Marx’s critique is powerfully moral, not in the sense of establishing rules of right and wrong conduct but in the older sense of describing what it is for humans to be able to flourish, to be able to realize themselves fully. It was also cynical about the very idea of morality, or rather of what it had come to represent. For Marx, the concept of alienation, and of human flourishing, could not be wrenched away from the project of social transformation, of the overthrowing of capitalism itself.
…’The claim of Marxism to be a morally distinctive standpoint’, argues Alasdair MacIntyre, for many years a Communist Party member, ‘is undermined by Marxism’s own moral history’. Whenever ‘Marxists have had to take explicit moral stances’, they have ‘always fallen back into relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or utilitarianism’. There is in Marx, MacIntyre suggests, an absence of thought about the moral underpinnings of social transformation. Marx excoriated the moral consequences of capitalism. He wrote of how human nature might flourish under communism. But he wrote little of the norms by which revolutionary social movements should be judged. One result was the wrenching apart of politics and morality in those movements and societies influenced by Marx. Social change came to be seen purely in political terms and its moral content defined solely in terms of the success of its political ends. The moral case for any action was that it furthered the cause. As a result, MacIntyre suggests, there is a moral hollowness to Marxism that could only be filled by looking elsewhere for moral answers, in particular to utilitarian ideas that the revolutionary means were justified by the revolutionary ends.
…By 2008, however, the possibility of change (at least in the way that Marx would have understood it) had become negligibly small. The depth of the economic crisis led to talk of a ‘crisis of capitalism’. And yet there was no political challenge to capitalism. Workers’ organizations had been destroyed, the left had imploded, as had the idea that there could be an alternative to the market system. The resurrection of Marx challenged none of this. Those who turn to Marx these days look upon him not as a prophet of capitalism’s demise but as a poet of its moral corruption. But to what extent does a moral critique that is explicitly hitched to a social critique remain meaningful when the possibilities of acting upon that social critique seem so to have faded? That, perhaps, is the most difficult question to be asked of Marx’s thought.
February 2015
Different Shades of Socrates
Chinese philosophers, Fung insisted, have tended to avoid the abstract, showing little interest in metaphysics or pure logic, pouring their energies instead into developing more down-to-earth, practical political arguments. They were, he suggested, ‘concerned chiefly with society and not with the universe’, more preoccupied with defining how to live than in discovering how things are. Or, as another Chinese philosopher Y.L. Chin has put it, ‘Chinese philosophers were all of them different shades of Socrates’.
Not just geography, but language too, Fung suggested, made Chinese philosophy distinct. The Chinese corpus contains few great philosophical tracts. There is little to compare with Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, or Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Chinese philosophy tends rather to be poetic, aphoristic, suggestive. The very language of the Chinese, many argue, has lent itself to aphoristic philosophy and discouraged long, finely argued theses. A written language based on the alphabetic system, and with a tight grammatical fabric, as came eventually to be used in the West, provides useful material from which to fashion an argumentative treatise. A language that is constructed from symbolic characters that are not susceptible to considerations of singular or plural, or of past, present and future tenses, and most of which can equally be a noun, a verb, and adjective or an adverb, but whose connotation changes according to the other symbols alongside which it sits in a sentence, is necessarily more ambiguous and allusive in meaning. Chinese language is, the philosopher Lawrence Wu suggests, ‘an excellent tool for poetry but not for systematic or scientific thought’. There is in Chinese philosophy ‘profound insights, brilliant aphorisms, interesting metaphors, but few elaborate arguments’.
The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the songs of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallization of language in writing… Writing creates an artificial memory, whereby humans can enlarge their experience beyond the limits of one generation or one way of life. At the same time it has allowed them to invent a world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality.
…It is scarcely possible to imagine a philosophy such as Platonism emerging in an oral culture. It is equally difficult to imagine it in Sumeria. How could a world of bodiless Forms be represented in pictograms? How could abstract entities be represented as the ultimate realities in a mode of writing that still recalled the world of the senses?
It is significant that nothing resembling Platonism arose in China. Classical Chinese script is not ideographic, as used to be thought; but because of what A.C. Graham terms its ‘combination of graphic wealth with phonetic poverty’ it did not encourage the kind of abstract thinking that produced Plato’s philosophy. Plato was what historians of philosophy call a realist — he believed that abstract terms designated spiritual or intellectual entities. In contrast, throughout its long history, Chinese philosophy has been nominalist — it has understood that even the most abstract terms are only labels, names for the diversity of things in the world. As a result, Chinese thinkers have rarely mistaken ideas for facts.
