All posts by anomalogue

Liberal versus democratic

Politics

Continuing from yesterday…

  • The liberal element of liberal-democracy is negative: Where is the majority prohibited from infringing upon the liberty of the individual (at the expense of the collective’s freedom to shape its collective life)?
  • The democratic element of liberal-democracy is positive: Where is the majority free to impose laws on individuals in order to shape its collective life (at the expense of individual liberty)?

I think Libertarians are deeply confused about their policies being most favorable to individual liberties. What makes Libertarianism essentially conservative is that deregulated markets create mechanisms for imposing law on individuals and for creating collective identity, but in the private realm. And it is no accident that the most vehemently individualistic Libertarians I know all enjoy employment arrangements that distance them from the often extreme levels of control imposed in corporate employment. They have state jobs, or bounce around (a.k.a. get bounced out of) jobs, or are un-/under-employed. Yet, without a trace of irony, they continue to extoll the liberty-bestowing powers of the deregulated market.

 

Private liberty and political freedom

Biography, Brand, Politics

I am currently reading Chantal Mouffe’s Democratic Paradox, which explores a fundamental tension inherent in all liberal-democratic societies, which can be summarized by Marvin Simkin’s famous formulation: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.”

…with modern democracy, we are dealing with a new political form of society whose specificity comes from the articulation between two different traditions. On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between those two distinct traditions but only a contingent historical articulation.

…it is vital for democratic politics to understand that liberal democracy results from the articulation of two logics which are incompatible in the last instance and that there is no way in which they could be perfectly reconciled. Or, to put it in a Wittgensteinian way, that there is a constitutive tension between their corresponding ‘grammars’, a tension that can never be overcome but only negotiated in different ways. This is why the liberal-democratic regime has constantly been the locus of struggles which have provided the driving force of historical political developments. The tension between its two components can only be temporarily stabilized through pragmatic negotiations between political forces which always establish the hegemony of one of them.

One of the problems dogging discourse in the United States (though, honestly, probably not in the top 1000 problems) is that we lack precise language for distinguishing between an individual’s rights against majority views (a negative conception of liberty), and the rights of communities to provide themselves support to maintain themselves (a positive political freedom to shape one’s society).

When I think about it this way, it becomes clear to me that the primary value of the free market is not, in fact, to provide the maximum individual private liberty, but rather to establish conditions favorable to political freedom of autonomous communities, that is, companies.

It is for this reason that I have become interested in the free market. It is not enough anymore for me to have my own individual liberty. I want to do things to the world, with other people, in a community with specific values, hopes and goals. I want to belong to a branded company.

But if you think this means I’m becoming an advocate for de-regulation, you’d better think again. Just as powerless individuals ought to be protected from other stronger individuals, if we believe in corporate personhood (and why not?) then let’s go all the way and grant it to corporate persons of all sizes. Wouldn’t this mean protecting small corporate persons from being anti-competitively bullied by bigger corporate persons?

And while we are at it, if entrepreneurship is the fullest realization of American freedom, doesn’t that set a new goal? Are we not morally obligated to provide all Americans equal access to not only to individual liberty but also to true political freedom? This does not mean all risk is removed, but it should mean that there is not a gross difference in consequences of failure. As things stand where a rich man who fails will certainly be crestfallen and have to cut back on some luxuries, a poor person who fails faces loss of healthcare for her/his family, long-term credit destruction (which extends far beyond denial of credit), to an environment that is physically safe and to adequate education for her/his children. There’s a point where freedom becomes a merely theoretical possibility.

This region of thought is pretty new to me, so I’m guessing none of this is very new, but it sure is exciting.

 

Knowledge funnel

Ideas
  1. Hunch – a wordlessly sensed possibility
  2. Intuition – a hunch made articulate (gate: articulation)
  3. Hypothesis – an intuition supported by informal evidence (gate: evidence)
  4. Experiment – a hypothesis put in testable form (gate: operationalized as test)
  5. Theory – an experimentally-confirmed hypothesis (gate: affirmed by test)
  6. Fact – a theory that has been tested sufficiently that a community regards it as true (gate: community acceptance)

 

Menckenating

Ideas

Menckenating – v. To believe that which one cannot understand cannot be understood because it is nonsense, and then to demonstrate how “the emperor wears no clothes” by exhibiting samples of apparently obscurantist language in order to justify refusal to seriously engage what is, in fact, ideas that are plainly fully-clothed to those who have successfully overcome the limitations of objectivist thought.

