Social Contract
I keep coming back in my mind to America's Social Contract. Regardless of where John Locke and the guys may have wanted to start, the American Social Contract started with protecting the right of Europeans to view Native Americans and Africans as being less than human. As not having legal standing except as chattel.
The next American "revolution" was when abolitionists attacked this notion with regard to Africans which lead to the Civil War and the end of "slavery" as an institution. But when it comes down to it, it seems like Americans are not that interested in other "people's" interests when their own economic interest is involved. Many of the "Sagebrush Rebellion" issues have to do with continued exploitation of Native lands.
The problem, in a world of robot manufacturing and the land being stressed by human population growth, is how are non-tech savvy Americans to be made whole? And this is far more than just an American problem. Because someone will find something for these people to do, just as Mussolini and Hitler did.
Perhaps, just as we need a multitude of gods and religions to suit our individual or group needs, there is no one political system that suits all people. It sounds like you're joking when you point out that the weakness of Italian Fascism was the need to pit Italian nationalism against some external force, but this does seem to be an essential requirement for all forms of extreme nationalism, and I'm sure America First-ism will tend in the same direction. I'm not even in a position to say that this isn't a necessary feature. This comes down to cultural anthropology and sociology. It may well be that the EU has pushed peace in Europe, for example, about as far as it can go. Perhaps radical pruning isn't an accident, but a necessity for European success. It certainly looks like something periodically pushes Europeans toward war.
Continued...
I've been holding onto this for days because I'm still dwelling in The House of Phlegm... (now with minimal hearing in my left ear due to congestion. Dr. Time seems to finally be getting the better of this vile plague. Maybe.)
But now I need to make this already too long post even longer as I just ran into not one, but two intriguing pieces from Medium. I will include the links below.
I guess I'm going to start with this piece on "The Alt-right Is a Doomsday Cult." It's almost like the author has been reading my blogs. There are references to Nietzsche and to Mussolini -- and I now I have to do some research on Julius Evola. There's even a new (to me) use of "kali" to describe the period of time when Kali dances. (How have I missed Evola? His connection with Hermetic philosophy links straight back to the original Faust writings.)
Here's a striking quote from Wiki:
"The Jews were stigmatized, not as representatives of a biological race, but as the carriers of a world view, a way of being and thinking—simply put, a spirit—that corresponded to the ‘worst’ and ‘most decadent’ features of modernity: democracy, egalitarianism and materialism."[20]
And:
Paul Furlong wrote that "The complete Evola held views that it is fair, if somewhat summary, to categorise as elitist, racist, anti-semitic, misogynist, anti-democratic, authoritarian, and deeply anti-liberal."[7]
And finally, the real shocker:
Evola died unmarried, without children, on 11 June 1974 in Rome.
I did a quick search and found this link where the internet, in it's occult wisdom, reveals that 63% of respondents think Evola was gay. That's what I was thinking as well. And not just because he was a Barone.
Now to our second piece on the suppression of science in Franco's Spain. Now here we see exactly what I thought we should see in fascism in general, if its enemy was truly the bourgeoisie (Evola is quite clear on this in his theory of "castes.") Some quotes,
The new council ["the central agency responsible for advancing Spanish science research and exchanges with foreign scientists"] was meant to bring back a view of science that would make it compatible with conservative Catholic values, mandating it to “restore the classical and Christian unity of the sciences that was destroyed in the 18th Century.” In other words, he wanted to turn back the clock to pre-Enlightenment times...
“The Franco regime defended the literalism of the Bible, which was considered an infallible account, inspired by the word of God,” said Manuel Castillo Martos, a professor at the University of Seville and co-author of Education, Science and Ideology in Spain (1890–1950). “Scientific ideas that contradicted it, such as Darwinist evolution, were considered unacceptable.”
Now we have Naphta's doctrine made law. Given that The Magic Mountain was published in 1926 and Franco came to power 1936-1939, and that we know (from Primo Levi) that "everyone" was reading the book after it was published, one has to wonder just how influential it really was.
The Nazis were not in a position, during the late 1930s and 1940s, to be purists when it came to bourgeois science, since they had a war to lose. But was there a long term plan to adapt something similar to (though less Catholic than) the Spanish approach to science? How would I.G. Farben have felt about that? Again, I'm not quite interested enough in this to actually read National Socialist texts. There should be a way to leave idea seeds on Medium in hopes that someone else will do your work for you.
