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
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if
everybody's wrong
(Intermezzo – adagio)
(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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