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In 1748, three books were published that would change the face of Europe.  Owing to the various regimes of censorship then operating there, none of them could appear with an honest title page.  Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws came forth into the world without its author’s name, although the Baron de Secondat would soon accept responsibility.  If controversy dogged it for a long time after its publication, so much of  The Spirit of the Laws has become conventional wisdom that students now find it tedious.  Societies obviously operate and change according to rules which we can know, and not divine mandate.  Liberalism as a political philosophy makes no sense otherwise: in a way, The Spirit of the Laws marks the birth of a notion of a “civil society” from which the government might safely withdraw control.  At the same time, Montesquieu formalizes a secular-scientific view of legislation that had been developing organically in France and England for some time.  As most people now do, he approaches the problem of the laws from a standpoint of “governmentality” rather than justice stricto sensu.

Modern readers, as I said, have a difficult time understanding how these methodological prescriptions could provoke outrage.  An example of how Montesquieu applied them may explain.  Some sixty years earlier, Pierre Bayle had opened an enduring and heated debate by arguing that a society of atheists could be virtuous, perhaps even more virtuous than a society of Christians.  Almost every enlightenment political theorist who came after felt obliged to take a position on this thesis.  Montesquieu, predictably, sides with the conservatives: in his view, Christians are the best subjects a ruler could wish for.  The reason for this, however, is not that Christianity makes people better.  Rather, it tends to make them obedient; moreover, Christianity is unique among faiths in possessing a sacred text made up not of hard moral guidelines but of polite suggestions, which a king can overrule without concern for the consciences of his people.

Montesquieu thus (as often) reaches a conclusion to which his traditionalist contemporaries would have been amenable by absolutely scandalous means.   He treats Christianity not as a religion, which can be true or false, but as a social condition which is adaptable to some purposes and not to others.  In this, he stands at no great distance from the views set forth by Spinoza in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, one of the most reviled European books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Early critics were quick to recognize such echoes and to accuse The Spirit of the Laws of Spinozism, which is to say atheism.  Despite Montesquieu’s denials, they were probably right to do so: from its opening pages, the book is shot through with Spinoza’s thought., which sets it at odds with the providential, god-governed world in which most of his contemporaries still lived.

More nakedly atheistic, and therefore more careful to cover its tracks, was Jean de la Mettrie’s L’Homme machine.*  What Monstesquieu did for society, de la Mettrie did for the individual body: the centerpiece of his argument was to erase Descarte’s distinction between animals and humans and to assert that we, like the animals, are automata without souls.  Vaucanson had constructed his famous mechanical duck, which was able not only to move about but also (apparently) to digest food, only ten years before; Descartes himself, in a paranoid state of mind, had wondered whether his neighbors might not actually be robots, and was rumoured to have built a robotic version of his daughter, Francine, after her death at age five.  De la Mettrie’s book could thus be read not only as a bold philosophical argument but as part of a technological project that seemed on the verge of completion, namely the production of mechanical substitutes for “real” human beings.

From both perspectives, L’Homme machine has to be judged a failure.  Despite using the most advanced medical science of its day (de la Mettrie was also a doctor of some reknown), the book fails to give a convincing substitute explanation for cognitive phenomena and entirely ignores the problems surrounding consciousness.  Technologically, of course, we’re still waiting, 280 years later: the only androids we have are on our cell phones, and Apple users don’t even have that.

None of this has presented the thesis of L’Homme machine from becoming, like that of The Spirit of the Laws, conventional wisdom.  Most young people now believe that humans belong on a continuum with animals and that, like them, we can be thoroughly explained via vulgar materialism.  I don’t mean to contest that thesis, only to point out a tendentious application that sees our material makeup as fully determining social practice.  This version of de la Mettrie’s argument (let’s call it the Thatcherite reading: there’s no such thing as society) is actually incompatible with Montesqueiu’s emphasis on the causal value of collective phenomena, society or culture.  Yet lots of us manage to hold both ideas in our heads at once.  Here’s hoping we never have to choose, but I’d ditch L’Homme machine if the choice were put to me.

By denying humans their souls, L’Homme machine staked out a position that was at the time heretical but has, in the interval, become central to all kinds of modern sciences.  Nonetheless, it is by far the least historically significant of the three books I’m discussing.  In that respect not even The Spirit of the Laws, as influential as it was, can hold a candle to Therese Philosophe, a now little-read pornographic novel published (of course) anonymously but probably authored by the Marquis d’Argens.  One of the forbidden bestsellers of pre-revolutionary France, its popularity among the revolutionary classes allows us to rank Therese Philosophe among the chief literary causes of the events of 1789.  Its self-consciously popularizing approach to serious questions of politics and religion (a hint to modern public intellectuals: sex sells, but that doesn’t mean people ignore everything else) foretold the anticlericalism and antinobilitarianism of Voltaire and his contemporaries.  What Voltaire mocked with cerebral wit, D’Argens showed getting chased naked out of a housewife’s bedroom window.

An incident from early in the novel – in fact, the one that sets Therese on the path to becoming a philosophe – shows striking homologies with Montesquieu’s discussion of the political value of Christianity.  Therese (a nymphomaniac and masturbation-fiend sent to live with nuns by her scandalized mother) happens to be looking through a hole in the wall when her friend goes to confession.   The friend’s spiritual advisor, a typically “celibate” monk, proceeds to flog her with “the cord of St. James” in order to beat out her impurities.  Obediently, Therese’s friend gets down on all fours and lowers her skirts (this isn’t the first time she’s been to confession, after all), but, lo and behold, the “cord of St. James” turns out to be intimately attached to the monk who wields it, and what he does with it could only very metaphorically be described as flogging.