No power to the slaves
I included a Franco quote above and then removed it because it didn't relate to what I was addressing just then, but I want to come back to it now.
“We do not believe in government through the voting booth,” he said. “The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box. Spain has no foolish dreams.”
And this goes nicely with Evola's thoughts on caste,
In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola developed a "general objective law: the law of the regression of the castes", claiming that "[t]he meaning of history from the most ancient times is this: the gradual decline of power and type of civilization from one to another of the four castes - sacred leaders, warrior nobility, bourgeoisie (economy, "merchants") and slaves - which in the traditional civilizations corresponded to the qualitative differentiation in the principal human possibilities."[13]
I don't think Fyodor Dostoevsky would have much of a problem with this. And neither would Naphta, of course. Though I imagine there would be some debate about who decides what between the "sacred leaders" and the "warrior nobility." And isn't it interesting that he chose the word "slaves" for the lowest caste (I'm assuming this is a decent translation.) I imagine Ford Madox Ford was familiar with Evola, I do wonder what he thought of these, Tory-er than thou views.
I do notice a couple problems for the Alt-right in installing these ideas in the New World. As Dostoevsky was aware, the U.S.A. is a pure bourgeois state. Getting rich regardless of the cost has always been the true American Dream and when Trump speaks of Making America Great Again, I'm sure that's what his followers are hearing. How do you introduce finer thoughts regarding the sacred and the noble in a land of the bourgeoisie?
And then there's religion. For Spain and Italy going to their sacred place was simply adhering to the Catholic Church -- just as it was Orthodox Christianity for Dostoevsky. But what is the sacred standard for the U.S.A? Evangelical Christianity? Who's brand? And whichever one you pick the Catholics and Mormons and Goat knows how many other sects will scream. America hasn't yet seen a good religious war, wouldn't it be amusing if the fight against Radical Islam resulted in a new 30 Years War among Christian sects?
Social contract
The other day I ran into an interesting article about the current political situation in the U.S. of A. (see here) that got me thinking again about the social contract and the viability of democracy. I've never been that sold on democracy since I don't have that much confidence in the sense of the common man. The "genius" of democracy is supposed to be that, collectively, we can make better decisions than we would be able to make individually. Time will tell how that works in the 21st century, but I still haven't given up hope.
Last summer I was open to voting for Sanders, though I was not a Sanders enthusiast. At one point I was considering the possibility of voting for Trump in the primary here to prevent Ted Cruz from getting the nomination... and I still stand by that preference. (For the record, I voted for Sanders in the primary because I thought he had the best chance of defeating Trump. I still stand by that choice as well, though I was pleasantly surprised by Clinton winning the popular vote in the general election. However, I suspect a great many of the most ignored Americans don't bother to vote. If everyone was required to vote, I suspect Trump would have won the popular vote as well.) I voted for Clinton in the general election because there's no way I could have voted for the Golden Cheeto, but I have to acknowledge that Clinton would have done nothing to make the problem -- that we've not been dealing with since at least the 1970s -- any better. The Clintons, Bushes, and even Obama, have all been part of the problem.
The problem, I now think, is the failure of America to abide by crucial aspects of the social contract, in particular the requirement to give a shit about the success of the average American. This applies to the "forgotten" white middle and lower classes, but also to the now feral people I see on the streets every day. Also people of Color! Even the best liberals have only been interested in the common people -- or their rights and status -- in general, not in the success of individual people.
Will Trump address this? Probably not, at least not successfully -- though both religious and fanatically political associations are often quite good at this, so he still could surprise me -- but I would like to hope that the Left will respond by taking up Sanders' banner and sincerely trying to address and even solve this problem. Though to be honest, I'm no more optimistic about this than about Trump. But that's what needs to happen.
There's a famous quote about the U.S. needing periodic revolutions (should have been by Thomas Paine, but I can't find it at the moment). The point being that the American Revolution ought not be a one and done proposition. As a Burkean conservative, I have reservations about this, but it's true that governments at least require periodic reforms. The tendency of man is to sink into policies that favor the wealthy and clever (like Sutpen, I suppose) and screw over the common people. Since it's unreasonable, apparently, to expect the favored to notice this and level the playing field, it seems to be the role of the common people to finally say, "enough," and force the favored/ruling classes to give in. That is what I see happening with Trump.
