William E. Connolly Author of The Fragility of Things: self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, democratic activism, Duke, fall, 2013 As I compose this I am sitting on a gorge in Ithaca, New York, a gorge formed over endless centuries by the loud, cascading falls situated at one end of it. I sit here the day after seeing “The East,” a May, 2013 film on corporate eco-terrorism, private intelligence firms that secure them, and the closeted eco-warriors who stalk both by adopting parallel tactics. The title is meant to recall the underside of the privileges bestowed upon the corporate east in America and the mess in the middle east today. But the geological resonance is also pertinent because some geologists contend that the Biblical story of Eden, situated in “the middle east” 6000 years ago, is actually a mythic condensation of faint memories passed down to later generations of a bygone era when an area stretching from the Arabian peninsula to the current Sahara had been a vibrant, fertile, green zone. Over a short period a radical change in climate transformed it into a desert. There are even remains of a sophisticated structure reminiscent of Stonehenge through which the leading intellects of the day tried to figure out what in hell was happening to their climate and world.
The condensation of that climate event in Genesis, at least as interpreted by Augustine, is one in which the first humans in the garden rebelled against God and we were all punished severely for their rebellion: labor in child birth thereafter for women, toiling in barren fields for men, and the experience of death for all. Climate change, human willfulness and divine punishment. The story is often used as a lesson in obedience, but also lurking in it, especially in the earliest J version, is a sense of powerful natural forces which we must tend as best we can. The Book of Job puts both stories into play too. Here is a somewhat different story: The first humans did not deserve what they got; we may deserve what we are sowing; future generations may reap the effects of our original sin.
“The East” is directed by Zal Batmangli and stars Brit Marling (who also co-wrote it). It co-stars Ellen Page and Shiloh Fernandez. Sarah works for a spooky corporate intelligence and undercover agency that infiltrates and breaks up eco-warrior groups. Our heroine is assigned to infiltrate an undercover group devoted to locating corporate eco-terrorism and enacting “jams” to make them experience precisely what their policies do to others. Does you pharmaceutical company produce a medication that creates severe mental dissociation? Do you then deny it? Let’s infiltrate the company celebration and pour the same medication into their drinks. Does your manufacturing company pour toxic wastes into the river at a precise time every night? Let’s capture the bosses and compel them to swim in the river just as the toxic brew gushes out of the huge pipe above them.
Reviews of the film so far often ask whether the suspense works well and whether the infiltration strategy is realistic. Demote those questions. The key thing is that Sarah soon becomes a double agent, not in the sense of playing both sides against the middle for her own gain. But in the sense of finding that part of her comes to identify with the goals and practices of the eco-warrior group and that part clings to the cool, more cynical analyst loyal to the firm. Also, part of her is mesmerized by the warrior tactics—who would not feel a thrill as you see those corporate cads swim in the slime they have brewed?—and part of her is drawn to bring the cool, technical knowledge and tactics she has learned at the firm to a new cause. She is a doubly identified agent. In this way she captures the predicament many of us are caught in today. We are appalled by corporate eco-terrorism; we find our responses to it to be inadequate; we fear for ourselves and families when we consider other options; and we don’t want to become as dogmatic and punitive from our side as the corporate terrorists are. We think that the latter approach will backfire. And yet we are dissatisfied with our current modes of double agency.
Eventually Sarah develops a strategy of public expose and activism that draws some sustenance from her two identities and resists the traps each sets for her. I will let that part unfold when you watch the film. Is it enough? Probably not. Could more of us participate in such acts to augment the potential they hold? Yes, we could. Many of us are what Michel Foucault called “specific intellectuals”, people with special knowledges and skills because of the work we do in law firms, medical practices, college teaching, blog writing, pharmaceutical companies, intelligence agencies, the media, school boards, churches, geological research, corporate regulatory agencies, and so on, endlessly. Each of us has specific modes of strategic information and critical skill linked to our role assignments. We can expose horrendous practices, as Snowden has done recently. We can also support others who do so as we seek to build a critical assemblage of public insurrection together.
Sarah provides a metaphor and exemplar for our time. Those two innocent children in the fertile garden did not deserve the fate imposed upon them. They therefore suffered a double injury: the fate and their sense of deserving it. And we today? We either contribute to the fate that will befall us or withdraw from fights against corporate eco-terrorism. The next generation will not deserve the fate bestowed upon it, but we are saddled with differential degrees of responsibility. I have explored multimodal kinds of action to be pursued under such circumstances in a recent post on “The Dilemma of Electoral Politics”. The cool Sarah does much more. She acts in ways that inspire us to think and act differently.