Turns

Ideas

When philosophers talk about experiencing a “turn” in their thought (for instance, Heidegger and Wittgenstein), the turn is often taken to be as a philosophical crisis brought on by philosophical thought and resulting in a different approach to thinking.

Increasingly, though, to my eyes, these look less like philosophical crises and more like normal transitions from immaturity to maturity: A boy’s rationalist philosophy (a natural consequence of limited social entanglements freeing the mind to theorize about its own apparently autonomous workings and capacity to intellectually master the world) is supplanted by a man’s pragmatist philosophy (an attempt to make sense of a transcendent world within which he is entangled, has been entangled from birth, and from which one cannot extract oneself especially in that boyish state of  delusional autonomy).

The unexpected

Ideas

The cash value of “expecting the unexpected”: Brace yourself for the distinctive angst that attends the arrival of the unexpected, and resolve to welcome the unexpected as an invited guest when she arrives.

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In my view, it is very near the heart of morality to suffer for the sake of welcoming the unexpectedness of another being.

To refuse this unexpectedness is to refuse transcendence itself.

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The cash value of “transcendence”: The permanent remainder to everything we know, which by definition is unexpectable. To accept only what we expect is to lock the world out from the cell of one’s mind, and to regard it a prisoner.

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You cannot stop at loving the person you’ve come to know. That’s only loving an image of your own making.

Miller/Latour: What religion does

ANT

I need to make friends with some fellow-nerds whose heads combust when they read stuff like this:

Religion corrects for our farsightedness. It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen. To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness. Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace. Redemption turns on this revelation.

The principle of irreduction guarantees resistant availability and bans any slick metaphysics. Absent the singular transcendence of a traditional God, grace isn’t dissolved but distributed. An object-oriented grace is fomented by a restless multitude of cross-fertilizing transcendences, resistances, and availabilities. Here, grace is the double-bind of resistant availability that both gives objects to themselves and gives them away to others. Or, better, grace is what gives objects to themselves by giving them away to others. There is no grace if the resistant is not also available and there is no grace if the available is not also resistant. Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude’s resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of grace.

On this account, sin is a refusal of grace. It is a refusal of this double-bind. It is a desire to go away, to be done once and for all with the necessity of negotiation, to be finally free from the imposing demands of others. Sin denies both the graciousness of resistance and the graciousness of availability. It can see neither work nor suffering as the gifts that jointly constitute the object that it is. Sin does not want to be dependent on a grace it cannot control and it does not want to be impinged on by a grace it did not request. Sin wants the given to be something other than given.

The business of religion is “to disappoint, first, to disappoint” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, “to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the incompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional. Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by a black box for the sake of obscuring grace. In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely. But in religious practices, “incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Great effort is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable. “Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”).

Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.

The trick, as Latour puts it, is “to paint the disappointment of the visible without simply painting another world of the invisible” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Something obscure does need to be revealed, but the obscurity in question is not the kind proper to what is distant, resistant, or transcendent. Rather, religion aims for a revelation of the obvious as otherwise than we’d assumed. In religion, “what is hidden is not a message beneath the first one, an esoteric message, but a tone, an injunction for you, the viewer, to redirect your attention and to turn it away from the dead and back to the living” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Life and redemption depend on this revelation of a novel tone.

(This passage is from Adam Miller’s Speculative Grace. Highly recommended, if you are one of those rare freaks who actually digs theology.)

Political pluralism

Ideas

Arendt’s quote on politics and plurality is one of my key intellectual landmarks:

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life.

Having immersed myself in Actor-Network Theory for the last several years Arendt’s characterization of action as “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter” seems a little quaintly 20th Century — but her assertion that “plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life” changed my vision of politics, and few days pass without my recalling this quote.