Like Montesquieu, d’Argens depicts Christianity as a religion of obedience, and the casuistic self-defence which the monk offers up when caught puts me in mind of the ease with which, as Montesquieu says, even the hardest of Christian moral prohibitions can be bent.  You can see why d’Argens’ presentation of these ideas might be better for inspiring revolutionary fervor, though.  It’s one thing to think, in the abstract, about Christian subjects being made to put up with all kinds of injustices, even those that go against their convictions; it’s something else to think they’re being fucked, and then (if you’re a citizen of ancien regime France) to realize the person being fucked is you.

The spirit that animates Therese Philosophe, one that’s totally lacking in Spirit of the Laws or L’Homme machine, is what George W.S. Trow called “ordinary cynicism:” the ability to tell, in a given complex social situation, who’s getting paid off (in money, sex, etc.) to lie to you.  Without this sensibility, we’re lost as political subjects, but it’s more of a knack than a knowledge, not the kind of thing you can teach in a university course.  The greatest achievement of the generation of writers following d’Argens was that they were able to transmit this knack to their countrymen, broadly, which is what made the latter fearless enough to stage a revolution.  That’s one lesson of 1748 that we need to relearn today.

* I see now that I’m fudging a bit, since L’Homme Machine actually first hit the presses in late 1747.  I think I can be forgiven for this, since 1748 saw the publication of a much larger second edition as well as its translation into the other major European languages.

 

I’ve always thought the argument set forth by some conservatives, that  individuals shouldn’t have to pay an extra share of taxes on their wealth because they made it themselves, i.e. without assistance from the government taxes support, was a sop for the dopes.  However a person may have acquired property, after all, it’s government that lends that property value by securing it and by ensuring a public order in which the value of more nebulous forms of property – e.g. money, copyrights, sports franchises – can be realized.  As usual, Rousseau puts the point better than I could have done:

“A third [reason for taxing the rich at a higher rate], and one which we should always rank first, is that of the use-values that each person draws from the social confederation, which strongly protects the immense possessions of the rich man and hardly leaves the poor man free to enjoy the shack he has built with his own hands.  All the advantages of society, aren’t they for the powerful and the rich?  All lucrative employments, aren’t they filled by these men alone?  All exceptions and exemptions, aren’t they reserved for them?  And public authority, doesn’t it favor them?  If a wealthy man robs his creditors or does other such base things, is he not sure of impunity?  The blows he hands out, the violaions he commits, even the murders and assassinations of which he makes himself guilty, aren’t these the kind of affairs one simply puts to sleep, and after six months no one speaks of them anymore?  If that same man gets robbed, the whole police force is set in motion, and woe to any innocents that they suspect.  Is he passing through a dangerous place?  Behold, there are escorts in the field.  Has the axle of his carriage just snapped?  Everyone flies to his aid.  Is someone making noise at his door?  One word, and everything is quiet.  Does the crowd inconvenience him?  He makes a sign, and everything arranges itself.  A carter happens to be in his way?  His men are ready to shove him out of it, and fifty honest footman going about their business will be crushed before this lazy knave in his carriage suffers any delay.  All these signs and measures of respect don’t cost the rich man a penny; they’re the right of the wealthy, not the price of wealth.  How different is the situation of a poor man!  The more humanity owes him, the more society refuses him.  For him, every door is closed, even when he has the right to expect to find them open; and, if at some time he should get the justice he deserves, it is with more effort than another would expend to get forgiveness.  If there’s work (corvee) to do, if there’s a militia to raise, that’s when the poor man gets preferred; he carries always, aside from his own burden, that of his neighbor who’s rich enough to get himself exempted.  When the least accident befalls him, everybody runs away.  If his little cart flips over, never mind his getting any help: I’d count him lucky if he can avoid abuse from the thugs of a young duke.  In a word, all free aide flees him in his moment of need, precisely because he has nothing with which to pay it; but I take him for a man beyond saving if he has the bad luck to have an honest soul, a pretty daughter, and a powerful neighbor…

“Let us sum up, in a few words, the social pact that unites these two classes: ‘You need me, because I’m rich and you’re poor; so, let’s make a deal: I’ll permit you to have the honor of serving me, provided you give me what little you have left for the effort I take to give you orders.’

“If we add all these things up with care, we will find that, to share out the tax burden in an equitable and truly proportional manner, the imposition should not be made only in the ratio of the goods of those contributing, but also in a composite ratio according to the difference between their conditions and the superfluity of their goods.  A very important and difficult calculation, which honest civil servants who know their arithmetic nonetheless perform every day, but which men like Plato and Montesquieu don’t dare undertake except in fear and trembling, begging heaven for enlightenment and integrity.”

That much-vaunted “resentment” of Rousseau which has caused modern political scientists to approach his work only “in fear and trembling” really amounts to nothing more than this: Rousseau understands that the rich enjoy privileges that go very far indeed beyond what they may have “earned,” and he proposes measures to remedy the situation.

There’s a lot to like in the rather expansive BUR Classici edition of the Corpus Hermeticum I recently picked up, from the acid-trip epiphany with which the collection begins to its weird agricultural/masturbatory cosmogony (the demiurge started the universe by casting seeds down into the world of material, and he hasn’t stopped since – that’s why we can do noesis) to its Neoplatonic exegesis of cult statues (which turns out to share a metaphysics with Christian attacks on those same statues).  What sticks with me the most, though, is the Latin Asclepius appended to the end of the collection.  This dialogue (most of the corpus consists of dialogues in a Ciceronian style, more like lectures) is the one that gives a much-quoted prophecy about the destruction of Egypt and the abandonment of its gods.  Leaving aside the question of which eventu the prophecy is ex, it makes a striking contribution to a genre I’ve been thinking about for a while now and which may be especially salient at this moment in our history.

