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 20^th 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 20^th century oversaw 100+ million state-made dead, which means that both practically and metaphorically, the 20^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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 19^th 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

Is America Going Socialist?

 My wife’s Facebook universe is being utterly consumed by the post-election conspiracy wormhole of whether or not “still-free” America is going down the path of socialism, and whether this (or not) is going to provoke the Second Coming of Christ and/or the imminent dissolution of the E Pluribus Unum; so she naturally looked to her pagan philosopher of a husband (which would be me) to think some Big Thoughts on this topic. And so of course here They are. As any man can testify, marital bliss works a whole lot better when we do what our wives tell us.

The Basis of Democracy. One danger for republican democracy, but the only assured promise of its eventual success, resides in the individual; and not just in the individual as meat on the hoof, as sheer numbers in a mass; but rather the individual as conceived of by Aristotle, Descartes, Jefferson, and Kant – as the thinking thing. And if the American individual should ever commit to the path of thinking purposefully, as a student of bruta facta as opposed to an inert depository that accepts or believes the contents of every idiot fwd and email rumor monger that lands in our PC inboxes, or that takes things only at their face value, then our modern democracy will finally begin to mark its entry into the true matrix of unpredictability and opportunity, which is the predictable philosophical endgame of every democracy.

            A Thinking Individual is dangerous; but the T-I is also the only true potential for the philosophy of democracy, and it makes us uneasy. Rightly so; for as the American philosopher John Dewey wrote: “If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.”

Recognition of a Problem. In some pockets of post-election America there has been, of late, a significant amount of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the impressive shellacking taken by Governor Romney. The hue and cry, of course, has been wrapped around the familiar old McCarthy-era chestnut – that America is on the road to European Socialism, which, as we all know if we know anything at all, is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from pinko Communism; and the road is short, steep and slippery as hell! It is a “come-to-Jesus” moment in America; because it is just possible that this last American election, when seen for what some Americans think it is… as a people’s turning away from the God of democracy and toward Godless socialism, will be the straw that broke the camel’s back, which, when good and broken, will either induce the labor of the Christian Rapture and the Tribulation, or embolden Texans into finally getting around to seceding from the “maggot ridden” Union, whichever comes first. Yee-haw!

            One of my wife’s Facebook “friends” even got her knickers in a philosophical twist by resolutely affirming pre-election that her God would not allow a socialist Obama to be reelected. The philosophical conundrum is now obvious, or at the very least, the illogical cat has certainly scampered out of the proverbial bag – because this “friend’s” religious “argument” dictates that either Obama did not get reelected on November 6, 2012, or that her God, like Homer’s Zeus (e.g., Iliad I:428-487), was out to an exotic dinner party somewhere else and not paying much attention to America’s elections; either way, the philosophical outlook for such a religious point of view is not pretty.

            So, it would seem that a certain segment of the American people, the above segment that got roundly whammed in these elections, is pretty certain that the other segment, which won the election in a whamming kind of way, has an absolutely wrong-headed philosophical vision of America. Group One, the losers, thinks that Group Two, the winners, have a totally flawed conception of democracy in American as an ATM. On this reading, G-2ers voted democratic because “they wanted stuff” from the government, and not because they wanted to be the noble creators of State, like G-1ers would have been had they won. Of course, one is instantly flooded by all-too-recent memories of the halcyon days of the Bush-Cheney era, which brought us wars and rumors of wars, an economic meltdown to rival that of the Great Depression, a transference of wealth away from the middle and lower classes that probably gave many an overindulged economic forecaster indigestion, and which left so many, many Americans remarkably poorer by having known it and lived through it.

Government & Management Theory.  Irrespective the party or the administration, there is inherent to the Big Idea of people-participation in government a practical, if not to say obviously organizational problem, which will always be at the very heart of the function we call State. How does one go about organizing a big community? There is always going to be some “few” who will have to sort out, in a management sort of way, the “many”; in the community there are always going to be some who have more (stuff, money, land, brains, beauty, family connections, ambition, talent, you name it…), and some who have less.

            There is by necessity an ingrained division of labor in any form of organization or community governance; where labor has been divided, it is not brain-science to suggest that there will no longer be an Absolute Equity, because the labor of State is supposedly divided, in the best of all possible worlds, along the lines of disposition, and competence, and willingness, rather than equality. Therefore the American philosophes were wise to see the equity of men, not in their individuality (i.e., personal disposition, competence, and willingness), but through the eyes of the Universal Law that protects each one of the We the People. This reveals itself to be a wisdom indeed because, looking back, most attempts to engineer artificially into the social space other types of equity (affirmative action comes to mind), inevitably result in injustices. Inequality (i.e., difference) does not automatically equate to injustice.