What about the warrior clan she infiltrates? To me, they simultaneously inform us, slide too close the adversaries they oppose, and pursue some actions that are apt to backfire under the glare of publicity. Are they, though, also invaluable prods? Yes. They are, perhaps, the Antigones, Nat Turners and John Browns of today. They force us to rethink, with Sarah, how we remain caught in oh so carefully crafted circles of self-protective pessimism, or cynicism, or innocence, or indifference. They spur us on. They press us to consider again just what mix of courage and tactical wisdom are appropriate to the fateful issues of today. We need the intensity they exhibit joined to multimodal critical practices, ranging from role experimentations through exposes to social movements and electoral politics—each of these enacted as an indispensable contribution to the others. Check out the film. Exacerbate, in the company of others, the double agent circling within you.
William E. Connolly Connolly's forthcoming book is entitled The Fragility of Things: self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, democratic activism. The dangers posed by climate change and potential shifts in the ocean conveyor system; the extensive suffering generated by the heightening of economic inequality; the need to restructure the state supported infrastructure of consumption so that all residents can participate in the housing, travel, health care, retirement and educational institutions it makes available; the need to support the pluralization of gender practices, religious membership, and ethnic identifications; the desperate needs of our cities and the ugly politics of apartheid designed to isolate them---these interlocking issues constitute commanding problems of our time. The fact is, however, that they are not addressed within the established terms of the electoral system. Does that mean that we should withdraw from electoral politics? Or wait for a revolution that eschews “reformist” politics until capitalism is liquidated, as some critics of the Occupy movement have asserted? I know too many people suffering in the working class to sanction either response. I read about too many others under duress as well.
There is, nonetheless, a dilemma of electoral politics confronting the Left: 1) It is tempting to forgo electoral politics because it is so dysfunctional. But to do so cedes even more power both to independent corporate action and to the radical right within the state. The right loves to make electoral politics dysfunctional so that people lose confidence in it and transfer confidence to the private sector. (2) Nonetheless, the logic of the media-electoral-corporate system does spawn a restrictive grid of power and electoral intelligibility that makes it difficult to think, experiment, and organize outside its parameters. Think of how corporations and financial institutions initiate actions in the private sector and then use intensive lobbying to veto efforts to reverse those initiatives in Congress or the courts, just as financial elites invented derivatives and then lobbied intensively to stop their regulation; think of how media talking heads concentrate on candidates rather than fundamental issues; recall the central role of scandal in the media and electoral politics; consider the decisive electoral position of inattentive “undecided voters”; note how states under Republican rule work relentlessly to reduce the minority and poor vote; recall those billionaire super pacs; and so on. The electoral grid cannot be ignored or ceded to the right, but it also sucks experimental pursuits and bold ventures out of politics. Can we renegotiate the dilemma of electoral politics? That is the problematic within which I am working. I do not have a perfect response to it. Perfect answers are suspect.
Perhaps it is wise to forge multimodal strategies that start outside the electoral grid and then return to it as one venue among others. Strategic role experimentations at multiple sites joined to the activation of new social movements provide possibilities. Indeed, these two modes are related. Consider merely a few examples of role experimentation tied to climate change and consumption available to many people in the shrinking middle class. We may support the farm-to-table movement in the restaurants we visit; we may participate in the slow food movement; we may frequent stores that offer food based on sustainable processes; we may buy hybrid cars, or, if feasible, join an urban zip-car collective, explaining to friends, family, and neighbors the effects such choices could have on late modern ecology if a majority of the populace did so; we may press our workplace to install solar panels and consider them ourselves if we can afford to do so; we may use writing and media skills to write graffiti, or produce provocative artistic installations, or write for a blog; we may shift a large portion of our retirement accounts into investments that support sustainable energy, withdrawing from aggressive investments that presuppose unsustainable growth or threaten economic collapse; we may bring new issues and visitors to our churches, temples, or mosques to support rethinking interdenominational issues and the contemporary fragility of things; we may found, join, or frequent repair clubs, at which volunteers collect and repair old appliances, furniture, and bikes to cut back on urban waste, to make them available to low income people and to increase the longevity of the items; we may probe and publicize the multimodal tactics by which twenty-four-hour news stations work on the visceral register of viewers, as we explain on blogs how to counter those techniques; we may travel to places where unconscious American assumptions about world entitlement are challenged on a regular basis; we may augment the pattern of films and artistic exhibits we visit to stretch our habitual powers of perception and to challenge some affect-imbued prejudgments embedded in them. A series of intercalated role experiments, often pursued by clusters of participants together.