Marxists and Whigs alike tend to interpret the history of philosophy as a history of progress, the sum of individual contributions to a collective project that always gains and never loses.  To say the least, that model falls well short of the demands of historical materialism.  In general but especially with respect to political thought, the production of a moment can only be assimilated to a timeless, accumulative history at the cost of ripping it out of the circumstances in which it has been produced and annihilating its polemic value within those circumstances.  A thoughtful historian like Ellen Meiksins Wood will recognize this fact and try to account for it, producing a richer narrative in which appropriations are also transformative.  Even Wood, however, tells a story of philosophy always moving forward – much as history itself, in a doctrinaire Marxist account, is always supposed to be progressive.

Look closer, though, and you see the cul-de-sacs, the dead ends and backwards steps.  If we have learned to see the Dark Ages as not so dark, the Decline and Fall as a Late Antique transition, still we can’t smoothe out all of history this way.  Those cul-de-sacs, it seems to me, are especially productive moments for political thought: the owl of Athena flies at midnight, but that doesn’t mean that dawn is coming.

Some of the works that fall under this rubric have been written off, over the course of the twentieth century, as “minor” texts that fall outside the productive tradition of Western philosophy.  Cicero’s De officiis, written after the assassination of Caesar but when its author had already begun to lose hope that a restoration of the Republic would follow from that, is one example.  The entire oeuvre of Xenophon, written as a rear-guard action against mass politics and mercantile power, is another.  All these texts were long misunderstood by a popular tradition of classical education which has largely died out; the academic history of philosophy that survives simply  doesn’t know what to do with them.

A more striking case is that of Machiavelli, writing in the wake of a failed republican experiment in Florence.  The Prince and the Discourses have never lacked for interpreters who see them as representing an important historical watershed, the secularization of politics and its liberation from various theological straightjackets.  I suppose that would be a case of moral luck: once enlightenment thinkers (who by and large rejected him or read him as a satirist) had completed the work for which Machiavelli is usually credited, he could be seen in retrospect as a historical antecedent.  Nevertheless, Machiavelli should be understood not as tranforming the substance of political thought but as writing about a recently vanished past.

All these thinkers are analyzing possibilities for action that have recently been foreclosed.  They write within what, for them, are radically impoverished historical horizons where forms of excellence that they cherish no longer seem possible.  The images they offer of that excellence are fully retrospective but exercise a fascinating power on later readers.  That may be the function of such texts: to beautify an obsolete form of political organization in order to raise the possibility of its restoration at some point in the future.

The Asclepius undertakes a similar task with respect, not to actual Egyptian religion, but to a Neoplatonic culture of theurgy that was under intellectual and legal assault in late antiquity.  It predicts that men who practice the old rites will be arrested and executed: this is precisely what happened to a pair of senators under Theoderic, who was enforcing legislation put into place by Theodosius a century earlier.  The Christian emperors had undertaken to exterminate Neoplatonism as a ritual practice.  In the West, they succeeded.

Against this background, the Asclepius directly broaches a question that the other texts I’ve mentioned only address obliquely: once the knowledge associated with the culture it memorializes has been lost, how will a restoration be possible?  It can answer this question in a concrete way because it shares with the rest of the Corpus Hermeticum a theory of knowledge (noesis) that depends on direct divine inspiration.  Things will be put right again after an interval of chaos because the god (ho theos) will send knowledge to a new generation of men.

The evidently mythical character of this solution highlights a problem that every text in this genre has to face.  The text itself may survive and inspire a new generation of imitators; what can be done to ensure that they read it correctly?  Hermeticism itself offers an example of how this can go wrong: Renaissance audiences eagerly devoured the Corpus Hermeticum in Ficino’s translation, but they historicized it as one form of wisdom among many in a kind of philosophia perpetua that bore only traces of Late Antique Neoplatonism.  Finally, Isaac Casaubon demonstrated at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the Corpus had been composed at a much later date than it pretended, and this was enough to destroy its authority.  Had its readers seriously imbibed its theory of noesis, this philological refutation should have done nothing to discredit the contents of the Corpus, which could just as easily have been divinely revealed in the first few centuries CE as in the second millennium BCE.  However, the Renaissance was characterized by new scholarly and antiquarian attitudes toward the “authenticity” of texts which the authors of the Corpus could not have anticipated.  The total control over its own reception which the text envisions was impossible to achieve in practice.

I’m writing this at a moment when it seems seriously possible that a certain political culture, one in which disagreements about collective aims and practices get resolved through rhetorical agonism rather than violence or asymmetrical repression, may vanish in my lifetime.  With the support of autocrats elsewhere in the world as well as his own electoral base, Trump may formalize his own authoritarian aspirations and suppress forms of free speech essential to democracy, if not the voting process itself.  Should that happen, democracy would lose the international prestige that led to its establishment (in name at least) around the world over the twentieth century.  It would retreat everywhere in favor of nationalist-socialist regimes like those recently established in Russia, Poland and Hungary.  This is an unlikely future, but not outside the realm of possibility.

If that were to come to pass, what would the philosophical legacy of this moment look like to future readers?  This is a difficult thought experiment, because it requires us to envision an advocate for the democratic process less brain-dead than David Brooks or Thomas Friedman, but bear with me and suppose that someone did turn up who fit the bill.  Would s/he be a footnote to history, like Xenophon?  A B-movie villain, like Machiavelli?  A mystic, like the author of the Corpus Hermeticum?  That we can hardly say which of these outcomes is most likely marks, I think, the extent to which our future is beginning to look like a black box.

 

Here’s a pressing question: if Matthew Crawford’s essay on privilege is as shoddy a piece of work as I say it is, how did it get published?

The easy answer is that Crawford works for the institute that funds the journal that published it, but I don’t think he would have had much difficulty placing it elsewhere.  It looks too “highbrow-magaziney” for an editor to turn down.  Let me explain what I mean.

First: Though the essay is essentially an opinion piece, it also gives a discursive treatment of some historical facts about privilege in ancien regime France.  These facts appear to support Crawford’s argument, but they’re not really vital to it.  In fact, they should be seen as purely decorative; they make it seem as though Crawford knows what he’s talking about.

