The Compulsive Explainer

The Moral and the Aesthetic

From Poetry Magazine

Each of these passages contains distinct aesthetic and moral casts of mind, and I want to consider how and with what consequences poets seem to be weighting the two. The terms “moral” and “aesthetic” are philosophically slippery, but I suspect most poets (and certainly these poets) have a strong intuition for the two domains: the aesthetic is sensuous and the moral abstract; one tends to description, the other to prescription; one hews to percept, the other precept.

The trajectory of the aesthetic is to deepen and bloom, without regard for its earthly use (it is said to be “non-instrumental”). The moral, one senses, is beholden to something beyond pleasure and so may ramify in unpredictable and potentially off-putting ways. The terms are commonly connected to “delight” and “instruction,” but I will use them here to refer to the more fundamental matter of the writer’s focus.

Privacy on the Internet

Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google. On a talk show he said:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Bruce Schneier, who is a security guru with his own company, responded:
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Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
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I can't put it any better than that.

However, I suspect that most care little about protecting their individuality, or that of others - and would rather live without it.

Hegel in 90 Minutes

I know, I know you don't have any time - especially for philosophy.

Anything that requires more than a 3 second attention span is beyond you. But if you can stretch that to 90 minutes, you might find this recording entertaining.  And you might learn something too.

You can download it from Audible for $7.82. You can also listen to a sample.

About Power

Since I am someone without any power to speak of, I am obsessed with the subject. For what it is worth, here are my thoughts on the subject.

Power comes in two forms: constructive and destructive - or, if you prefer, good and evil - and that is basically all you need to know about power. In any particular social situation you only have to identify which kind of power is in operation - which is not that hard, you don't need a degree in philosophy to do it. Just notice if construction or destruction of the human spirit is going on. If you don't know what the human spirit is, God help you.

In addition, power tends to form trends: in either direction. Once momentum builds up, it tends to keep going that way - either up or down. This is fine in the up direction, because success builds in success. But the down direction is trickier: because no one wants to see it - and it can happen without anyone being aware of it. Once it gets started, it seems normal, and people forget what constructive behavior is like - and destruction builds on itself - until nothing is left.

Consider military power. This was unknown before we became civilized and had to invent organized destructive force. Let me repeat that: military power is always destructive. This is what it does: it destroys whatever it is told to destroy. It can be used temporarily for other purposes, such as peace-keeping. But it can only stop people from killing each other, not make them friendly to each other. In other words, it can only be a negative influence. And a society that is militaristic will not last. It will destroy itself, because destruction is what it does best, and that is what it concentrates on - externally and internally.

If destruction is so awful then, why hasn't the human race done the sensible thing: concentrated on construction, on making a better world for itself (and its fellow creatures)? I suspect part of the reason is that we are inherently destructive creatures: we have been killers for a long time, and gotten really good at exploiting the rest of the world, living and non-living. Exploitation always implies destruction, but since it benefits us, we don't mind. Carried to its logical extreme, this means soon there will be nothing left but plenty of humans, must of them in poverty - and nothing else.

Those who are incurable optimists will not be upset by this prospect. We can always work around any shortages, they say. For example, if we run out of oil, we can use the sun to make energy. Implied by this is something not so salubrious: the wealthy will find ways of staying wealthy, using solar energy, perhaps, while the poor who cannot afford these advanced technologies, will starve. But the human race - minus its losers - will go on.

The dark card in this deck is global warming. If the earth gets to hot to grow food, as the best climate models predict, all bets are off. Exit the human race. This will be the ultimate example of how destructive power can be.

People Obsessed with Power Become Weak

This is one of the oldest lessons of history, but one Americans have not learned. They became intoxicated with power, became powerful, and are now in the process of losing it. Military power is expensive and can overwhelm a civilian economy - and it keeps getting more expensive. It costs half a million a day to keep an American soldier in Afghanistan.

The details of the American decline were unique to their time and place. However, true to form, Americans were completely unaware of what was going on. And they disappeared as a people before they disappeared as a nation. The effect on the people has not been documented before, but perhaps I will help with my own observations. During the rise and fall of the British Empire, the last time this happened, no one paid much attention to the changes to British people themselves.

As a participant in the fall of America, during the last half of the last century, I can remember that time clearly - and now, in retrospect, can recall what happened to my fellow Americans. At the time, I went into shock at the horror of the situation, but now that has worn off, my mind is starting to work again.

If I have an unusual skill, it is this: I notice more of what is going on than most people; I am not well-adjusted. I no doubt inherited this from my father, who was also a loner - but noticed what was going on more than people realized. He was the fly on the wall, taking it all in, but staying out of harm's way.