            In the above-linked ATM article, Lewis Lapham states the inescapable and axiomatic principle for this type of management distinction in government, which would be more abstract and philosophical if it were not so simple and confoundedly practical:

From Aristotle the founders borrowed the theorem that all government, no matter what its name or form, incorporates the means by which the privileged few arrange the distribution of law and property for the less-fortunate many. Recognizing in themselves the sort of people to whom James Madison assigned “the most wisdom to discern, and the most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society,” they undertook to draft a constitution that employed an aristocratic means to achieve a democratic end.

Statement of the Problem. What I would really like to know at this point, then, is something about the G-2 voters who dared to shock and awe the G-1 voters by winning these last elections. What is all the “stuff” they actually want from government, stuff that G-1 voters (the losers) would not take from government for love or money? In what ways is our post-election America now following a socialist agenda or moving toward a socialism, which will then tip over into a communism, which will then provoke either the Second Coming of Christ or the secession of Texas, along with potentially 30 other states, from the American Union?

Thinking Through the Problem. For almost two years my wife and I have been teaching and living in a country, the Netherlands, where the social contract is clearly defined in terms of a socialist philosophy, and frankly, I have only just recently seen a noticeable difference between this socialist county where we live and the “still-free” America that we left behind. As far as I can tell from living here, and can remember from my pay-stubs in America, in both social contract countries the State has the legal right, and indeed obligation, to use my tax-dollars 1) to staff and maintain the schools and universities and hospitals, 2) to keep up the roads and parks and public spaces, 3) to bring clean water and gas and electricity to my house, to take away sewage, and to maintain these infrastructures, 4) to empty the trash, and 5) to provide defense to the people (which might also include financing a foreign war or two, plus wars of a home-grown political sort: on Terror, on Drugs, on Poverty, on Karl Rove, as well as on miscellaneous other war-worthy causes, at least in the case of the US).

            On a side note for item 5): there has been something troubling me about this last warrior fact… The military budget for the Netherlands is expected to reach $10.77 billion by 2016, while the military budget for the U.S. is currently at $964.8 billion, which is expected to decline to $901.8 billion by 2016. Given this information, I still cannot quite figure out why I feel safer in the Netherlands—they are obviously not spending nearly enough money on my personal safety, and I am still awaiting, eagerly if not overly persuaded, their adoption of the equivalent of the American Patriot Act (whatever the budget!), so I can feel even safer yet! (This may be read with irony, if so desired…)

            So, schools and hospitals, trash, sewage, roads & other infrastructure, clean water, electricity, and wars—tax-wise, when all is said and done, it would seem that in both countries approximately the same amount of real money is gone from my paycheck every month, and that in both countries my tax dollars go to creating and enabling the practical possibilities of my life and well-being. Have I missed something? Did I miss the fact that the social philosophy of the Americans is comparable in its practical outworking to that of any other socialist State in Europe? Did I miss the fact that this is what pragmatic socialism looks like? Already long before this present generation America’s Socialism started with people-oriented, republican (i.e., non-monarchical) policies from the likes of Abraham Lincoln (Republican), Teddy Roosevelt (Republican), Franklin Roosevelt (Democrat), and Dwight Eisenhower (Republican). So for the question as to whether America has gotten to socialism yet… the answer is clearly: away and beyond. In fact, it would seem that America has been functioning on the principle of pragmatic socialism at least since the days of Honest Abe Lincoln.

More Thinking + Information. So, you might well ask, in addition to the pragmatic socialism inherent organizationally to republican democracy, what else does American socialism look like? Well, in the U.S. I have a tax rate of 28-32% for federal taxes, to which is added property taxes + sales and/or other state & local taxes, + (FICA, social security + Medicare), which is another 7.65%. So when the dust settles at the end of my American month, real money out of my pay going to tax-type liabilities, is between 40-50%. The Internet-God confirms this approximate figure: “Federal tax rates vary from 10% to 35% of taxable income. State and local tax rates vary widely by jurisdiction, from 0% to 12.696%.” 
            However, my liability is still not quite finished in the U.S. I also had to make monthly contributions to my health insurance, which changed according to my university’s contract negotiations: I went from about $100.00 a month for a single man in 1997, to about $650.00 a month for a single man in the early 2000s, then back to around $125.00 for a family of 4 (marital blended bliss set in…) around the end of that decade.

