Wednesday, November 21, 2012

On Protest Movements & Conspiracy Theories, in 2-part Harmony. Common Time.



Part I – 21 November 2012
Part II – 28 November 2012

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear.
            (Prelude - Verismo)
Paranoia. I am a philosopher with eyes in my head; and this head of mine is canted very deliberately in the direction of the world that surrounds me. Now for what it is worth, although I am not much given to conspiracy theories I still have to admit to being plagued by a rather significant degree of social distrust. Stephen Stills penned words for my Vietnam-era generation’s deep-rooted social malaise in the song For What it’s Worth -- “paranoia strikes deep”; and in my platitudinous book, it is hackneyed but nonetheless still true that “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck….” And, then, how can one contest the ultimate logic of the paranoid, to paraphrase Mel Gibson’s delicately-wound character from Conspiracy Theory—just because I am paranoid does not mean I am not being followed…?

This morning’s Reflection is not about the various theories of conspiracy surrounding the re-newed American President; these are presently holding court in the Internet Universe and each will run its course in due time according to its merit. Rather, I am interested in imagining, in a conspiratorial kind of way, what the world of men around me would begin to look like were I, like an author of some futuristic novel, to develop and implement a plan, or plot, or conspiracy to take over the world. This Reflection is inspired both by Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. Mass Death and the American Future, which my students read in the ethics classes, as well as by my own social paranoia.

The 20th century, born out of a 19th Century’s industrialized and economic vision of the world of men, has been described quite reasonably as a modern man's Book of the Dead. In this rather unique 1972 book Elliot calculates that the first 70 or so years of the 20th century oversaw 100+ million state-made dead, which means that both practically and metaphorically, the 20th century may go down in human history as the era that will compose the Death Symphony of the Individual. Our interest in this Reflection is the metaphorical death of the Individual as an idea, and all germane conspiracies tending toward that end.
            Now, philosophically speaking, the modern idea of the Individual was born along with René Descartes’ (1596-1650) Big Idea of the cogito-Individual—the Thinking Self. Of course the idea was not his alone; but it was his primarily.

Everybody look what's going down…
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
            (Intermezzo – adagio)
The History of the Individual as an Idea. From the bird’s eye, the view of the history of this idea looks a little like this: the Greece of antiquity oversaw a shift away from traditional mythological representations of the world, a world full of gods and other invisible critters, to an era dominated by simple men reasoning around and about the physical world that was in front of them, and confining their reasoning to the material edges of that world. The general thinking in this period in the history of philosophy was that it is possible to think about the physical world, and men in the world, without having to explain things in terms of Invisibles… so gods became, by and large, sidelined as explanatory devices. Blandly concluded, Plato the dualist and Aristotle the monist would become central figures in the history of this philosophical shift, each representing a distinct point of view. Plato thought that there were two dimensions of reality, physical and non-physical (but not really gods of any meaningful sort), and Aristotle that there was only one essentially knowable dimension of reality, the physical.
            Now even though Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) will define the human animal as a featherless biped that reasons, i.e., biology that is of the thinking sort, philosophically speaking the Individual as an idea is still not in fact fully birthed in the era of the ancient Greek thinkers (although I seem to recall that F. W. Nietzsche interpreted Socrates as the first individual… it would seem, after all, that FWN did not always get it right!).
            With the advent of the Christian period, which would naturally be more receptive to a Platonism that admits of Invisibles than to an Aristotelianism that finds more persuasive the idea that the world is entirely composed in terms of materiality, the focus of thinking will once again shift away from the substantial world of the earliest philosophers and back to an earlier, mythological way of defining the world in terms of Invisibles. In the Christian period, which will continue all the way to the modern period (where we meet, among others, Descartes), men will not be conceived individually or as individuals in any meaningful fashion, but will be clumped together into a “people”; “all God’s Creatures” will be fused into an indistinct collectivized mass called the Invisible Church, with all the attendant Christian values, vices, and virtues.
            Now all this listing of events hither and yon is neither here nor there, but is just a brief, bird’s eye view refresher in the history of philosophical ideas, which brings us right back around to why Descartes’ idea of the cogito-Individual is a Big Idea. With this idea Descartes in fact challenges the Christian collectivist or fusionist definition of man—the idea of the Church, both material and spiritual, which constitutes the bedrock of Christian belief. For the thinkers of his day Descartes confirmed philosophically Aristotle’s original idea of Man as “biology that reasons,” by persuasively affirming that in its essence the individual is a “thinking thing,” which is what cogito means; and, voilà, an idea is born, and Descartes is obliged to flee très-catholique France for the more “livable” atmosphere of Amsterdam.
            Now, this idea of the cogito-Individual will split off into many historico-philosophical streams.
1) One stream will become the foundation of Kantian philosophy, with obvious repercussions on German thinking as a whole all the way up to Nietzsche, and will go on to be the paradigm structure of the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud in particular.