Second: Crawford cites and summarizes an argument by Furet, who’s published a number of books.  Furet is French, so he presumably knows what he’s talking about, and that means Crawford isn’t just making things up.  A knowledgeable French person agrees with him.

Third, and most importantly: Crawford provides a pithy, counterintuitive, but actually quite simple and easily-memorized position on a major topic of discussion among what the Hedgehog Review takes to be its audience.  That makes the essay useful for people who like to have things to say in social situations.  The relevant context for deployment of Crawford’s thesis wouldn’t be in a debate about white privilege, since it’s too flawed an argument to stand up to hostile scrutiny.  Rather, we should imagine something like the following dialogue:

(SCENE: a crowded porch, evening, summer.  White people in suits and dresses are drinking cocktails.)

Rebecca: Did you see the Wall Street Journal article about all the college kids saying that Yale should rename Calhoun College?  Something about “white privilege.”  I don’t get it.

Nigel: I read a really interesting article about that by Matthew Crawford.  You remember, the guy who said kids need to work with their hands more?  Anyhow, he said it’s all liberal self-hatred.

Crawford’s ideas are designed to circulate among people who already know that they don’t like to talk about white privilege, but aren’t sure why.  The “liberal self-hatred” thesis works to cut conversations about white privilege short in an apparently intellectually creditable way.  In this, it functions like one of Flaubert’s idees recues, those obligatory cocktail-party apothegms that express conventional wisdom so well as to block further inquiry.  Some thoughts become idees recues as soon as someone publishes them.

That brings me to the question of whom this article is for.  I’ve already given some sense of my answer, which is that it’s “for” the kind of people that “X privilege” talk might make uncomfortable if they hadn’t been innoculated against it.  Those are the people who read the Hedgehog Review: ivy-league students and their parents, but not the ones who’d read or accept the meritocratic justifications of white privilege on offer in the Weekly Standard or the Daily Stormer.  This audience accepts Crawford’s argument as exactly the kind of balm for a guilty conscience that he accuses “white privilege” discourse of being.

How do you write an article like this?  You don’t necessarily need to be insincere; you just need to be clever, not too self-aware, and suffering from the same crisis of conscience you want to address in your readership.  Then you need to dress up whatever sophistical solution to that crisis lets you sleep at night with facts, figures and authority claims from that book you read a while ago (and note that every such claim on offer in Crawford’s article derives from one book).  Cover your tracks – which is easy, thanks to the loose citation standards of highbrow non-academic periodicals – and you’re good to submit to the journal of your choice.  The editors (assuming you’re enough of an insider or a Big Name to get them to take a look at your work) will sense that you’ve written something valuable for their audience, which in turn will digest your ideas and put them into broader circulation.  The only blowback you’ll get is on blogs, which nobody reads anyway.

Today, a third post on Matthew Crawford’s recent, much-shared essay attacking contemporary privilege discourse.  That’s three posts more than necessary, but I’m committed to following through on all my mistakes.

The first half of Crawford’s article, which I’ve discussed already, argues that phrases like “white privilege” are for various reasons intellectually illegitimate.  The second half offers an alternative explanation for the prevalence of that phraseology, especially (and, as Crawford seems to think, exclusively) on politically liberal college campuses.  In outline, he alleges that “white privilege” is only the latest in a long line of balms for the survivor’s guilt that afflicts anyone who succeeds in a bourgeois-capitalist society with egalitarian norms.  The winners in such a society, Crawford claims, feel a kind of obligation to search out all forms of inequality except the ones that have led to their own success and to which they remain blind.

This isn’t wrong, exactly, especially if it’s read from a Marxist perspective: identitarian privilege language does tend to ignore class divisions and might even act as a cover for them, blocking forms of agitation that might find broader audiences and achieve more revolutionary results.  Is this what Crawford means?   Of course I can’t see into his secret heart of hearts, but I suspect not.  In his breakthrough book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, he quotes Marx favorably about the mechanics of alienation to which Crawford (a little naively) proposes DIY handiwork as a balm.  That was in 2009, though; nine years later, Crawford seems to have abandoned any Marxist sympathies in pursuit of a place as a “centrist” intellectual under the Trump regime.  The only intellectual authority Crawford quotes by name in “Privilege” is François Furet, a writer who made his name by red-baiting during an earlier global right-wing turn in the 1980’s.  Furet’s attacks on university Marxism provide Crawford with a template for the argument I summarized earlier.  In Craword’s view, privilege language has replaced that Marxism as a kind of intellectual shibboleth by which members of the upper class at once assuage their guilt and assert their belonging.  Both political stances are illegitimate, and for the same reason.

This puts Crawford in a difficult position.  He identifies “X privilege” phraseology as a cover for class tension, but seems unable to offer a reason why that class tension shouldn’t exist.  Following Furet, the Crawford of this essay seems like a defender of the current order of things for its own sake.  Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the extent to which Crawford has benefitted, materially and otherwise, from the way we live now.  Like most white men, Crawford hasn’t even been harmed by the election of Trump.  On that subject, here’s a particularly obtuse (I wanted to say “fucking dumb,” but “obtuse” was what the thesaurus gave me) sentence from near the end of the essay:

Whether one regards that event as a catastrophe or as a rupture that promises the possibility of glasnost, its immediate effect has been panic in every precinct where the new class accommodations have been functioning smoothly, and a doubling down on the moralizing that previously secured them against popular anger.

I don’t know what country Crawford lives in – maybe the same one as the people who write for the New York Times opinion section.  Regardless, I think it would be safe to characterize him as one of those people who feel safe enough to regard Trump’s election as “a rupture that promises the possibility of Glasnost.”  If that isn’t white (combined with upper-class) privilege, I don’t know what is.