The basics are simple: power is transferred from the people to the power structure. The people do not feel this loss, they feel empowered by identifying themselves with this larger identity, which has many names - including (most importantly) no name at all - only the euphoria of power that isn't really there. The people no longer exist as persons with their own identity, but they now have a powerful group identity. Once the people no longer exist, however, the nation is a hollow shell that cannot last. The nation loses its ability to self-correct itself, because it has no sense of personal ethics.

This is process is greatly assisted by television, which taught the people their new roles as non-persons: education disguised as entertainment: sitcoms. Our schools could not compete with this edu-tainment, so the young were affected most of all. They became charter members of a economy that could not last.

The Devil in History

From the NY Review of Books

This was a lecture given by Leszek Kolakowsky at Harvard in 1987. Even if I had been there at the time, I would not have gone. Kolakowsky was a renowned scholar of Marxism:

Kołakowski's perspective is further complicated by the skeptical distance that he maintained from the uncritical nostrums of official religion (not least his own, Catholicism) and by his unique standing as the only internationally renowned scholar of Marxism to claim equal preeminence as a student of the history of religious thought.^[3] Kołakowski's expertise in the study of Christian sects and sectarian writings adds depth and piquancy to his influential account of Marxism as a religious canon, with major and minor scriptures, hierarchical structures of textual authority, and heretical dissenters.

Among his criticisms of Marxism was this:

It was a defining feature of Leszek Kołakowski's intellectual trajectory that he took evil extremely seriously. Among Marx's false premises, in his view, was the idea that all human shortcomings are rooted in social circumstances. Marx had "entirely overlooked the possibility that some sources of conflict and aggression may be inherent in the permanent characteristics of the species."^[1] Or, as he expressed it in his Harvard lecture: "Evil...is not contingent...but a stubborn and unredeemable fact." For Leszek Kołakowski, who lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Soviet takeover that followed, "the Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously."^[2]

I have just spent part of an after noon explaining my reservations about Socialism, or Marxism, - and haven't done a very good job of it, but he puts the whole thing very well:
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He had little patience for those who supposed, in the teeth of twentieth-century history, that radical political improvement could be secured at little moral or human cost—or that the costs, if significant, could be discounted against future benefits. On the one hand he was consistently resistant to all simplified theorems purporting to capture timeless human verities. On the other, he regarded certain self-evident features of the human condition as too obvious to be ignored, however inconvenient:

There is nothing surprising in the fact that we strongly resist the implications of many banal truths; this happens in all fields of knowledge simply because most truisms about human life are unpleasant.^[5]

On the other hand he summarizes its contributions well also:

Whatever has been done in Western Europe to bring about more justice, more security, more educational opportunities, more welfare and more state responsibility for the poor and helpless, could never have been achieved without the pressure of socialist ideologies and socialist movements, for all their naïveties and delusions.... Past experience speaks in part for the socialist idea and in part against it.

Corporate Democracy

Noam Chomsky in the Boston Review
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Warnings about the purposeful destruction of U.S. productive capacity have been familiar for decades and perhaps sounded most prominently by the late Seymour Melman. Melman also pointed to a sensible way to reverse the process. The state-corporate leadership has other commitments, but there is no reason for passivity on the part of the “stakeholders”—workers and communities. With enough popular support, they could take over the plants and carry out the task of reconstruction themselves. That is not a particularly radical proposal. One standard text on corporations, The Myth of the Global Corporation, points out, “nowhere is it written in stone that the short-term interests of corporate shareholders in the United States deserve a higher priority than all other corporate ‘stakeholders.’”

It is also important to remind ourselves that the notion of workers’ control is as American as apple pie. In the early days of the industrial revolution in New England, working people took it for granted that “those who work in the mills should own them.” They also regarded wage labor as different from slavery only in that it was temporary; Abraham Lincoln held the same view.

And the leading twentieth-century social philosopher, John Dewey, basically agreed. Much like Nineteenth-century working people, he called for elimination of “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” Industry must be changed “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order” based on workers’ control, free association, and federal organization, in the general style of a range of thought that includes, along with many anarchists, G.D.H. Cole’s guild socialism and such left Marxists as Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Mattick, and others. Unless those goals are attained, Dewey held, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business, [and] the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.” He argued that without industrial democracy, political democratic forms will lack real content, and people will work “not freely and intelligently,” but for pay, a condition that is “illiberal and immoral”—ideals that go back to the Enlightenment and classical liberalism before they were wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, as the anarchosyndicalist thinker Rudolf Rocker put it 70 years ago.
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Chomsky is the most powerful radical thinker of our time, something even his detractors will not deny. This sometimes makes him hard to understand.  I have no idea who the people referred to the paragraph above are. Presumably they are compatible with the Libertarian Socialism Chomsky believes in.

Political philosophies commonly described as libertarian socialist include most varieties of anarchism (especially anarchist communism, anarchist collectivism, anarcho-syndicalism, mutualism, social ecology, autonomism and council communism). Some writers use libertarian socialism synonymously with anarchism and in particular socialist anarchism.

