have been unemployed at a higher rate than rural whites for the past forty years, and that the disparity is growing, as much as you want.  You can show them a piece of paper with numbers on it.  None of that will change their mind.

That’s because what they really are is envious.  Envy, when you come down to it, is all about pleasure: you envy someone because you think that they’re having a better time than you are.  That claim is by nature irrefutable, but it’s also one we’re inclined to regard as morally vicious.  All this nonsense about unemployment is only a cover to hide the envy that lies at the heart of rural white “economic anxieties,” not just from the rest of us, but from rural whites themselves.  When envy comes out in the open, we call it hate.

In America, “tolerance” mostly means the cultivation of this state of affairs by people who benefit from the appearance of political engagement that envy generates.  Almost nobody fights for anymore for the essential things, true equality and the cancellation of “free-market” economics that this would entail.  Neither major political party even aims at anything worth calling a common good.  Both of them thrive on, and take their cues from, a groundswell of invidious sentiment.  Envy animates a body politic that we would otherwise have to recognize as a corpse.

What, then?  An end to tolerance?  Of course not, if the alternative is a return to the killing fields of the Jim Crow South or (following Michea’s line of argument) of the 17th-century wars of religion.  But suppose we can get past tolerance going in the other direction?

Since Isocrates gives a lot of unsolicited advice, his speeches often start with a kind of sales pitch that explains why the addressee – who might never even have heard of Isocrates before! – should still pay attention to what he’s got to say.  This is one of my favorites:

“There are many things that educate private citizens, most of all that they do not live in luxury but have to take council every day about how to stay alive. Then there are the laws under which they happen to live, and finally the forthrightness and openness with which their friends may rebuke them and their enemies attack them over any wrong action.  In addition to all these things, certain of the poets have left them treasuries of advice about how one should live.  It’s reasonable that common people should turn out for the better through all these factors.  None of them are available to tyrants, though, and these men – who ought more than anyone else to be educated – turn out, as soon as they take the throne, to be utterly brainless.” (Isocrates, To Nicocles 4)

The point is that Nicocles, who is himself a tyrant – tyrannos, not apparently a word that always carries negative connotations outside Athens – may have missed his chance at a moral education that everyone else gets for free.  This is a lack that Isocrates promises to fill.

We come to find out what he fills it with over fifty more pages of prose that contain a few but not many surprises.   I’m rather more interested the content of the “private citizen’s” education that Isocrates says is unavailable to tyrants.  It’s not hard to understand how necessity, the laws, the poets and sharp-tongued friends could turn out to be teachers.  But what is it – in a Greek or a modern context – that they teach?  Will they teach the same, or complementary, or even incompatible lessons?  Will their students turn out “good” in the same sense that the tyrant is good, or “good” in some other sense, one that makes them useful or noxious to the tyrant?

If, to make a long story short, we find the poets (e.g. Hesiod in the Works and Days) and the sharp-tongued friends (e.g. the anonymous praisers and blamers of the Nicomachean Ethics) saying more or less the same things as the laws – “live quietly and don’t seek profit unjustly” – then necessity, which makes men take council about preserving their own life, seems to speak against this chorus.  The Greeks never invoke necessity except as an excuse or an explanation for an action that would otherwise have seemed just bad.  Necessity teaches people to be strategic, but not scrupulous, in their pursuit of a living.

It’s difficult to square this with the lessons of Isocrates’ other “teachers of the masses,” unless we take Isocrates to have a thought in mind here that he articulates more clearly elsewhere – that a man should appear to behave justly, not through weakness and because he cannot do otherwise, but only out of respect for justice itself.  In that case, necessity would be teaching a capacity to act strategically against justice, a capacity that then remains latent in good men but that renders their goodness meaningful by marking it as a choice.  Socrates makes a similar argument in the Hippias Minor and in Xenophon’s Memorabilia – that the man who knows how to lie is “better” than someone who can only tell the truth.