2) Another stream will go on to inspire the philosophes of the English and French Enlightenments to challenge formally, i.e., philosophically, the collectivizing dogma of the Christian Church, and would ultimately result in the idea that all things pertaining to the church should be separated from anything pertaining to the State, which in turn gave rise to a very modern State value that we call secularism, under whose aegis both the Americans and the French will wrap their young democracies.

3) A third stream of the idea of the cogito-Individual will be that which wetted the thirst of John Locke, who will provide the philosophical fuel for the fire that will ultimately cause the historical meltdown of the idea of the divine rights of kings; from this will spring up in turn a new idea, which is the validation of the idea of the social contract. This idea-stream will then dampen the boots of Thomas Jefferson, who decides that it will fit very nicely as the philosophical cornerstone for the Nation that the new-world philosophes were trying to articulate philosophically and to create practically and institutionally. When “The People” as a body of valuable Individuals is created as an idea, and then set in opposition to the idea of a “king,” this also automatically allows the logical possibility for the creation of individual rights for men.

4) And finally, this idea of the cogito-Individual will also be the foundation that will support the rise of the masses in the 19th century, where each individual has rights, and each one counts in the real function of State, both as working contributor in the industrial production of the State’s economy, and as social and political participant though universal suffrage “in the way the State should go”.

In the history of western philosophy the period surrounding and following Descartes is aptly called the Age of Reason. Along with generating some amazingly Big Philosophical Thoughts, like the cogito-Individual, there was at this point another idea-pattern that strode upon the center-stage of western history with far-reaching consequences – for with the dissolution of the monarchy-idea and the emergence of the idea of The People, it was almost an organic necessity that men would work out an alternative pattern for social structure—the idea of Nation. Will and Ariel Durant remind us that a simple exchange took place in western social thought in this period of our history—as the cogito-Individual took form philosophically, it also had to rethink itself politically: “In this period the basic developments were the rise of murderous nationalisms and the decline of murderous theologies.”  

You step out of line,
the men come and take you away 
            (Accelerando)
As I was saying before the historian of ideas in me cried out for context: born of a 19th Century’s revolution in industry and economy, the 20th century will orchestrate the slow and very deliberate decline of this very particular republican and liberal idea of the Individual. This is the philosophical mooring of Rubenstein’s vision, and of my futuristic fantasy. The exercise for us, then, is to think about the Nazi period in Germany, and then to take the deceptively simple mental step of transposing some of the more disastrous elements of the German State of the Nazi era onto today’s American State (Rubenstein specifically transposes onto the America of the Nixon Administration, but my interest is more general in scope).
            In the broadest strokes, Rubenstein’s argument is that the business (corporate) and industrial philosophy of the Nazi state was framed around the idea that man was an exploitable cog within the machinery of the State, hence subservient to the idea and purpose of State, in all respects. With this idea as philosophical and socio-political premise, a predictable starting point for assuring the economic stability of the Nazi State, was for the State and Industry to seek out or to create a renewable and disposable source of minimally paid, or indeed unpaid labor to ensure continued industrial production.
            To create such a population, in 1935 Germany passed the Nuremburg Laws, which stripped Jews of German citizenship and redefined them as wards or “subjects” of the German State; and by redefining and thereby creating a specific, legally marginalized, and dependent population within the State, Germany was easily able to transition from caretaker State to slaveholder State, which (according to the Internet-God) worked to the advantage of companies such as Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, Fordwerke (the German subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company) and Adam Opel AG (a subsidiary of General Motors). Of course, an early 19th century corporation that might look an awful lot like IBM would be needed to do all the bookkeeping and accounting for the captains of these Industries.
            The process begins by legally redefining and marginalizing the desired population, then interning them, first in ghettos then in internment or labor camps (such as Auschwitz); this provided German Industry & Friends with an almost infinitely renewable source of free labor to be redefined progressively as the particular labor pool became exhausted (i.e., the Jews, the Gypsies, the Communists, the Poles, the homosexuals, the blacks, etc.). So the utility of the state-cog/slave laborer to the German State of the Nazi era was defined in terms of Industry and Production, and this cog/laborer was either immediately disposed of (annihilated), or disposed of in the short term when its work capacity began to diminish below a certain horizon.
            As a business philosophy or strategy, the advantages to German Industry of this process of labor pool creation during the war, were obvious.  Exhausting this type of labor pool does not drain the economic resources of the State, because the overhead is minimal and the labor is free, thus guaranteeing a bottom-line net profit to whoever owns the slave.

End of Part I - Part II on 28 November 2012

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