            In the Netherlands, on the other hand, and I say this in the interests of transparency, I qualify for diminished taxes (exonerated from the first 30% of my income) because I am a foreign employee. This is a cost-of-living type of compensation or adjustment, agreed upon contractually between the U.S. and the Netherlands, to encourage working exchanges between the two countries—workers from less expensive cost-of-living economies, like in the U.S., can actually afford to travel to, work and live in more expensive economies, like the Netherlands. Again according to the Internet-God, in the Netherlands: “Income tax is charged on a progressive basis on Box 1 income, at rates ranging from 2.5% to 52% (2007), at a rate of 22% on Box 2 income up to €250,000 and 25% on the excess (2007), and at a flat rate of 30% on Box 3 income.” Now, this gobbledygook (at least for those of us who are more philosophically inclined) does not mean much to me, but the “street” version is that the tax rate is roughly going to be around 52% for all and sundry, most likely under that threshold for many, but never over for anyone.

            So it would seem that in this socialist country, with my foreign worker status, I am actually paying less in the way of taxes than I would in the U.S.; and without the special foreign worker status, I would be paying approximately the same as I was paying at my former teaching position—from 40-50%. Health insurance costs are additional in NL, like they were for me in the U.S.; but the cost of the health plan seems to be stable countrywide—at about €99 per person per month for the basic plan.

Conclusions? What do I deduce from this short but tedious comparison of my tax-life in the U.S. and my tax-life in the Netherlands? That 1) my tax liability, and what I get for my tax dollars/euros, is approximately the same in both the U.S. and in the Netherlands; and that 2) either America and the Netherlands are both and have been for a very long time socialist states, or that neither are socialisms in any way that should be bothersome to anyone living in American. It certainly does not seem to bother the Dutch very much. Perhaps I should also add a third obvious deduction: 3) that I am excluding from my equation that category of American that thinks the government should have no right to take money out of our wallets for taxation purposes.

Perhaps it would be informative at this point, to reflect on the ways the U.S. and the Netherlands differ in their social philosophies. I suggested earlier in this Reflection that I only just recently learned about a noticeable difference between this socialist county where my wife and I live and the “still-free” (=supposedly non-socialist) American nation that we left behind.

            Big Difference #One is that in the Netherlands EVERYONE has access to the justice system, and one pays according to income. For instance, my blended daughter is a graduate student here, and she is having “issues” with Dutch Immigration (IND) right now. She is in the process of legally appealing a rather pompous bureaucratic decision not to allow her to immigrate to Holland as a family member—apparently in the Netherlands you cease being a family member at the age of 18 and if you have ever had an independent income. Anyway, based on her funds/revenue, her appeal will cost her a whopping €76. The courts will hire the attorneys, make the case, etc., and… we will see what we will see.

            In America on the other hand, and I say this in shame, the citizen has very limited access to individual justice. According to the World Justice Project’s “Rule of Law Index,” in fact, the U.S. placed 20th out of 35 nations in terms of access to legal counsel. How charming. And it should be noted for the record that “limited access” does not mean that the doorways to lawyers’ offices are just too narrow to accommodate the throngs of all of America’s tired, poor, and “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” (per our Statue of Liberty); no, the entry into the hallowed Halls of Justice by the “wretched refuse” on America’s “teeming shore” is limited by the exorbitant price of justice in America—justice, a top-shelf item with a hefty price tag, costs real money in America, real $ dollars and not credit cards. Sell your house and you might be able to afford Justice in the land of the free and home of the brave.

            So, as we remember back to my blended child’s legal contortions with Dutch immigration, if you have ever had dealings of any sort with the U.S. Immigration Service, “things” are really quite Short and Sweet: you leave on your own initiative or you are deported—fairly traditional American black & white. There is not enough money in the universe to pay for attorney’s fees and wait the years on end for justice to happen in terms of American immigration.

Big Difference #One, then, is that Justice is accessible to all and sundry, or to anyone who can scrape together the €76, in the NL; and We the People do not pay a single euro extra for this clearly socialist benefit. ‘Nuf said though about the costs of justice behind America’s “golden door.”

A second difference in how the social State is expressed and practiced in the Netherlands as compared to the U.S., is access to health care. In the Netherlands there is no need for a social safety net, because every single person living in the Netherlands, Dutch and other, is socially safe. Everyone pays, even those on unemployment pay for health insurance out of their unemployment benefit; and those who need to use the various services less, actually help defray the costs for those who use the services more. I do not suppose this is actually brain-science economics.