Cut That Timber, Show Him How, Beat That City Slicker Now
D’Lane Compton & Tristan Bridges:
Many aspects of masculinity are “comfortable.” And, men don’t need outdoor gear and lumberjack attire to be comfortable. Lumbersexual has less to do with comfort and more to do with masculinity. It is a practice of masculinization. It’s part of a collection of practices associated with “hybrid masculinities”—categories and identity work practices made available to young, white, heterosexual men that allow them to collect masculine status they might otherwise see themselves (or be seen by others) as lacking. Hybridization offers young, straight, class-privileged white men an avenue to negotiate, compensate, and attempt to control meanings attached to their identities as men. Hybrid configurations of masculinity, like the lumbersexual, accomplish two things at once. They enable young, straight, class-privileged, white men to discursively distance themselves from what they might perceive as something akin to the stigma of privilege. They simultaneously offer a way out of the “emptiness” a great deal of scholarship has discussed as associated with racially, sexually, class-privileged identities.
The lumbersexual highlights a series of rival binaries associated with masculinities: rural vs. urban, rugged vs. refined, tidy vs. unkempt. But the lumbersexual is so compelling precisely because, rather than “choosing sides,” this identity attempts to delicately walk the line between these binaries. It’s “delicate” precisely because this is a heteromasculine configuration—falling too far toward one side or the other could call him into question. But, a lumbersexual isn’t a lumberjack just like a metrosexual isn’t gay. Their identity work attempts to establish a connection with identities to which they have no authentic claim by flirting with stereotypes surrounding sets of interests and aesthetics associated with various marginalized and subordinated groups of men.
Lumbersexual masculinity is certainly an illustration that certain groups of young, straight, class-privileged, white men are playing with gender. In the process, however, systems of power and inequality are probably better understood as obscured than challenged. Like the phrase “no homo,” hybrid configurations of masculinity afford young straight men new kinds of flexibility in identities and practice, but don’t challenge relations of power and inequality in any meaningful way.
Clouds in My Coffee
My only problem with this characterisation is that, in one sense at least, it has Zizek backwards. True, to the extent that Zizek is a Marxist, he seems perennially split between Groucho and Karl. But the mistake is to think it’s his analysis that is silly and his political stance that is sinister. In fact it’s his analysis of capitalism that is ‘‘deadly’’, in the sense of being incisive, and his communism that is a joke in poor taste.
Jokes are central to Zizek’s analysis, not because they win him an audience but because they point up absences and all the little ‘‘unknown knowns’’ that sustain the dominant ideology. Thus, when Zizek tells the story of the man who orders coffee without cream and is told that, since there is no cream, he will have to settle for coffee without milk, he isn’t merely being cute, or isn’t only being cute; he’s drawing attention to the ‘‘complex interplay between what is said and what is not said, the un-said implied in what is said’’. Offered the ‘‘freedom’’ to buy our own healthcare, it is up to us to investigate what this freedom might be lacking. Is it coffee without cream or coffee without milk? Or is it ‘‘the thing without itself’’ — coffee without coffee, freedom without freedom?
Since what happens in the past will affect the present and what happens in the present will affect the future, all phenomena — mental and physical — will contain trace elements of previous states and ‘‘clues’’ as to their future ones: a fact that is as true for ideology as it is for water molecules in transition from one state to another. And since all ideological formulations depend on what they exclude or suppress, it falls to the radical dialectician to uncover the anomaly, the incongruous detail, that, when approached and analysed, begins to undermine the dominant belief system.
All of this would seem very crude to Zizek, whose notion of ‘‘absolute recoil’’ entails a twist on the (already twisty) concept of dialectical materialism, one that reads a highly individualised version of Hegel back into Marx. But his general point can be simply stated. It is that 20th-century communism was bound to end in catastrophe because it was a fantasy generated by capitalism itself, a ‘‘utopian’’ version of what is wrong with it. The solution, for Zizek, is not to reject communism but to repeat the revolution — endlessly.
Can’t Unsee the Things I Saw; Fallen Devils, False Gods in the Violet Light
*Sniff* I have to say, reading about Heywood’s loss of innocence made me so nostalgic for those long-ago days — you know, three years ago — when I, too, was similarly, blissfully ignorant. My ears were so wet, my eyes were so wide, and the world was so full of promise then, back when Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders were the fenceposts marking the edge of the political left from the unpopulated wasteland beyond. But now, oh, I have such wonderful, wonderful things to show you…!
Libera te tutemet ex inferis!