Viewed in this way, I have to say it is indeed genius. What better way to say "This is how little we think of your Bushes and Clintons and 'qualified' leaders. We're going to put an orange, business failure/ entertainer in their place." The Democrats tricked us all with a very attractive candidate (Obama) last time and we fell for it, but he was really just more of the same as far as his policies went. Better than Bush or Clinton, but not substantially better. I'm tempted to borrow Sarah Palin's lipstick on a pig quote here.
Entropy 2
Take an economic system. Say you're Sutpen raising cotton and you produce bales worth an amount $X. These bales are shipped to Cressbrook Mill where the cotton is spun into thread. Now, thanks to the work of capitol and those orphans, the cotton is worth $X+Y. If it is then transported to California where it is dyed indigo and turned into jeans (ignoring for the moment that transport costs were too high for this in the 19th century) you get a product that is now worth $X+Y+Z.
I admit that it would be difficult to continue this entropy reducing trend unless you have access to a time machine that could bring worn out jeans to, say Tokyo today, where they might have an inflated value. Or you could have a skilled quilter turn the worn jeans into a prized quilt. So it gets increasingly difficult and in fact unlikely.
This is almost the lesson of the "Cradle to Cradle" idea for recycling. Cradle to Cradle is an economic or resource equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, a state of affairs where entropy stays constant.
Absalom
p294 ...Not two of them [Shreve and Quentin] in a New England college sitting-room but one in a Mississippi library sixty years ago... and they -- Quentin and Shreve -- thinking how after the father spoke and before what he said stopped being shock and began to make sense [that Charles Bon was Henry's brother], Henry would recall later how he had seen through the window beyond his father's head the sister and the lover in the garden, pacing slowly... to disappear slowly beyond some bush or shrub starred with white bloom -- jasmine, spraea, honeysuckle, perhaps myriad scentless unpickable Cherokee roses -- names, blooms which Shreve possibly had never heard and never seen although the air had blown over him first which became tempered to nourish them. It would not matter here in Cambridge that the time had been winter in that garden too, and hence no bloom nor leaf even if there had been someone to walk there and be seen there since, judged by subsequent events, it had been night in the garden also. But that did not matter because it had been so long ago. It did not matter to them (Quentin and Shreve) anyway, who could without moving, as free now of flesh as the father who decreed and forbade, the son who denied and repudiated, the lover who acquiesced, the beloved who was not bereaved....
This is such interesting fiction. Everyone busy composing the story. Or rather the author busy composing versions of the story from a variety of perspectives and giving those character/perspectives leave to re-imagine the setting. You can even imagine them all working together to dream up the best story and best presentation of the story.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to tell the actual story as concisely as possible. I bet you could do it in a page or two. Where Martha Grimes gets distracted by characterization, Faulkner seems to get distracted by the telling of his stories... and how Southern is that. Unlike with Grimes, I'm pretty confident Faulkner knew exactly where he was going to end up. The telling is like a seduction.
p302 "...who would in return surrender all his miseries and follies and misfortunes to the lice and fleas of Coke and Littleton..." Sir Edward Coke? I really have no idea what this means.
Absalom
Now I'm thinking Faulker just has a thing for italics. I was thinking this was well on the way to turning into a full blown epistulary novel, but that, peeking ahead, doesn't seem to be the case. And then there are pages of interior monologue also rendered in italics.
And now that we've gotten used to the father and son (whoever they are) we get Shreve who we know even less about except that he was born to recite the last chapter in Absalom, Absalom! summary while being either ignorant or willfull about the connection between Quentin and Miss Rosa. And still our story is either recited by one character to another or read or recounted in reflection. In some ways I'm reminded of Ford Madox Ford's style in Parade's End from about a decade before. But that's mostly because the method of storytelling is convoluted and difficult. Something like a cat feeder I saw recently that required the cat to climb around and really work for its kibble.
And Shreve progressing from calling Sutpen a "Devil" to calling him "Faustus." I admit I didn't see that coming. Does that make Jones Mephistophelese? That does make a kind of sense.