Prior to this understanding, I saw politics as an essentially coercive activity, done by one gang of people to another (that is, to me).

But this ignores the fact that gangs must cultivate relationships before they can become gangs, and even more importantly, it misses the crucial insight that operating as a gangs is only one possibility of alliance, and thankfully not necessarily the most common one. Certainly alliances can be a means to coercive action, but alliances can also be a end in itself, and if you think about it, one of the most fully satisfactory ends a person can accomplish. It could even be argued that goal of coercive force might actually be a means to an us-versus-them feeling of alliance, which could help explain the strange euphoria so many people feel in the face of an enemy.

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To put it in terms of a professional dichotomy I’ve been entertaining/obsessing over, the idea of politics as essentially pluralistic changes the nature of a political problem from what is conceived as an engineering problem (active agents working on a “hard” system of passive/unfree parts) to a design problem (active agents working on or within a “soft” system composed at least in part of active/free participants).

If you see politics as social engineering, obviously you’ll want as little of it as possible. You’d be crazy not to. Social engineering is a horror (whether the social system is a governed public or a privately managed company) because it requires people to play set roles in a system and minimizes variance among parts for the same reason factories adopt Six Sigma: smooth and efficient functioning.

But if you understand politics as a participatory forming of alliances, its meaning changes from social engineering to social design: the belief that we are empowered to take collective action to change situations for the better (which pragmatists call meliorism and what innovation professionals call “design intervention”). Social design makes the system responsive to the people who constitute it, who in turn respond to the system by choosing to perform as participants — or by changing the system for more satisfactory participation.

 

Difference and reconciliation

Ideas

Friendship is the parallax of two people’s existence in one shared reality.

Friendship is difference of perspective reconciled in depth.

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Friendships are tested and actualized by fighting.

The first test is whether one fights. A second test is how one fights.

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Friendships can end in irreconcilable difference; but conciliatory indifference can cause a friendship to never begin.

Irreconcilable difference can kill a friendship, but conciliatory indifference keeps it dead.

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Like every reality, friendship exists in the “double-bind of resistant availability.”

Variant doubles

Ideas

Two eyes reconciling independent perspectives gains depth of vision. Two ears hearing slightly different emphases hears a stereo space. A memory that recalls and compares past and present dwells in historic depth. A mind that can grasp details while maintaining awareness of the meaningful totality that provides it significance can be said to have intellectual depth.

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To understand the effects of parallax, we can cover the left eye and look through the right, then cover the right and look through the left. To understand stereo we can try listening through one ear alone and then the other. Philosophical hermeneutics attempts to repeat this basic operation with history and thinking.

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Whatever remains perfectly constant barely registers as existent. A changing world is a bigger world, and a changing person is a bigger person.

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Plato’s allegory of the cave begins with “And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: — Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.”

 

Real

Ideas

This quote has become important to me: “What is love but understanding and rejoicing at the fact that another lives, feels and acts in a way different from and opposite to ours?”

Does this mean we follow Rilke’s advice to maintain distance in order to get a better view? If difference were exhaustible, that might be the best strategy.

However, no matter how much we try, difference always eludes our attempts at familiarization. There is always more difference — if we want it.

Adam Miller says the real is an irreducible “resistant availability.” Love wants the real.

The USA is not a cult

Ideas

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were not and never claimed to be Old Testament prophets. They were smart Enlightenment Age men, finite, fallible, time-bound and 100% lacking divine magical powers to foretell the future and to lay down eternally valid algorithmic laws of conduct.

So, let’s stop turning our Founding Fathers into cheap copies of Moses, Isaiah and Ezekiel. This sort of nationalistic piety is specially inexcusable among “objectivist” libertarians who claim to be atheists, or at least hard-nosed secularists, but who run around like holy-rollers spewing Jefferson and Franklin.