As you can see, some exotic stuff. 

I have two criticisms of Chomsky. First, he doesn't seem to understand the emotional, or psychological impact of all this on people: the loss of self. Second, he has has had little contact with the high-tech world of computers, software, the Internet, and supercapitalism (globalization) - where talk of the means of production makes no sense.

He is still part of the industrial world. I have updated his phrase industrial democracy to corporate democracy. The corporate world is more hostile to democracy than the industrial world ever was, something he realizes quite well.

The Urge to Murder

This is a fundamental human instinct, certainly not one of our best, and usually a part of ourselves we prefer to ignore, forget - or even deny. None of these strategies work - they only make the situation worse. This is something we have to live with, and constantly keep in the back of our minds - and sometimes in the front of our minds too.

If we don't, we will eagerly use our military in another war - on one pretense or another. Not realizing that our primitive instinct to murder is at work. We will say we are "supporting our troops," when in reality they are supporting us, and our urge to murder.

The Diversity of Life

We live in a world dominated by one species: ours. And we think this perfectly natural: that the best species should have everything - and we also believe that the best economy in that species should have everything: this is referred to by its supporters as the Market Economy, otherwise simply known as Capitalism.

But in nature this is not the way it is: the amount of diversity is astonishing. Nature does not appear to be too interesting in efficiency, Darwin notwithstanding - and maybe we should not be totally interested in that either - but also in diversity.

Diversity is important, partly because it improves the resilience and adaptability of an ecosystem, but also because it is an expression of Life itself, the way it wants to live. Diversity is one of Life's primary values.

Note that I am using Life with a capital L here, in other worlds: Nature. One of the healing effects of being in Nature is to experience its diversity and power. This severely compromised in a agricultural situation, where only one species is allowed.

I remember watching the Maya Indians cultivate one of their gardens in Guatemala. It didn't look like one of our gardens at all, with its rows of identical plants. All the plants were growing mixed up with each other, big ones and little ones, in no apparent order. But they had evidently decided this is kind of environment is what the plants wanted - and they were there to help them.

When you come across one of their milpas (cornfields) in the forest, you see an amazing sight. The corn plants are planted right in among the trees! They carefully tend to each plant, and remove any weeds around it, but the forest as a whole is disturbed very little. 

This is also true of their coffee fields. They remove some of the undergrowth, but leave the big trees to provide shade for their coffee. The quality of the coffee is excellent, but the yield is less than when the plants are in the open sunlight. Let me say that again: the lifestyle of the indigenous people is preserved, and the quality of the coffee is superb. But no one cares - least of all the consumer, who cannot take the time to taste the difference, and is mainly influenced by advertising and price.

And that is not all. Back in the Eighties, the Maya were almost exterminated by goverment troops, with the knowledge and cooperation of their American advisors. The insurgents were Marxist-inspired, it is true, as they were in El Salvador and Nicaragua, but that was no reason to exterminate them. Most Americans have no knowledge of this and refuse to believe it. But that is part of our sorry history in Latin America. And our refusal to accept diversity.

The People no Longer Matter

The People are no longer in control, and powerful forces are making sure that this situation continues. The people have, effectively, been destroyed without their being aware of it.

How could something like this happen? There must be many answers to this question, enough to fill many books. But there is clearly a vast shift in power involved - from the people to something else: something I have labeled the power complex, for lack of a better term. Whatever it is, it definitely exists - and it is in control.

There is also a shift in values here, old values have been abandoned and new values have been accepted - here again, with no awareness of what was going on. This lack of awareness is fundamental and basic to the process. 

Also basic is the substitution of fantasy for reality. Nothing could be more damaging. It is as if people intuited how bad things were getting, how they were powerless to stop it, and simply switched their attention to another reality - a reality these same forces controlled completely. They got hit by a double whammy. 

Along the way, their most important asset: themselves, disappeared. And now they cannot imagine what that could have been. The people no longer mattered because they no longer existed. All they are left with is a vague dissatisfaction they cannot overcome.

If we take the long view, we can see nothing surprising is going on. Mankind is simply reverting to its normal condition: rule by a small minority. The democratic world was a temporary condition, one that sometimes occurs - such as during Periclean Athens or during the Roman Republic - which were quickly overcome. 

Accept of course, that our technology is much more advanced. The new status quo will be something entirely new - but with the same basics: rule by the few.

The objective of many will be to become part of that ruling class, one way or the other: by joining it directly or making themselves useful to it: as modern courtiers. They will always need someone to run their computers for them. And also to run the media and keep everyone under control. And keep the government under control. And all the little bureaucratic functions that keep the machinery greased. They will have little trouble finding little people for this. After all, they have the big carrot (jobs) and the big stick (social collapse).