I kid. A little, at least. For a long time, I thought “political correctness” was a term that told you less about the target than the person using it, i.e., that it was a right-wing dog whistle. I recognized that in the big scheme of things, a bunch of overzealous hall monitors in academia were petty criminals compared to the organized crime rings who controlled the political and corporate worlds. But then the online atheist environment got contaminated by a strain of fanaticism, in which the fanatics insisted that atheism must be made synonymous with their particular brand of intersectional politics, or else be cast out into the outer darkness of sociopolitical irrelevance. Suddenly, I focused on the rabbit instead of the duck, the vase instead of the two kissing faces, the half-full glass instead of the half-empty one. The basic facts of the matter didn’t change; I just realized there was more than one valid perspective here.
For me, that perspectival shift meant that I started dividing people along lines of personality and psychology rather than politics and ideology. I realize it sounds glib and trite, but ♫ I’ve been around the world, and I’ve been in the Washington Zoo, and in all my travels, as the facts unraveled, I’ve found this to be true ♫: some people are just fucking assholes. SJWs are merely a different species of fucking asshole from the right-wing Republican assholes, or the religious fundamentalist assholes. Assholes go out of their way to cause and prolong conflict. They are natural-born petty tyrants and aspiring authoritarians who are never happy unless they’re taking charge and ordering other people around in accordance with their vision. Today’s SJWs, who are busy being the most inflamed, hemorrhoidal assholes they can be in the fight against transphobia, microaggressions and pixelated representations of misogyny, will still be gratuitously obnoxious assholes in ten years when they’ve left all those childish things behind and moved on to climbing the corporate ladder or making partner at a law firm. At this point in my life, I’m not interested in making excuses for assholish behavior just because, according to some tribal calculus I don’t even subscribe to, the assholes are on my “side”. Many assholes, I find, are under the delusion that they’re grandmasters at multi-dimensional chess. They believe that by acting like assholes at the right time for the right reasons, they’re somehow reducing the overall amount of assholery in the world in the long run.
And that brings us to a fascinating thing about assholism from the memetic perspective. Almost everybody would agree, in the abstract, that being an asshole is generally a bad thing. In order to reproduce itself, then, the asshole meme has to convince the host that acting like an asshole is necessary in this particular instance. The cause is too important! My opponent is too stubborn! I revealed the truth to him, but he refuses to recognize it! He started the argument anyway! Collectively, we all think that people should stop being assholes. Individually, we all think we have a uniquely good reason to act like an asshole occasionally. Thus does assholism remain a thriving, vibrant force in the world for all time. Quite a brilliant strategy, really.
So, yes, I took a crash course in all sorts of ostensibly left-wing ideologies that I had only dimly understood before, only to come out of it convinced of their utter uselessness. Countless lectures on privilege-checking didn’t teach me a thing that I hadn’t already grasped from the old folk wisdom about not judging a man until you’d walked a mile in his shoes. I concluded that attempting to practice the universally-recognized virtues will do more to improve the world than mastering sociological jargon to feign scholarly sophistication. I don’t even really frame this as a political argument anymore. There are easygoing, reasonable people on both sides of the political spectrum. If anything, I see myself as an heir to the honorable tradition of the Taoists, who thumbed their noses and blew raspberries at those ancient assholes, the Confucians, who likewise believed that society couldn’t function without their wise oversight and strictly-regimented organizational schemes.
Down In the Graveyard, Listening to the Underground
I’m not really making any judgments about all this. Personally, I miss old-school blogging and the conversations it started. But I also recognize that what I’m saying about Twitter is very much what traditional print journalists said about blogging back in the day. You have to respond within a day! You have to make your point in 500 words or less! Whatever happened to deeply considered long-form pieces that took weeks to compose and ran several thousand words? Sure, those conversations took months to unfold, but what’s the rush?
Well, they were right to an extent. And now conversations have become even more compressed. Some people think that’s great, others (like me) are more conflicted about it. When I respond to something, I usually want to make a serious point, and Twitter makes that awfully hard. Writing a coherent multi-part tweet is just way harder than simply writing a 500-word blog post. On the other hand, the tweet will get seen by far more people than the post and be far more timely.
Yeah, it’s that time again. Andrew Sullivan’s decision to retire from blogging will likely inspire several more epitaphs for the genre. But let’s avoid the predictable clichés, shall we? Blogging isn’t dying; it’s coming down from a several-year cocaine binge. An artificial spike of frenzied activity complete with delusions of grandeur, now settling back into humdrum routine with a touch of paranoia. As always, there is plenty of good stuff being written by authors who either don’t know or don’t care that they’re not considered the hot new thing. The rambling, personal essay that has survived from Montaigne’s time to ours will outlast the trendiness of social media and toy phones, too.
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