His capacity for evil is, as we know, what makes man a dangerous animal, but it’s also what makes humans more than livestock.  Supposing that such a capacity really is valuable, even necessary for validating good behavior as more than a confession of weakness, ethicists face their own version of the metaphysical question as to how a potential can be said to exist if it’s never realized.  That is, a really good man has to have the capacity for evil; but, if he’s really good, he’ll never do evil, and so the very capacity that makes us call him good in the first place remains a mere postulation.

Isocrates has an interesting solution to this conundrum, one that in some ways seems characteristic of a shallow thinker but that in other ways accesses a truth about Athenian social life that has no place in the ethics of Plato or Aristotle.  As far as I know, Isocrates is the only Athenian ethical writer – in a culture that gave us Phaedra and Oedipus! – who takes seriously the question of secrets.  He almost seems to take it for granted that those who receive his advice will, nonetheless, keep on doing bad things.  They should hide this, he says, if they can; but, if they need a friend’s advice about an evil deed, they should ask as though they were talking about some third party.  We need only glance at one of Plato’s discussions of the relationship between being and seeming good to see the distinctiveness of Isocrates’ position, which I take to be this: that a man should indeed try to seem good, but that a certain amount of evil done in private is the only thing that can make this seeming worthwhile.

Since before last year’s election, there’s been an argument going on about whether the third of Americs that’s die-hard for Trump is driven by racial animus or something closer to economic self-interest (and, in the latter case, also dumb enough to fall for an obvious con).  The conclusion I came to pretty early on was that both of these things are, to some extent, true.  Much if not most of white America is no less racist now than it was in the fifties, even if people know that you can’t say certain words in public.  Racism can’t be the whole story, though, since plenty of plainly racist white people voted for Obama, some of them twice.  Racism in America is an attitude, and not every attitude is politically salient all the time.

When voters think they have something meaningful to gain from voting for one party or another – when they see that they have an interest in the issues of civil rights, economics or what have you that are at play in a given election – they’ll vote according to that interest.  The rule in American politics has been that interests trump attitudes; as long as genuine interests seem to be at stake, racism can remain widespread without any electoral consequences following from this. What seems to me to have happened in the last few years is that lots of people, especially but not exclusively lower-class whites, have lost any sense that the centrist economic consensus according to which our country has been governed for the last three decades has anything to offer them.  When people believe that nothing the government does will ever help them, the only way left for them to choose a side will be to follow their attitudinal commitments – commitments that can grow to be quite passionate in the absence of other, more meaningful forms of political engagement.

None of this is to discount the palpable effects of gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement – both forms of institutional rather than attitudinal racism – on the outcome of last year’s election and others before it.  I’m only offering a theory as to how things got so bad that these factors, which swung maybe one or two percent of the vote in key states, were enough to put a liar, a scam artist, and a probable rapist in the White House.

The theory I’m working with is, to sum up, that politics as usual in the United States works by a system of collective bribery that leads us to tolerate whatever we hate about our neighbors in exchange for the palpable benefits of peace and prosperity.  Whatever those benefits may once have been, they’re no longer accruing to most Americans – one point on which Black Lives Matter activists and rural Trump voters might even agree.  This has been the state of things for a while – maybe ten or twenty years – but we’re only now starting to realize it.  The consequences of this are difficult to predict.

I find all this much more eloquently put in Jean-Claude Michea’s The Realm of Lesser Evil, a series of lectures in which the author (who teaches Philosophy at the University of Montpellier) reconstructs liberalism’s original sin as its co-dependence with a market economy that undoes many of its egalitarian promises.  Michea argues that liberalism, which emerged in 17th-century Europe in the wake of brutal civil wars, aspires to depoliticize every moral judgment so that our deep ethical commitments can no longer organize political (and therefore potentially violent) conflict.  Since an amoral state no longer has any grounds on which to claim the allegiance of its citizens, it offers the market economy instead: a circulation of goods built on principles of non-judgment and non-interference that, as the liberal promise goes, will guarantee endless growth.