But don’t such activities merely make the participants “feel better”? Well, many who pursue such experiments do feel good about them, particularly those who accept a tragic image of possibility in which there is no inevitability that either large scale politics, God, or nature will come to our rescue. Also, could such role experiments ever make a sufficient difference on their own? No. These, however, may be the wrong questions to pose. What such experiments can do as they expand is to crack the ice in and around us. First, we may now find ourselves a bit less implicated in the practices and policies that are sources of the problems. Second, the shaky perceptions, feelings, and beliefs that authorized them may thus now become more entrenched as we act upon them. Third, we now find ourselves in more favorable positions to forge connections with larger constituencies pursuing similar experiments. Fourth, we may thus become more inspired to seed and join macropolitical movements that speak to these issues. Fifth, as we now participate in protests, slowdowns, work “according to rule” and more confrontational meetings with corporate managers, church leaders, union officials, university officers, and neighborhood leaders, we may become even more alert to the creeds, institutional pressures and options that propel these constituencies too. They, too, are both enmeshed in a web of roles and more than mere role bearers. Many will maintain an intransigence of viewpoint and insistence of interpretation that we may now be in a better position to counter by words and deeds with those outside or at the edge of the intransigent community.
One advantage of forging links between role experimentations and social movements is that both speak to a time in which the drive to significant change must be pursued by a large, pluralist assemblage rather than by any single class or other core constituency. Such an assemblage must today be primed and loaded by several constituencies in diverse ways at numerous sites. It is necessary here to condense linkages that may unfold. But perhaps movement back and forth between role experiments, social movements, occasional shifts in the priorities of some strategic institutions, and a discernible shift in the contours of electoral politics will promote the emergence of a new, more activist pluralist assemblage. Now, say, a new, surprising event occurs. Some such event or crisis is surely bound to erupt: an urban uprising, a destructive storm, a wild executive overreach, a wide spread interruption in electrical service, a bank melt down, a crisis in oil supply, etc. Perhaps the conjunction of this new event with the preparatory actions that preceded it will prime a large constellation to resist the protofascist responses the intransigent Right will pursue at that very moment. Perhaps the event will now become an occasion to mobilize large scale, intensive support for progressive change on some of the fronts noted at the start of this piece. It is important to remember that the advent of a crisis does not alone determine the response to it. So waiting for the next one to occur is not enough. The Great Depression was followed by the intensification of fascist movements in several countries. Those with strong labor movements and progressive elected leaders proved best at resisting them. The most recent economic melt-down was met in many places by the self-defeating response of austerity, and worse. That is why the quality and depth of the political ethos preceding such events is important.
The use of the “perhaps” in the above formulations suggests that there are no guarantees at any of these junctures. Uncertainties abound. These points, however, also apply to any radical perspective that counsels waiting for the revolution, as it surrounds its critiques of militant reform with an aura of certainty. Today the need is to curtail the aura of certainty of all perspectives on the Left. The examples posed here, of course, are focused on primarily one constituency. But others could be invoked. The larger idea is to draw energy from multiple sources and constituencies. The formula is to move back and forth between the proliferation of role experiments, forging social movements on several fronts, helping to shift the constituency weight of the heavy electoral machinery now in place, and participating in cross-country citizen movements that put pressure on states, corporations, churches, universities and unions from inside and outside simultaneously. Indeed, perhaps the severity of the issues facing us means that we should prepare for the day when we are strong enough in several countries to launch a cross-country general strike.
The proliferating approach adopted here, again, is replete with uncertain connections. That’s politics. The point is to resist falling into the familiar game of optimism vs. pessimism and to minimize that tempting blame-game within the Left, folding more attraction and inspiration into our activities. The point is to appraise the severity of the needs of the day and to attract people to join in different ways and degrees a multifaceted movement to respond to them.