I’m losing the thread.  Crawford identifies privilege discourse as a substitute for something, which should be Marxism but which, since Crawford leans so heavily on Furet, can’t be.  If that’s the case, it’s unclear what’s wrong exactly with the contemporary language of privilege.

“White privilege” salves class guilt.  So what?  Is it worse than cocaine, in that sense the while privilege of the 80’s?  Yes, says Crawford, because it makes people angry – in particular, the sort of people against whom “white privilege” language is targeted and whom Crawford, like much of the media, tends to think of as “real Americans.”  Well, that’s typically what happens when a polemic hits home: people get angry.  Polemical language forces confrontation over a point of substantial disagreement that would otherwise have gotten swept under the rug.  That’s what polemics are for.

If talking about privilege forces us to confront the corrosive effect that enduring (and developing) privileges have had on our national life, then I’m all for college campuses amplifying that discussion.  Of course, I’d rather the students having that discussion were also socialists or Marxists, but a lot of them are: they prefer both/and over Crawford’s neither/nor.

I know this because I teach on a college campus.  Crawford doesn’t, as far as I can tell; he’s “a research fellow,” which is academic code for “insulated from undergraduates.”  I assume, then, that he gets his news about who’s using privilege language and how from some other source: colleagues, Fox News, whatever.  Maybe I should just have said this at the outset, because it’s enough to discredit the empirical characterization of privilege discourse (it’s all ivy-league students, the winners of capitalism) on which his argument depends.  Actually, Crawford has no idea who’s talking in terms of white privilege.

Some ivy league students, certainly – I know that because I’ve taught at an ivy league school, something that Crawford has also to my knowledge never done.  But also a lot of non-ivy league students, students whom it would be obtuse (that thesaurus again) to characterize as winners in the game of capitalism.  A lot of them are first-generation college students, people who find themselves stuck on a qualifications treadmill that demands they have a BA to get a job that pays less than one they could have held with a college diploma thirty years ago.  A lot of them are minorities, which means that, even with a degree in hand, they’ll have a harder time finding a job and whatever job they do find will probably pay them less than their white classmates would’ve made.  Those people aren’t using “white privilege” language to soothe a guilty conscience; they’re using it to attack what the word designates in the hope of eliminating it, so that they can get a fair shake.

But those people aren’t the target demographic for the Hedgehog Review.  Tomorrow I’ll write about whom Crawford’s article is for and (relatedly) the role of the dishonest magazine intellectual in modern public life.

In my previous post, I offered a correction to Matthew Crawford’s etymological method.  Now, returning to the same article (“Privilege,” published in the Hedgehog Review), I’m going to discuss the second in Crawford’s docket of complaints against the widespread circulation of phrases like “white privilege” and “cis privilege.”  Crawford sees these phrases not as apodictic but as expressive: “The term ‘privilege,'” he writes, “is used not to make a case but to convey a mood.”  The mood in question, according to Crawford, is fundamentally one of resentment against those who succeed in the “winner-takes-all” competition of modern capitalism.  That the most successful are also the most likely to express such resentment is a separate claim of Crawford’s, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.

The form of Crawford’s argument has its roots in Nietzsche, who was the first to articulate a theory of ressentiment that transformed it from a term of personal psychology into a world-historical force.  Broadly speaking, Nietzsche characterized the history of Europe as following from a series of  “slave revolt in morality” (Christianity in its various historical forms) that replaced the aristocratic ethic, a valuation of power, with a slave/peasant ethic that valued suffering and that bound the exercise of power together with guilt.  Feelings of ressentiment on the part of the lower orders against their social superiors were the what drove this transformation.  For Nietzsche, ressentiment meant a feeling of having been injured and a drive for revenge against those to whom, because of your own weakness, you could do nothing.  Physically impotent, ressentiment seeks its satisfaction in the world of ideas;  ressentiment takes advantage of every opportunity to force the powerful to see the exploitation by which they thrive as morally wrong.

Nietzsche intented ressentiment as a categorory of historical explanation.  In that field, it functioned as part of Nietzsche’s more general attack on the notion of reason in history.  Not only were the progressive accounts of whig historians (to say nothing of older providential narratives) wrong; the historical agents themselves, when they offered apodictic claims, could not be taken at their word.  Those agents took their various argumentative positions not because logic compelled them to do so, but for other reasons having to do with partial or private interest.  Ressentiment was one of those reasons.  In history, Nietzsche thought, these were the only kind of reasons with any explanatory value.

Nevertheless, resentment rapidly came to play a role in  arguments of an entirely different sort.  Since its foundation, Western political philosophy has gyrated around the question of whether there’s one politics or many: do different social positions generate different but commensurate political orders, or is there one right order that transcends social positioning?  On the side of multiplicity are e.g. Aristotle, Plato (not uncontroversially) and Machiavelli; on the side of singularity, we find Cicero, Hobbes and Spinoza (a rare and perhaps the only non-elitist to insist on the univocality of the political good).  Anyone in that latter camp has to face the difficulty that, in fact, different people have advocated and put into practice many different solutions to the basic problems of politics.  Tactically, the easiest way to surmount this difficulty has been to insist that all solutions except the right one have arisen from irrational motives, typically motives that satisfy the self-interest of a section or of individuals at the expense of the social whole.

Nietzschean resentment was readily deployed as one such motives by bourgeois thinkers who wanted to argue against calls for redistribution of the wealth amassed by industrial capitalists.  You can see, though, how this shift of context is inappropriate: the defenders of profit transferred resentment from a historical field where logic had no purchase into a “scientific” field where it would always fight an asymmetrical battle against the superior logic of upper-class intellectuals.