I'm at Sutpen's backstory now -- Southern Culture as viewed by a Virginia hillbilly -- so it occurs to me (could it really be for the first time?) that slavery was a way to re-assert what Ford would have called a "Tory" world order in a New World that rejected the Tory order of social classes. Slaves were the new peasantry that had even fewer rights than in old England. America was a step back not a step forward for "all" men. (Interesting to note that serfdom was developing in Russia (1600-1650) around the same time that chattel slavery was developing in the North American Colonies (1650-1700)).
Social contract theory
I'm now into part 3. of that piece on political and moral philosophy. John Rawls is the kind of academic who gives ivory towers a bad name. I'll give him credit for terminology that is more meaningful than his buddy Kant's, but "the Original Position, behind the Veil of Ignorance" sounds like he spent his youth reading comic books. (Not that that's an entirely bad thing.)
In a way, Rawls' rational ethics reminds me of pre-Copernican calculations for the movements of heavenly bodies. If you don't understand the actual logic behind these movements all you can do is invent increasingly convoluted schemes. It's all really clever, but it has nothing to do with reality.
Reasoning from an "Original Position, behind the Veil of Ignorance," you could show that everyone should eat a low calorie, vegetarian diet; walk, run, or bike everywhere; women should probably have their babies before they are 20 with mates chosen by computers; and I could come up with a better list if I wanted to think about it a while -- which I don't, because it's just silly.
And there is nothing here to suggest that this rational invention of an ethics would make actual people happy. I do agree with the final statement in 3. a. "Rawls’ theory of justice constitutes, then, the Kantian limits upon the forms of political and social organization that are permissible within a just society." He does take Kant's notions about as far as they can go. If we were rational beings, it would all make prefect sense. Though even then you would need to demonstrate that an ethics and a political constitution constructed on this foundation actually made people happy.
The 3. b. update of Hobbs is just the same, too Kantian in thinking we are rational. I'm still going with Hobbs.
In 4. a. ii. there's this interesting passage, "C.B. Macpherson, for example, has argued that Hobbesian man is, in particular, a bourgeois man, with the characteristics we would expect of a person during the nascent capitalism that characterized early modern Europe. Feminists have also argued that the liberal individual is a particular, historical, and embodied person. (As have race-conscious philosophers, such as Charles Mills, to be discussed below.) More specifically, they have argued that the person at the heart of liberal theory, and the social contract, is gendered. Christine Di Stefano, in her 1991 book Configurations of Masculinity, shows that a number of historically important modern philosophers can be understood to develop their theories from within the perspective of masculinity, as conceived of in the modern period. She argues that Hobbes’s conception of the liberal individual, which laid the groundwork for the dominant modern conception of the person, is particularly masculine in that it is conceived as atomistic and solitary and as not owing any of its qualities, or even its very existence, to any other person, in particular its mother. Hobbes’s human, is therefore, radically individual, in a way that is specifically owing to the character of modern masculinity."
I think Hobbs was just trying to be as rational as possible, but this is another way of saying that all three of our imaginers of a Social Contract, were ignoring sociological and anthropological factors.
This seems to be the case with most of the gender or race based attacks on the Social Contract that follow.
Social Contract
The Trump election; the return to a State of Nature on my city streets; and Crash Course, Philosophy progressing into Ethics, has all conspired to make me want to read about Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- something I did as little as possible in college. I found this interesting piece about the Social Contract, and I've read through the first two sections.
Since I'm reading their view of man's State of Nature after being exposed to more reality based ideas from cultural anthropology, I value this more for telling me what they think men are like and what they think men want. I like that Hobbs rejects religion as being any sort of foundation for morality. I don't like Rouseau's insistence on true democracy, but current events are proving him right about the need for this.
Our national "Red" vs "Blue" division, as well as the breakdown of order on our city sidewalks, suggest that our Social Contract is no longer valid. (San Francisco has decided, through political and judicial decisions, that it will neither jail nor fine people violating basic civic rules like "Thou shalt not shit on the sidewalk." Our sidewalks are returning to an actual State of Nature that doesn't look much like what any of these thinkers imagined.) Since the original American Contract was hammered out over 200 years ago, when the population was a fraction of what it is now, and since even then it was more what Locke had in mind than what Rousseau had in mind, I'm not sure how this redrafting of the Social Contract can work.
It may turn out that Rousseau is right, but we may still have to fall back on Hobbs. That is, I believe, what happened at the end of the Roman Republic.