According to the Republican Party, Wall Street, “Morning Joe”, Fox News and every neoliberal financial analyst we live in an Entitlement Society. And it is carrying us into crisis. All the entitlements they want to reform or eliminate are provided by the state. Medicare and Social Security are the biggest villains, with Medicaid hot on their heels. So the critique of the entitlement society goes hand in hand with the demand by neoliberals to divest more and more activities from the state so that the market can handle them in its way. The neoliberal claim, in contrast to both the Keynesian liberals and radical democrats they oppose, is that the more activities folded into the “impersonal” market the more rational the world will be and the less taxes the state will gulp down. You can thus have both tax reduction and deficit reduction according to this fantasy. This story is all too familiar.
But why is the fantasy so persistently pressed even amidst abundant evidence that it is not true? Well, part of the reason is a theme that lurks just below the surface of neoliberal rhetoric. The more that the state safety net is handed over to the private sector the larger the number of constituencies who will be totally dependent on the market; they will be locked into a logic of opposing taxes, identifying with entrepreneurs and corporate elites, resisting market regulation, demonizing the poor, and defunding state activities that cannot be defined as military, crime control, or subsidies for “job creators”. Many moderates and Independents are also tempted by this story, as they struggle to make ends meet and wish they could locate an automatic way to resolve our ills without intervening in a gridlocked political process. Neoliberalism both satisfies market ideologues and plays to many people trying to get through the day without adding close involvement in the political dynamic to their heavy agenda of responsibilities.
The most obvious thing to note about the above “entitlements”, of course, is that each generation pays into these funds and each promises to support the next in turn through its payments. They are funded through a cross-generational social contract that builds trust across the generations. They are not welfare, though Medicaid is an exception. Neoliberals do not like such programs in part because they want all social trust to be funneled into market processes rather than into cross generational links between citizens. They also don’t like the fact that these programs work well, setting dangerous counter examples to their chant that the “cumbersome” state can never be successful and efficient.
Given that background let’s look more deeply into why the word “entitlement” applied to the poor and middle classes is so appealing to the neoliberal Right. Why choose that word as the title of choice? Let’s peel this onion to uncover its rhetorical power. Well, on the first layer there is the idea that too many people have come to feel entitled to benefits which they have not earned within the market place. The implication is that even if people pay into these programs they still have not earned a return on their investment by cashing quarterly dividend checks and profiting from the low tax on investment returns. The mythic idea is that the corporate rich take risks to earn profits while others merely siphon off the largesse of the state. Very few remember to add that the rich can often pass their losses down the line to save themselves, or that the state is formally accountable to the electorate while the market is accountable only to itself.
The word “entitlement”, however, does much more than merely quarantine those who earn their income from jobs and pay into public programs from those who profit from market processes. It also conceals under the rubric of this shaky private/public split how one constituency works both sides of it to become the most entitled constituency of all. I refer here, of course, to the rich and the superrich. They demand and receive special entitlements in the shape of a news media that coddles them, huge subsidies from the state for their enterprises, undue deference by those who seek jobs or philanthropy from them, an amazingly low estate tax, tax laws that allow them to pay a lower percentage of their incomes than their employees, and special access to public officials to ensure that their activities are not closely regulated in the public interest. Indeed, as Paul Krugman details in a recent NYT column entitled “Egos and Immortality” this class feels entitled to curtail any criticism of its position, resources and excessiveness. They dismiss it as “class envy” when such charges are brought from any quarter. They confuse envy with indignation. Wall streeters, he says, “are spoiled brats with immense power and wealth at their disposal.” And they are using that wealth to “buy immunity from criticism.” Let’s say, they feel entitled to put us at risk and to squash our attempts to hold them accountable for doing so.
We do face an entitlement crisis, then. But it is not the one identified by Fox News and the Neoliberal Right. It is the one concealed by the nomenclature and attacks by the Right. What’s more, as the recent economic meltdown in 2008 demonstrated, these entitlements are not only unjust, they are extremely dangerous. A class entitlement to escape regulation while putting at risk a whole society, and indeed world, is nothing to sneeze at. And as we have seen most recently, even if a world wide depression is avoided after such a meltdown, its costs and sacrifices gradually trickle down the social ladder until they, too, reach those at the middle and bottom layers of society. So, the rich and the superrich feel entitled to monopolize the largesse when growth occurs and to pass down the costs of their adventurism when the bottom falls out. That is a hell of a lot of entitlement. That is precisely why so many are so eager to publicize the false version of “the entitlement society” today, within state legislatures controlled by the Republican Party, through Superpacs allowed by the gang of five neoliberals on the Supreme Court, and on the 24 hour News Media. Reduce the deficit, they chant, by curtailing programs supporting the middle and poor classes. Quietly accept the double-trickle down process. But don’t you dare touch the entitlements of the rich that put everyone else at risk.