Nietzsche would not have objected to this appropriation (for him, ideas are only tokens in a struggle between wills to power) but neither can we say that such use of the term belongs to a Nietzschean tradition.  He would probably have commented, though, on the ironic transformation of what he had identified as a drive of the lower classes into a psychological defense mechanism of the aristocrats.  In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, “resentment” was a magic word that you could use to make the logic any argument for redistribution, no matter how sound, disappear.  It now appeared as though the shoe was on the other foot: in the field of political theory, “resentment” was an irrational response on the part of the oppressor against the reason of the oppressed.

That’s how Crawford uses the word in his essay: “white privilege” is an inherently irrational attack on the successful.  That this usage still makes sense is a measure of how successful the rhetorical class warfare of the capitalists was, at least in an Anglophone context.  After a paragraph accounting for “X privilege” in terms of resentment, Crawford  expects his readers to take him at his word when he claims that such language is purely expressive in character.  Never mind that there are dozens of books, academic and popular alike, written from the left and the right, that spell out exactly what apodictic weight the charge of “X privilege” carries.  The word “resentment” conjures away all that literature in advance.

Here, as usual, the theory of resentment is anti-intellectual: it saves us the trouble of puzzling out what arguments might be offered in support of the existence of something like “white privilege.”  I suspect it also saved Matthew Crawford a lot of research, on which more in a couple of days.  For now, and to give a sense of what Crawford’s trying to cover up, I’ll spell out one argument as to the existence and salience of “white privilege.”

Legal privilege is odious to American democracy, and per se illegal.  However, the forms of action enabled by such privilege, as I argued yesterday, not only persist outside of legal justification but may, with time give rise to a legal justification.  Minimally, such forms of action could be identified with the practical indifference of a group or individual to a law that everyone else has to follow.  The fact that non-white people are far more likely to be stopped and, if stopped, ticketed for minor traffic violations, is sufficient evidence for the existence of this minimal white privilege.  I’m white, and one of my brake lights has been out for a year.  During that time, I haven’t bothered to replace it and I’ve never been pulled over.  That’s an action consistent with privilege: I act as though the law doesn’t apply to me.

When people talk about white privilege, however, this isn’t always what they mean.  They’re often talking about a certain kind of inequality of opportunity, in particular claim that white people don’t have to concern themselves with certain negative possibilities like deportation, chronic underemployment and housing precarity.  Each of these particular instances calls for empirical demonstration, of course; one of the major weaknesses of “X privilege” language is that it doesn’t always pursue such demonstration and, when it does, fails to recognize that the privilege in question may result not just from whatever X is but from the cross-cutting of other categories like class, race, gender and geography.*  In principle, however, such language has content and is not merely expressive.

Here is where Crawford’s charge of resentment appears to have some purchase.  Why do we care if some people get ahead while others fail, so long as that’s not the result of a collective decision for which we’re responsible, i.e. a law?  It’s just a result of market sorting – which process, Crawford seems to think, gets the right answer every time.

This appearance is a trick, not so much on Crawford’s part as of the system in which we live.  Free-market ideology is one thing, free-market politics is another: something like an allergy on the part of the state for being blamed for any particular outcome.  To avoid such blame, the sphere of the law contracts – except when it comes to regulations for public safety, of which the drug and traffic laws now so unevenly applied are a prime example.  Then what happens?  The laws of the state get replaced by the laws of economics, which are, preposterously, supposed to be “natural” laws.  Nonetheless, by refusing to regulate the economy more aggressively, we chose them.

If economics now stands in for the law, as in many spheres it does, then the economy is a field in which we should look for patterns of action associated with privilege.  When we find them, as we do – whites accepting as entitlements things like SAT prep classes and home loans for which Blacks and Hispanics have to fight – we should seek to eliminate them for the same reasons we seek to eliminate legal privileges, though perhaps by different means.  Crawford, no idiot in economics, is disingenuous in ignoring these arguments.  Resentment gives him conceptual cover for doing so.

* This weakness is tantamount to a general public unwillingness, grounded in a justified fear that doing so would amount to giving up on the American Dream, to identify any particular social formation as an “aristocracy.”  A group so identified would be ripe for revolutionary overthrow, but most Americans would still rather join them than beat them.  Apropos of that, a major reason for the failure of all slave revolts in antiquity is that their leaders didn’t want to overthrow slavery as such: they only wanted to become masters.

I made the mistake of taking a fresh look at Arts and Letters Daily today after several years away.  In retrospect, it’s easy to see how the site pioneered a clickbaiting strategy: Dennis Dutton, its founding editor, mixed articles of genuine interest with “hate reads” that would guarantee audience engagement at an affective and not just an intellectual level.  Dutton (not that bright a bulb himself) practiced an editorial “neutrality” that put tedious ideologues like Roger Scruton on the same level as serious thinkers and talented writers.  Notably, Christopher Hitchens loomed as large on the site after his neocon conversion as before.  I think I used to respect this, but now I can’t see it as anything different than what facebook does.

All that is by way of apology for my taking the bait.  Matthew Crawford, the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft (and somehow, on that basis, a fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Study, but more on that tomorrow or the next day), published an essay on “Privilege” which aldaily, with its infallible nose for outrageous bullshit, picked up.  There’s enough wrong with the essay to fill three posts, to which I’ll be adding a fourth with a theory as to why it managed to find a place in a “major” publication.

Crawford’s argument is essentially that the use of the term “privilege” in phrases like “white privilege” is historically illegitimate, motivated by resentment, and functional more as a way of assuaging bourgeois guilt than as a real political critique.  I’m going to address each of these points in turn, starting with the first.

When he treats modern use of the word “privilege” as a katachresis, I take Crawford to be making a point about etymology.  As a classicist, this is a subject in which I have some expertise.  Knowing Greek, Latin and a little Indo-European linguistics is enough to make English transparent: you know where all the words come from.