            In the U.S., on the other hand, there is the need of a social safety net, such as hospital emergency rooms and “free” clinics, all of which is paid for out of taxpayer dollars. It would probably be cheaper, dollar-wise, to have a more well organized health care program in the U.S., where all the citizens would have to pay, because the taxpayer pays anyway whether he wants to or not. As it stands at this point in the U.S., it is true that Obama-care is improving people’s access to healthcare, and that the number of Americans without health care declined in 2011; so now there are only about 48.6 million Americans without coverage.  An improvement in fact, compared to the numbers in pre-Obama America!

            So what does 48.6 million people without health care, let alone Americans without health care, look like? Well, this number looks a whole lot like a number that equals or surpasses the total individual populations of the following countries:  South Africa, Ukraine, Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Poland, Tanzania, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, Canada, Morocco, Afghanistan, Uganda, Iraq, Peru, Nepal, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Republic of China (Taiwan), North Korea, Ghana, Romania, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Australia, ad nauseam… In fact, there are only 25 countries in the entire world that have total populations larger than the U.S. population of uninsured citizens (i.e., 48.6 million), which means that the uninsured American population beats the total individual populations of 171 countries, hands down. I suppose this could be considered a record of some sort.

Big Difference #Two, then, is that health care is accessible, indeed mandatory, to all and sundry in the NL; and We the People do not pay a single euro extra for this clearly socialist benefit. ‘Nuf said though about the costs of health care behind America’s “golden door.”

            As a side note: this type of social benefit, or pragmatic socialism, is a recognition that it is not only the citizen who has an obligation to the State in the social contract, but that the State has obligations vis-à-vis the citizen as well; because for work, and therefore production and productivity to continue to maintain the viability of the State in the world, a thriving and healthy class that works must exist. This, also, is not brain-science economics; but it is a benefit of socialism in the NL that is only now beginning to come to America, thanks to her current socialist president.

Big Difference #Three: university tuition costs about € 1,700 per annum for students in any university in the Netherlands; but tuition fees vary according to individual countries in the European social community.

            In the U.S. the average costs of tuition have gone up around 15%, with top universities logging in at between $36,000 - $43,000 per annum. ‘Nuf said.

With respect to Big Difference #Three the U.S. enters a Plea of Nolo Contendere.

America does not like to lose, and does not lose often; but when she loses, she loses Big Time.

Self-Images & Self-Creation

Right in the very beginning of one of his essays (literally on page 1 of the Parerga und Paralipomena), Schopenhauer makes a distinction between two types of philosophy: 1) that which is taught as a heave-to discipline in the University, which is the handmaiden of the State and subject to its interests and influences; and then 2) the type of philosophy that stands ready to cast off “full steam ahead” in the service of Nature and Humanity, philosophy as the “unhindered quest for truth.” We are meant to conclude, I presume, that folks like the then very-popular young Hegel are the university teachers-of-philosophy (the Kathederphilosophen), academic philosophers who are maintained in an upright position by their state-financed pulpit or lectern, who are duty-bound (career oblige!) to service a State-sanctioned vision in and of philosophy, which will fairly reliably represent the intellectual statu quo or unilluminated mediocrity of thought, although, rather than Thought, a Nietzsche might have called this a glorification and codification of the herd Instinct! So, Kathederphilosophen are really quite distinct animals from those philosophers, presumably like Schopenhauer himself, who “do” the true questing and journeying work of philosophy.

            In many ways universities remain true to the spirit of Schopenhauer’s rather grumpy tendency to make Disobliging Distinctions; and while I am in fact absolutely sympathetic with this particular D-D with respect to philosophy, my this-morning reflection is about a different D-Distinction—the one that Departments of Languages and Literatures have so often made among types of literature. First there is Academic Literature, all the wonderful stuff that has been hallowed, originally by the 17th century’s Battle of the Books in England, then by the 20th century’s “canon wars.” Then there is All-the-other-stuff that is thought unworthy of ivory-tower classrooms.

            The D-Distinction between Reading and Simply Reading can already be anticipated by looking at the types of authors one used to read at American universities. According to a 1965 survey by the National Association of Scholars, there was a time when English classes would spend their semesters pouring over many of the inhabitants of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World reading the famously and classically dead (the notably notable “dead white male” society!)—immortal names like Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and Eliot could be readily heard echoing sanctimoniously in the corridors of Academe. A scant 35 years after that survey, and many of the immortals have bitten the academic dust; for while one could still occasionally catch the dulcet tones of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer lingering like an afterthought in the air, Other Sounds as well, New Sounds, were “unleashed upon ‘the learned world’” (as Harold Bloom writes in The Western Canon), distinctly less mellifluous echoes, less illustrious, less classical, and profoundly less masculine: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison.