The real entitlement crisis also puts democracy at risk, as Steven Johnston has shown in a recent post on TCC. It would take action on numerous fronts to expose, shame and tame the real entitlement class. Media exposes, blog assaults, public protests, electoral victories, teach-ins, new Supreme Court appointees to replace those now governed by neoliberal ideology—all these and more would be needed. The goal would be to galvanize the young and minorities of numerous sorts to take back this culture from the entitlement class.
The stakes are high. Many leaders of the entitlement class believe that we are ordained to drink this socially toxic cocktail to protect their largesse, subsidies, social risk taking, privileges and expectations of deference. And too many outside the elite who aspire to the same entitlements identify too strongly with them. Some right wing Christians, for instance, celebrate such entitlements, now acting as if God himself has invested economic markets with divine dispensation. And many in the business elite actively support state lotteries, partly to create new business opportunities and also perhaps to build up false hope among the down and out who cannot get good jobs or pay accountants to minimize their taxes. It is worth noting that evangelists who once opposed gambling as much as they did sex out of marriage have more or less dropped their concern about the first activity.
When the next meltdown occurs many identifying with the entitlement class will be tempted to impose a neofascist response upon those who protest against its irrational leadership and largesse. For, you see, those who are most intensely and totally committed to such actual or aspirational entitlements are apt to go to any lengths to preserve and protect them. You already see signs of this intensity in laws to disenfranchise poor voters, in the eagerness with which pseudo-doubts about Obama’s American birth and Christian faith are embraced, in the way Romney’s base welcomes the bald lies fueling his campaign, in the secrecy by which the corporate right funds Superpacs to weaken unions and support voter suppression, in the ugly primary campaigns by Bachmann, Gingrich, and Santorum, in the racially fueled intensity of the gun lobby, and in the disconnect between the Supreme Court’s protection of corporate hegemony in the name of freedom and its treatment of regular citizens suspected of crime or its tolerance of voter disenfranchisement. This is not a Supreme Court that “strictly” interprets the Constitution. It is one that folds a neoliberal, corporate ideology into its interpretation of key statements in the Constitution.
Where will President Romney, if and when elected, turn as such right wing drives intensify? I recall that a lot of people said during the 2000 election that George W. Bush was a moderate, compassionate Republican. Don’t worry too much if he is elected, they said. And, besides, a Democratic defeat will force the party to become more progressive. They were correct that the democratic Left needed to become much more active in the micropolitics of churches, schools, families, unions, localities, protests, consumption choices, and cross-state citizen movements. But two horrible, unfunded wars later it turned out that they could not have been more mistaken about the wisdom of handing an election over to the right wing.
Now we hear that Romney, too, is a moderate playing to an extremist base to win an election. Or, sometimes we hear that he is a hollow, flip flopper who is not too dangerous for that very reason. I believe the latter is true, but this truth makes him an extremely dangerous man. Hollow men, if you scratch them, turn out to be loaded with existential resentment. They resent their own hollowness, and they seek others upon whom to vent that resentment. The young Romney at Cranbrook Boarding School could, for instance, recruit a gang to hold down a teen age boy and cut off his blonde locks, just because that boy’s distinctiveness assaulted Romney’s fragile sense of normality. Don’t believe his bullshit story that nobody in his generation was alert to the issue of sexuality. I am older and more honest than Romney, and I grew up in southern Michigan too. I once even voted for his daddy for Governor because he opposed the Vietnam War before Democratic officials were prepared to do so. The issue of sexuality was a regular topic of nervous, ill-informed and defensive conversation in locker rooms. And yet nobody I knew took the sort of action Mitt Romney adopted.
When the going gets tough for them powerful, hollow men revert to repression. And this hollow man already has “a base” urging him on, one that could soon control both houses of Congress. If you seek to understand the psychology of a President Romney watch The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci. That hollow man first joined the fascists in Italy to protect the fragility of his identity and then attacked the fascists as traitors as soon as the Allied victory over Mussolini was complete. He was not merely a flip-flop artist. He was a hollow man. The real entitlement crisis threatens democracy and economic stability together.