I imagine the Founding Fathers would have seen all this patriotic fundamentalism as a symptom of decadence and a warning sign of decline. But to put it more patriotically (in a specifically American sense of the word): according to my own perceptions and judgment this appears to be the case, and to further intensify this patriotic performance, I invite your opinion on this matter — because perhaps you disagree with me, and we have something to learn from one another by duking it out. Conflicts are opportunities to deliberate and actualize our nation.

If Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Washington were alive I’d love to get them involved, too, but they’re dead. Further, having been dead and out of the loop for centuries, they are all woefully uninformed on what’s going on in our times, and entirely unable to comment on what to do in a world where a single suitcase bomb can take out half a city, where electronic surveillance makes it more and more possible to efficiently spy on billions of individuals, where a single well-placed disturbance can collapse a fragile electronically-mediated global economy, where people do business with people on the other side of the Earth everyday, often anonymously or in vast aggregate, where an identity can be stolen and used… etc., etc., etc.

It is up to those of us who are still alive to follow the example of those who came before to take responsibility for shaping our future. And also to not follow them. We should always be re-founding. While we’re at it, I think we could benefit from some Founding Mothers. (I nominate Elizabeth Warren.)

To summarize: The USA not a cult. We’re a tradition founded on reason and sustained by the exercise of individual judgment.

Mere gods

Ideas

Without thwarted lusts and transmuted animosities even the most powerful men would remain mere gods.

A corollary (added July 2): To the degree a man gains the capacity to lust and despise without constraint, he is free to devolve into a god.

[Note of explanation: I just finished reading a book on paganism written by a right-wing European thinker. This aphorism is a dig at him and his vigorous and stunted religiosity. These day, I’m trying to purge my vocabulary of romantic words like “gods”, “wisdom”, “spirit”, etc., out of loyalty to the realities they fail to represent. Please excuse this lapse.]

What is metaphysics?

Ideas

To use Levinas’s distinction, ontology is inquiry into being within a totality; metaphysics is inquiry into the being of infinity.

The two inquiries can be seen as “containing” one another in different senses, the former subjectively, the latter objectively. Ontology contains metaphysics within its subject — its manner of inquiring — because metaphysics can be seen as a category of being, but one that is understood to “overflows” or stands beyond contact (and certainly the grasp) of the mind. The “object” of metaphysics contains the object of ontology, in that every entity treated within ontology is also treated within metaphysics as a subset of some kind — an effect, manifestation, superstructure, etc. of metaphysics’s more primordial categories of being.

 

Intellectual Teflon

Ideas

The slippery slope argument is the slipperiest slope of all.

Applying it in a disagreement is like spraying the conversation with Teflon®. Now it’s a question of which agreement is better, not where the right balance is…

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The slippery element in a slippery slope argument is the notion that political practices are governed solely by algorithmic mechanisms, and that human prudence is powerless to guide where the mechanisms take us or to control how fast and how far they go.

The very belief that prudence cannot exercise an effect means that it is factored out of discussions and is denied the ability to exercise its effect in deliberation.

We end up treating human affairs as engineering problems rather than the design problems they truly are.

Dimensionalizing method

Ideas

Without ever meaning to, I’ve managed to collect a fairly large number of theoretical books with “method” in their titles: After Method, Beyond Method, Against Method, For and Against Method, Truth and Method.

What is interesting about all these books is that they equate method with algorithmic techniques for capturing, analyzing and evaluating data. And they seem to either ignore or underplay the non-algorithmic principles of practice. They seem to be in battle with vestiges of a modernism that has lost much of its predominance in the last decade. They’re all beginning to feel as historically situated as they almost unanimously admit they are.

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Having just been through a project with too little method, I have to admit that I prefer having a little too much method to having not enough.

But I’m becoming sensitive to the fact that this is not a uni-dimensional continuum. Method is a complex set of practices of different kinds. “Too much” usually means imposition of unhelpful algorithms, where “too little” means having insufficient heuristic guidance (to use Roger Martin’s deeply flawed but nevertheless hugely useful “knowledge funnel” framework. And the flaw is assuming 1) the knowledge autonomously “evolves” from heuristic to algorithm, when in fact these are separate dimensions of practice, and 2) that algorithm is always, or even usually, more desirable than heuristic.)