It is a truism of literature in general (both academic + airport reading combined) that we are hooked on a book when the action of the story seduces us into exchanging our here-and-now version of reality (e.g., I am waiting at the airport….) for the fast-paced activity of Storybook (e.g., I am being hounded by the bad guys across roofs and through the back gardens of innocent and unaware citizens whom I am trying to save from horrible destruction at the hands of some Jabberwocky, and the inevitable clock is ticking in the background…). Similarly, we can become hooked when we see ourselves, some(mysteriously)how, reflected back to us in the eyes of Storybook in-dwellers.

            To the degree that either of these intuitions is accurate about our adventures in Reading and Simply Reading, I would argue that the academic Disobliging Distinction between them is fundamentally irrelevant, and therefore no better than bluster, swagger, and general, all-‘round censoriousness—because we have become involved in, transformed, and transported by the Literature of our Lives. We are Kidnapped.

During my rather extended sojourn in Academe’s hallowed halls, I have listened attentively to all of the above “dulcet tones” of the world’s authors, some truly great, some less, liking some more than others; and I have put myself personally into all the visions and experiences of the various worlds that have unfolded before me in their pages. And I have to admit that I still get caught up by a good Hero’s Tale – from Hektor to Reacher by way of Luigi Natoli’s Sicilian hero, Blasco da Castiglione—for me every hero is a good hero. So whether in the Reading world of the Academy or the Simply Reading world of everyone else, the Heroic Story is the secret passage at the back of the wardrobe for me to pass from my here-and-now into the not-here-and-now of Narnia, which can become my here-and-now if I choose to make it so.

We seldom if ever read O’Henry in our hallowed halls of higher learning. Yet this writer created some of the most significant collaborators of my life, teachers all, who continue to show me how my life can be if I choose to make it so. In a story called The Last Leaf, O’Henry introduced me to a proud, but humble old immigrant painter, Behrman, who, believing he will never create a work of art that people will buy thereby making him famous, yet creates one single work of life-giving art, but which goes (almost) unnoticed—because you and I notice! This unsung and lowly artist-hero created a single painted ivy-leaf clinging to an alleyway wall in the face of winter’s onslaught, a willful leaf that saved the life of a young woman, lying in bed behind the opposite window, whose despair was driving her into death’s arms. The old artist died that night from the cold; but the young woman took heart in the morning, and lived… she decided that if one single ivy leaf could resist winter’s icy fingers plucking it to its doom, then she could also resist death as well. In The Gift of the Magi the same O’Henry showed me how the Spirit of Christmas could be real in my life as a Love Story – that I could sacrifice my “pearl of great worth” for the Beloved, and, in the Love Story, it would go without saying that the Beloved would sacrifice her “pearl of great worth” for her Lover. O’Henry’s story showed me that I valued and wanted to experience this Love, so like the story’s hero I made this type of love the Adventure of my life.

            Tarzan was perhaps the earliest of my heroes. I so much preferred the Tarzan of Edgar Rice Burroughs to the Weismuller-esque Tarzans of cinema. Instead of Hollywood’s pseudo-buffed strongman swimmer, Me-Tarzan-You-Jane type of monosyllabic troglodyte, Burroughs gave me the vision of a polyglot and exquisitely educated Tarzan-Lord Greystoke whose first language was that of the Great Apes, and whose first man-language was French (albeit of a Belgian sort, bien sûr!). It was Lord Greystoke, the English aristocrat reared in the wilds of “darkest Africa,” who rose up through battle with his peers to be the white King of the Mangani, the tribe of Great Apes, and who later, in his personae of Lord Greystoke, would bring to the world of human injustices in the cities of Europe, the savage justice of the animals, the justice of the strong individual committed decisively to right action, in which context his “tribe” would remain whole and secure.

            It was James Fennimore Cooper who introduced me to Deerslayer, the hero of his Leather-Stocking Tales. This was the natural man who could have been the model for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, a white man in the savage world of the early American frontier, who used all of his gifts, those inherited from his “whiteness” as well as those come from his long frequentation of the native wild-places and their inhabitants, to become the exceptional man in both environs.