The residue of Michea’s depoliticized judgments would be what I’ve been characterizing as “attitudes;” the market’s promise of prosperity would organize what I’ve been calling “interests.”  Trump’s America is what happens when the market’s promise, which is the central pole around which all interests are supposed to circulate, turns out to have been a texture of lies.

Since the French edition of Michea’s book came out in 2007, it takes no account of that year’s economic collapse and the period of secular stagnation which followed upon it.  I think that the Michea of 2007 would not have been at all surprised to see this course of events issue in the presidency of someone like Trump.  What would’ve surprised him was Marine Le Pen’s defeat in the recent French elections – especially since the French are, if anything, much more cynical than us Americans about the purported benevolence of the invisible hand.

The difference between France and America may just come down to an equivocation that runs throughout Michea’s treatment of tolerance, which he frames as the chief ideological instrument of depoliticization in modern liberalism.  By and large, Michea is opposed to a tolerance which he sees as merely the silencing, by increasingly draconian means (and, since he’s an aging white guy, these means for Michea include “political correctness” – more on this later) of hateful attitudes that survive and even thrive beneath this blanket of repression.  He proposes to replace it with something resembling the Stoic oikeiosis – an ever expanding circle of concern, within which we come to love our neighbors, and their idiosyncrasies, as we love ourselves.

In practice, it would be difficult for an outside observer to tell which of these two tendencies was operating in a given social formation.  They might look almost identical, especially if a society came to cultivate oikeiosis as a virtue that it enforced upon in various non-liberal ways.  Under those circumstances, what Michea derides as political correctness might better be understood as a society’s means of enforcing its own norms as to virtue in a manner that goes beyond the impotent liberal consensus.

The practices of a given, apparently liberal, social formation are thus subject to a kind of anamorphosis: depending on where we stand, what looks at one moment like Michea’s “bad” tolerance can look at another moment like Michea’s “good” brotherly love.  The proof, though, is in the electoral pudding.  White Americans look at their non-white countrymen with barely-repressed hate and envy; they vote for Trump.  The French, on the other hand, still cherish – and are willing to enforce, if necessary – the old-time virtues of liberty, equality, and especially fraternity.

A certain Apollodorus was there, a great desirer of Socrates but otherwise a dope, and he said, “But this, Socrates, is the hardest thing of all for me to bear – that I have to see you unjustly put to death.”  But Socrates is reported to have said, stroking Apollodorus’ hair, “My dear Apollodorus, would you have preferred to see me put to death justly rather than unjustly?”  And he laughed.

A Taulipang myth (as cited in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Immanence and Fear”):

“In the deep past, animals and people lacked an anus with which to defecate.  I think they defecated through their mouths.  Pu’iito, the anus, wandered around, slowly and cautiously, farting in the faces of animals and people, and then running away.  So the animals said: ‘let’s grab Pu’iito, so we can divide him up between us!’ Many gathered and said: ‘we’ll pretend that we’re asleep!  When he arrives, we’ll catch him!’  So that’s what they did.  Pu’iito arrived and farted in the face of one of them.  They ran after Pu’iito, but couldn’t catch him and were left trailing behind.

“The parrots Kuliwai and Kalika got close to Pu’iito.  They ran and ran.  Finally they caught him and tied him up.  Then the others who had been left behind arrived: tapir, dear, curassow, Spix’s guan, piping guan, dove…They began to share him out.  Tapir eagerly asked for a piece.  The parrots cut a large piece and threw it to the other animals.  Tapir immediately grabbed it.  That’s why his anus is so huge.

“The parrot cut a small, appropriately-sized piece for himself.  The deer received a smaller piece than tapir’s.  The doves took a little piece.  Toad arrived and asked them to give him a piece too.  The parrots threw a piece in his direction, which stuck on his back: that’s why even today the toad’s anus is on his back.

“That was how we acquired our anuses.  Were we without them today, we’d have to defecate through our mouths, or explode.”