The pedagogical temptation, if you have this knowledge and happen to be standing in front of a class that neither has it nor aspires to it, is to trot it out at every point and make your class about words rather than whatever you advertised yourself as teaching.  You might, for instance, point out that the word “advertise” comes originally from Latin “[animum] advertere,” “to notice or attend to.”  You might then say either that this is a “true” etyomology because of the attention-seeking character of modern advertising, or that American-style descriptive/aspirational advertising is “illegitimate” because it goes beyond advertising’s etymological function as that which merely draws our attention to the products of commerce.  Both claims would probably be convincing for a classroom of undergraduates, but they’re equally shoddy: the causal arguments involved in each (“because,” “since”) can’t possibly be justified with reference to etymology.  They’re synchronic evaluations grounded in diachronic evidence.  These two types of explanation don’t mix: it’s as if you’re telling me my steak counts as a vegetable because it used to be grass.

Crawford’s discussion of the history of the word “privilege” is only slightly more nuanced than this.  He begins by giving a straightforward explanation of the term’s Latin/French etymology as “private law,” then outlines the role such privileges played in the noble exceptionalism of the ancien regime.  That exceptionalism was bad, Crawford says, because parasitical (another bad argument, but for different reasons; 18th century economists saw things this way, but both the noblemen themselves and that considerable group of revolutionaries motivated by their reading of Rousseau articulated the problem in terms of justice.)  Modern talk about “X privilege,” however, means something completely different:

Obviously, the whole system of privilege was parasitical. It was also quite different from what we mean today when we speak of privilege. According to current usage, it means something like good fortune. In a polemical discussion of education, for example, it will be said that a child who grows up with two parents is “privileged,” from which we are meant to infer that there is something illegitimate about the source of his relative calm and competence.

Leaving aside Crawford’s straw-man example (the notion of two-parent privilege is preposterous, to be sure, but I also suspect Crawford invented it himself), the argument appears complete.  People used to use the word in a serious sense to justify or attack “real” injustices, ones enshrined in law; now people use it to attack anyone who’s been lucky.  The new usage is “illegitimate” from the perspective of etymology.

The trick with an argument like Crawford’s is that, if you devote yourself to contradicting one of its assumptions, you appear to grant a number of others that are equally weak.  In passing, then, I need to raise the following questions: what does Crawford think noble birth was, if not “something like good fortune?”  Is Crawford unaware that the “relative calm and confidence” of his American students, whether they come from two-parent households or not, is grounded in a tremendous resource parasitism vis-a-vis the rest of the world?  To say nothing of the parasitism of capital on labor, which, in a reference to communism as a passing illusion that obscures a real petitio principii, Crawford disregards with a wave of the hand.

Leaving those questions behind, I’m going to pose a hypothetical one that exposes the basic hollowness of Crawford’s argument from etymology and others like it: what would have to be true in the present day for people to go on using “privilege” in a historically legitimate sense?  The answer to that can only be that we’d have to live in something like ancien regime France.  The US constitution effectively bans privileges, so that would have to be modified or repealed; then, somehow, a situation would have to arrive in which the very rich so openly controlled our government that they were able to pass laws explicitly exempting themselves, as individuals, from civic obligations that the rest of us had to undertake (leaving aside the question of whether this is how things are already, de facto; in a democracy, you at least need to put on a show of equality before the law.)

By Crawford’s standards, then, not only do college students use the word “privilege” incorrectly; there’s no way for anyone now living to use it in the right way, except with historical referent.  That’s the actual conclusion of Crawford’s argument.  Etymology grounds a prescriptivist claim that effectively annihilates a word from the English language.

Where did Crawford go wrong here?  I’m sure he knows, but I’ll say it anyway: he ignored the basic Nietzschean point that origin is neither definition nor explanation.  Knowing the etymological root of a word tells us nothing, either positive or negative, about its usage in the present day.  The only question of interest, the real genealogical question, is how we got from there to here.

The rest of Crawford’s essay seems to want to answer this question, but, since it assumes the illegitimacy of the modern usage and since it operates at a time-depth (from one to two decades) equivalent to synchronicity, it’s not an answer of the right sort.  The right sort of answer would be the sort that Raymond Williams gives in Keywords, his commentary on the OED: a lexicographically careful history of usage from the 18th century to the present.  That kind of answer helps you understand not just that the meaning of the word has changed – a trivial observation – but how and why.

What would such a genealogy of privilege look like?  I don’t have Williams’ patience or talent, but I do have online access to the OED, and that’s enough at least to draw a sketch.  When I look at the entry there, the first thing that stands out to me is that the use of privilege to mean “something like good fortune” (s.v., 3b) actually predates the 18th century.  If we’re looking for something new in the way the word’s now used, we should be looking under definition 6:

As a mass noun: the fact or state of being privileged. In later use also: the existence of economic and social privileges associated with rank or status; the fact of there being such privileges within a society.

The quotations suggest that what the OED means by “later use” here, especially when it comes to “the fact of there being such privileges in society,” is “late 20th century and onward.”  Since this is also the sense of the noun as it appears in phrases like “white privilege,” then this, and not a superficial detail like Crawford’s “good fortune” or “parasitism,” is what a historian ought to be investigating.

How did “privilege,” once exclusively the property of an individual or corporate institution, develop into an abstract noun?  The turn, it would appear, begins at some point in the 18th century, and almost immediately privilege appears as something to be attacked.  The target these early users have in mind, though, is not those legal privileges of which Crawford makes so much.  Instead, they’re attacking the social echoes of those legal privileges.  Take for instance Samuel Richardson’s 1753 description of “A..man, who wants to assume airs of privilege, and thinks he has a right to be impertinent.”  The characterization is evidently invidious, not because its target actually possesses legal privileges but because he acts as though he did.

The line of connection between Crawford’s legal privilege and the “airs of privilege” sniffed at by Richardson is easy to draw.  Special status at law means you have less need to be careful of offending or injuring others, whom you can also count upon to render you certain legally-mandated services and obeisance.  To take advantage of those privileges means acting differently than you would have acted without them: privilege produces a habitus, and the habitus can persist without legal support.