            Another of my heroes is Mozart’s Papageno, the sidekick-to-the-hero of Die Zauberflöte. I think, though, that Papageno is important to me for different reasons; he is more a type or model-of-man that I have chosen to carry around with me so that I remember what has become important in this modern world of ours. But let me be painfully realistic about this particular hero-model: Classism continues to exist in these supposedly class-free societies of ours; and my experiences have taught me that I am a class hybrid. I do not fully belong, either by birth or by sentiment, to the privileged (moneyed) classes or to the normal working classes. Were I to have been alive during the French Revolution and the Terror I would have been guillotined—that is clear to me; for even though the principle occupants of my porte-monnaie are nearly always only dust-bunnies, my education places me socially in a privileged (albeit not moneyed) class, in an inter-class ni chèvre, ni chou. I experienced this in-betweenness throughout my adult working life, before the Academy, because most of the jobs that sustained me during my education were of the laboring sort. I did not mind the labor then and I still do not; but those laboring around me and at my side were often made uncomfortable by me because it seemed apparent to them that my life was not exactly like theirs. My education was changing the very nature of my social reality; following in the footsteps of Odysseus, the in-between course on the map of my life was already being charted, and was leading me to very different destinations, both short-term and long-term, from my companions.

            So Papageno sings to me the joy of the authentic common man, which is a testimony to Mozart’s genius. In a high-minded society whose courtly values and expressions were dominated by Verdi and Italian opera, with the creation of this Bird-Man character Mozart seemed to have understood how, and then dared, to translate the heart of a normal, socially powerless “simple man” into a language and for an audience that would only ever attend the Volksoper, whose joy was to share in the life and miseries of a bawling and grousing, but faithful and good hearted volks-hero-sidekick whose highest lament, in German the language of the people, is his lost-love (lyrics in German and English here). Mozart’s creation of this type of hero is significant, in part, because it anticipates the “rise of the masses,” which defines in many ways the 19th century. This is also most certainly why romantic lyrics, such as those of the famous Donizetti aria, Una Furtiva Lagrima, [Pavarotti], from his operatic melodrama, L'elisir d'amore, [1830s] continue to move us all, of all classes—because they validate our individual experience of the post-19th century world, and especially of that experience that we all most seek out -- Love.

            I read Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus & Goldmund for the first of many times when I was an undergraduate student of religion, only to realize that, in very fundamental ways that I could not remedy in myself, I was both Narcissus and Goldmund. I was a walking contradiction; but I also began to understand why the life of a seminarian was not going to be for me. I have “felt” the anguish of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary as she broke through the wall of 19th century French morality, which threatened to suffocate her. Her break-through (1856), which made her the heroic prequel of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1883), also transformed her into a spiritual and social pariah unto her death; and yet I had also felt along with Madame Bovary both the boredom of the mundane routines that await the “normal” life, as well as that intoxicating moment when we realize that we each hold our own destiny, our fate, in our own two hands. She made her choices, I mine.

            I am thrilled, and moved, each time I read through Milton’s Paradise Lost. After Satan and his legions have been cast out of the heavens and into the deepest regions of hell—Satan picks himself up, shakes himself off, sees laying stunned around him his myriad warriors, and, not ever one to give up as beaten, this prodigious angel shouts out to them in a great, virile voice: “Awake! Arise, or be for ever fall’n! (Book I).” Or how much have I learned about the world’s truth when, in Book II at the war council of the fallen gods, I hear the poet sing of Belial:

“in act more graceful and humane:

A fairer person lost not Heavn’n! He seemed

For dignity composed and high explóit,

But all was false and hollow though his tongue

Dropped manna…”;

or when Moloch, “the strongest and the fiercest spirit/That fought in Heav’n, now fiercer by despair”— in response to the deceptive and cowardly words of Belial, spoke words of absolute clarity and frankness: “My sentence is for open war…” And then there is Milton’s Satan, an exquisite creation if ever there was. Intent on wreaking havoc at the heart of his Enemy’s creation, Satan penetrates into Eden to seek out Eve and lead her into temptation. In this encounter (Book IX, 455ff) Milton reconstructs for us one of the most interesting experiences in all of the worlds, literary and real-life: Satan meeting Beauty, and Malice is struck dumb! This is the original Beauty meeting the Beast.

She most, and in her look sums all delight:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone: Her heavenly form
Angelick, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture, or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil-one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good; of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge:

All of these books are standing on my shelves—lovely sets covering the walls from floor to ceiling; and yet, in the interests of transparency, I do have to admit that while I own copies of them, I have not yet been successful in wading through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), which is of a density that defies the laws of physics; and, frankly, I have to admit as well that I would rather die or suffer serious dismemberment before plunging into the interminable 7-volume wasteland of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu). My wife loved Proust… but, Call me silly.

            However, the “people” I have met in these (other) collective pages—these guides continue to roam through the corridors of my life, my own private herd (flock? gaggle? school?) of Daimoni; and unlike the single and limited Daimon of Socrates, whose only job was to point out to Socrates the way he should not go, my myriad of Daimoni have continued to illuminate my path in all the varied and sundried circumstances of my life. They are the sign-posters who attend me and illuminate the dark places on the path of how I should go. In our broken and fragmented world where lessons and rituals are being forgotten as quickly as computer passwords, how else are we supposed to learn how to “do” real-world living and dying?

            In my life I have followed Horatio’s example in the face of loss—saying farewell to a friend: Good night, Sweet prince… and Shakespeare’s words actually expressed truly what I was experiencing in that moment of my own grief and loss. Horatio’s words taught me what to say in my own real-life pain, and they gave me comfort worthy of my feelings. This is the phenomenology, the lived space, of the Reading Life. Our lives are a flash in the pan, here today gone tomorrow, gone in the twinkling of an eye, ashes to ashes, dust to dust… all truthful sayings that have been, and are used in real situations by real people experiencing real grief.

            “I” am a handy Fiction upon which to hang the story of my life… the cohesion that links the passage of my days into an historical continuity, into the narrative continuum of Me. So I will be many things in my life; or perhaps more philosophically, there will be many pieces of me, many facets, that reflect the various ideas I will value as I pass through this world of mine.

Proud to be an American?

In a recent ethics class one of the student presentations had been about Injustice and the State, and the discussion, naturally, slid over into torture and state-sponsored terrorism. As usual then, at least for those who know me even the slightest bit, at the end of the presentation Teacher held forth on the unacceptable-ness (an Aikenesque neologism) of State involvement in committing acts of injustice, and especially on the subject of America’s participation in such activities… complete with the usual, “We (i.e., Americans) should be better than that!,” and all—the whole enchilada. So it caught me a bit short when, on the way out at the end of class, a student asked me if I were still proud to be an American.

            I admit—the question took me by surprise. At first, looking at her a bit askance and askew as is my teacherly (another A-n) wont when unsure about whether I am being mocked, I could not decide whether or not she was being facetious with her question, as I had been cranking rather unambiguously on the U.S. critique-machine; so, frankly, irony could certainly have been in her mind. Even now I am undecided about whether the student intended to serve up a cold portion of irony with this question.

            At any rate, what she got from me in response was still my philosophical stock in trade answer – I am only proud of things when I actually have personal merit or involvement. As an erstwhile disciple of that old Stoic Slave-Master, Epictetus, there can be no other possible answer to such a question than his:

6. “Don't be prideful with any excellence that is not your own. […] What, then, is your own? Only your reaction to the appearances of things. Thus, when you behave conformably to nature in reaction to how things appear, you will be proud with reason; for you will take pride in some good of your own.”

Or again:

44. … These reasonings are connected: "I am richer than you, therefore my property is greater than yours;" "I am more eloquent than you, therefore my style is better than yours." But you, after all, are neither property nor style (as rendered by Ms. Carter on the MIT site).”

So the simple, and philosophically correct answer to my student’s question is that no, I am not in the least proud of some “condition” over which I had no control. My birthright is neither “mine” nor my “possession” in any normal or meaningful sense of that word, so it would be philosophically inappropriate for me to make it a subject of my pride. It is this same Stoic common-sensical (yet another A-n) critique that also makes social constructs such as {Patriotism + Pride=American value} so patently and philosophically meaningless.

            Being proud of where I am born is akin to being proud of having naturally curly hair or good skin… these are not personal “accomplishments” that demonstrate any particular character on my part. So one who is proud, or not proud, or who has any strong opinion whatsoever about where he is born, is exactly like the little mole who wanted to know who did a poo on his head, and who then proceeded to walk around beshat (beshatten? beshitten? beshyted?) for the entire duration of his investigation. What is frankly important here is not whose business it is, but what I personally do(o) about it now that I am besplattered. So let us choose to be different from our little molish friend, and, by asking the correct questions up front, try to draw out the best possible conclusions. Chances are much better that we will act well if we begin our quest by thinking well.

Answer by List. Perhaps there are other philosophical considerations relevant to my student’s question. How might it be meaningful to make the connection between personal and individual pride and the fact of being the fruit of American loins? This reflection then is an endorsement of no American party or of any candidate, but rather of a value – Justice.

·      In my generation it was trendy not to be proud of America’s involvement in Vietnam, for all the various and sundry reasons; it therefore stood to reason that I was not proud to be an American in that season, because it seemed to mean that I was implicated and therefore complicit in America’s Asian involvement.