Richardson and his contemporaries already knew what modern research has confirmed, that behaviors have historically been more important than laws in the production of social inequality.  Suppose you create a society ideologically committed to social equality: then you’ve set the stage for the next step in the semantic evolution of privilege, from the habitus of an individual to the very existence of such a habitus in society.

That kind of privilege is the one that the best part of the enlightenment project has been dedicated to stamping out.  When activists anywhere talk about white privilege, then, it would also only be charitable to read them in this way: as attacking a habitus that has the pernicious tendency to produce and reproduce social inequality.  Crawford’s sloppy etymology, however makes him (allows him to?) miss the point.

Instead, Crawford identifies the discourse of “x privilege” with resentment.  His  argument for that identification is plausible and in some cases correct, but that’s not why it appeals to him or his readers.  More on this tomorrow.

When political scientists offer you the choice between force and consent, the one you pick is supposed to be a foregone conclusion.  Don’t you want to live in a state where the government solicits the consent of the governed rather than enforcing its will with violence?  Of course you do, especially when the alternative is something like Stalin’s USSR or Nazi Germany.

The dark side of the dichotomy is that consent means something a little different from active support.  You can consent for all kinds of reasons to things you don’t particularly like.  I consented to having a nasty airport sandwich the other day because I was hungry and tired.  Last night, I consented to having low-grade box wine with dinner because that was what was in the fridge.

When it comes to everyday consent, as those examples suggest, the bar is pretty low.  Politically, it’s even lower, especially when “government,” as it does in any modern bureaucratic states, designates a much narrower corps of people than the citizenship as a whole.  It’s not like Ancient Athens, where consenting to something means you might end up having to do the dirty work yourself.  As evidence that he didn’t consent to the tyrannical rule of the thirty, Socrates points out that he refused to go arrest a man who was going to be executed.  That’s not a defense that most of us are ever going to be able to offer, and the ones who could are so habituated to thinking of themselves as cogs in a machine that the idea of doing so would never cross their mind.  We can even consent to war without, in most cases, it affecting us personally, while the culture of the US military makes following orders, regardless of how much or little sense they make, a matter of personal pride.

You can see, then, how a political culture in which consent is the only bar anyone’s trying to get over might be deeply corrosive to the democratic ethos.  When their consent is what’s being appealed to, people learn not to expect better.  As long as a policy debate (or an election) won’t cause unbearable harm to them personally, it’s not worth participating: they consent, so why bother?.  To the proferred policy option, their response is not “yes” or “no” but “sure, whatever.”

None of this is news to either major party.  For decades, they’ve been focused not on doing what most Americans want them to but on ensuring that the “sure, whatever” vote remains in the majority.  Republicans have been more successful at this on the whole than Democrats have, because most Republican politicians are quietly racist and this gives them an intuitive sense of how to carve off the cares from the care-nots.  In Republican rhetoric, “white” means “safe.”  This is one sense in which Republican dog-whistle tactics have been a bit misunderstood: whatever the intent behind them, they work not so much because white Republican voters are sadists as because they reassure those voters that the harm is always going to befall someone else.  When you get the consent, after all, the force has to go somewhere.

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America isn’t really a great alternative history: in some ways, all that’s jut a cover for another finely-felt childhood memoir about discovering masturbation.  What Roth gets right, though, and what makes that book unsettlingly predictive, is the extent to which Americans will happily “consent” to all kinds of madness so long as it doesn’t hurt them personally.  However true this was in the 1940’s, it’s definitely true now: white people don’t care about a little ethnic cleansing as long as the employment numbers stay good.  After all, they’re not ethnic.

In Roth’s novel, and in real life these past two years, most people won’t come out and say they support ethnic cleansing – but they still want to “consent” to it, because that’s easier than the alternative.  In Roth’s book and reality, this dilemma gets resolved through what properly alarmed observers have come to call “normalization,” where we pretend to believe whatever marginally constitutional justification our leaders offer for policies that clearly violate the bedrock principle of equality before the law.  “Normalization” is a good term, but most people point it the wrong way.  The goal isn’t so much to “normalize” unconscionable actions but to “normalize” ourselves as the kind of people who’d consent to them.

Meanwhile, the nation splits into subjects and objects of politics.  The objects of politics are all the people it turned out Trump could slander and still get elected president.  They have no control at all over what’s happening.  To them, anything can (and will) be done.  Agamben said this was where we were 20 years ago, and nobody believed him.

The subjects of politics have no control over what’s happening either, but at least they’re doing something – “consenting” – that can be described in the active voice.  Republican politicians notionally are doing something, but, since that something is mostly about preserving the subject-object split by disenfranchising voters, ethnic cleansing and rewriting laws, our country ends up having the psychology of a genuine neurotic: it’s change you can’t believe in.

Our choice of consent over force (for ourselves, anyway) is supposed to make us feel safe.  The problem is that consent is something for which you can be held accountable: ask the Germans, who, pace the Nazi state’s hallowed place as an example of a force-based regime, mostly consented to the murder of millions of their neighbors and haven’t yet been allowed to live it down.  There’s an alternative to accepting guilt for what you’ve consented to, but it’s even more unpalatable.  If Trump, in 2020, tells you what Pericles (with appreciably more justification) told the Athenians after a couple years of Peloponnesian Warring – “You’ve done too many horrible things to these people, they’ll never forgive you, so you have to keep fighting until they’re utterly defeated” – what’s your answer going to be?

Your answer can’t be that you voted for democrats, because that’s still consenting to the policies of a government in which democrats have no power.  Your answer can be, for example, that you went to jail for protesting.  That answer would imply that, when they offered you a choice between consent and force, you picked the other one.

 

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.