            However, I was distinctly proud of the fact that individual Americans, including my younger self, would take to the streets to protest that war– I was proud to engage my thought, and my time, and my energy in the real-life working out of a people’s democracy.

·      I was not proud to be an American in the era of U.S. segregationist policies; but I was distinctly proud of the moment in America’s history when she was able to get beyond the issue of color in order to see the man—because I actively supported that transition into social justice in my political choices, and because, although racism is far from dead in America, I personally continue to refuse to allow racist opinions of all the ilks (gender, color, nationality, etc.,) to influence my thinking and my actions.

·      According to Human Rights Watch, America seems to have an active policy of putting its convicted youth in solitary confinement. So, while I have to admit that I have known some pretty rowdy and even out-of-control young people in my time, this particular American philosophe is not proud that he hales from a modern western 1^st world country that locks up its troubled young people in solitary confinement. If someone in prison needs medical or psychological attention, it would seem reasonable that we Americans could and should find a more appropriate manner that addresses these problems, which would include a whole range of professional approaches and solutions.

            This America does not make me proud; but the fact that I can actively and loudly join my critical voice to that of the people at Human Rights Watch makes me proud, because it gives me the opportunity to play a role, no matter how small, in creating an America that is good and just.

·      Also according to the HRW, America got away with torture during the Bush Administration (2001-2008). This was a violation of both US and international law, not to speak of the U.S. Army Field Manual (since 1956 until its revision in 2006 under the Bush Administration); but to address all the arguments relevant to torture and our need for intelligence in one fell swoop—at the end of the day it does not even matter whether or not torture “works” in getting that all-too-important intelligence we keep hearing about. It is ILLEGAL, a violation of American constitutional law, and therefore we Americans should not be practicing it. I am not proud of America’s renegade conduct in this matter.

            By the way, the science is in – torture should be out, unless we are just absolutely dead-set on creating the next generation of terrorists by means of our own state-sanctioned terrorist conduct. On the other hand, if America should wish to practice torture, then it should follow the legal and political channels of American democracy to have torture voted into law and ourselves voted to be taken out of the U.N. This is how the people work in a democracy.

            However, because this step toward the legalization of torture has not yet occurred in the U.S., I am therefore delighted that this current President decided that America and her president should act within the confines of the U.S. Constitution, as well as in agreement with the treaties the U.S. has signed with the United Nations; and I am proud that I cast my vote on the side of a man of this character that values Justice, who still has a vision of America that reflects the America I have known in my life. So nix to Gitmo and torture—almost…

·      There are approximately 196 countries in the world, and, in theory, we all, each and every one, individually as well as nationally, at least pay lip-service to the idea of Justice in the world. I am proud to be of this number. Also, I know of no one, personally, who has ever convincingly made the case that we humans should not strive for Justice.

            Of these 196 nations in our world, 193 are members of the United Nations. I am proud to say that America is of this (latter) number, and that I have also played my part by teaching students the importance of justice and civilized conduct in our relationships, both close to home and beyond our shores.

·      However, in publishing its 2012 Facts and Figures, Amnesty International supplies a corrective to my rose-colored understanding of America’s engagement for Justice in the international community, because the country of my birth is plainly playing a non-supportive role in the theater of global justice. I am not proud of this side of America. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded in 2002 with the following transnational statement of value: “The investigation and prosecution of international crimes—including genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes—is a fundamental component of transitional justice.”

            To date, 121 nations of the world have signed up to the ICC; simple math tells me that 75 have not, which includes the United States. It would seem that on the question of International Justice the U.S. is playing keep-up-with-the-Joneses with North Korea and Somalia, two bad boys of the world’s most repressive societies. Sheesch… Even Uganda, of Idi Amin fame, and Nigeria, perhaps the most historically corrupt country on the planet, are signatories to the ICC. I am not proud of this American fact.

            According to the Internet-God on this question, the Clinton Administration signed the original Rome Statute in 2000, but failed to submit the treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification; and the Bush Administration, again according to the above source, made quite clear that the U.S. would not join the ICC. For these two facts I am not proud, because this does not reflect the justice I value for America and for the world community of nations.

            However, I am proud that the current American Administration has reestablished a working relationship with the ICC. My pride about this comes from the fact that I have not only taught my students about Justice, but that I have also worked together with other people who value justice to choose this current President as the representative of an America of Justice.

            It is when we support just men and just women that we create Justice in our world.

While we all may hope that God might bless these United States of America, per the Greenwood song, you and I, My Fellow Americans, must still not fail in our day job—which is to create everyday in our own personal actions an America where, in Dr. King’s words, “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”