The film, Melancholia, presents an attractive, young couple driving down a narrow, twisting, country path in a white, stretch limousine. Sunlight bathes a muddy roadway lined by bushes. The trip seems interminable to the viewer: that curve is too sharp, this zone is too muddy, those bushes are overgrown. Frustration and joy mingle in this scene, as the viewer oscillates between soaking in the beauty of that couple in a delicious setting and wondering when the stretch limo will reach a destination as yet unrevealed. We don’t know where they’ve been or where they are going, but we do smell trouble on the horizon.
Melancholia tracks beauty and denial, intentions and frustrations, glowing surfaces and opaque depths. . The couple turns out to be two hours late for their own wedding celebration at a sumptuous, well appointed mansion. She is received by friends and relatives as if her lateness and casualness about it are par for the course. The young woman is afflicted with melancholia. Each intention she forms is countered by an opposing tendency. She cannot act. Or, at least her planned actions are countered by enervation, and the impulsive acts she takes repeatedly hurt those around her.
Two melancholias track each other in this film: her affliction and a planet called Melancholia. Previously hidden by the sun, this huge planet now circles ominously around the smaller earth, getting closer with each rotation. In one uncanny scene, after the wedding party has unraveled, two moons appear in the night sky, presenting a scene with two vanishing points instead of one. Up to this point people have reacted to the implacable event on the way with denial and forgetfulness. As the couple did in stretching out that drive. As these two moons bathe the world they bring the abstract prospect of the planet’s pulverization down to earth. How do you prepare for the end of the world? What about those children who have just begun to form skills, ambitions and hopes? It is enough to make a therapist, a priest, or a philosopher stutter.
Yes, death is terrible. Your mother’s death, for instance, filled you with grief. A life lived in work, commitment and turmoil, brought to sudden termination. Gradually, you also come to terms with how several memories have lost some solidity with that death. You and she shared, say, a secret that those childhood humor-fests that got you into trouble with teachers were subtended by a personality too feminine and sensitive to be acknowledged in the rough and tumble of boyhood life. No one shares that secret now. Unspoken features of her life, expressed in her demeanor, have become sealed too. Suppose something wonderful happens to you. The impulse to share it is countered by a sudden recollection that is too late to do so. The losses of death return. Death teaches those left how deep memory runs and how fragile its depths are.
A massacre, a holocaust, a massive bombing. These are even more implacable. They break the bond of trust in the world that had tacitly bound survivors to it. These shocks and losses are so horrifying that some survivors never heal. Healing may be felt as disloyalty to those who were slaughtered through an unspeakable breach of trust. Unremitting despair or revenge settles into life. How could the world encompass such acts of mindless violence?
Melancholia has yet different fish to fry. Not death. Not a holocaust. But an impersonal collision between two planets, at least one of which houses adult human beings, ants, children, hippos, crocodiles, rainforests, films, the internet, TV melodramas, wedding parties, semi-sovereign states, steamy love affairs, rich intellectual traditions, academic quarrels, military adventures, holocausts, an ocean conveyor belt, Picasso, species’ evolution, volatile weather systems, multiple gods, and basketball. No more games. No new loves, long slow runs, intellectual traditions. No future horizon. No artistic contribution to sensitivity, enriching feeling and perception. No one will remember anything after this collision. How do you respond to that?
Some devotees to monotheism conclude that an omnipotent, benevolent God makes such an event impossible. Other devotees incline close to the theme of Melancholia before veering off radically. They envisage Armageddon, in which a few are lifted to heaven and billions of nonbelievers are punished with the infinite hell of sulfur and fire. Is there, circulating somewhere in that punitive story, an initial identification with humanity as such? Perhaps. Otherwise the demand to punish so many would not have to be connected to the image of such a vengeful God. When I read The Book of Revelation, as I do regularly in an undergrad class, I sense an initial identification with the human estate that is overridden by a desire to take revenge against a large slice of humanity for features of the human condition that exceed our control. The brilliance of Melancholia is that it peels away the issues of responsibility and existential revenge to allow the experience of attachment to soak into our pores.
Those who project neither an omnipotent nor a punitive God into being, sometimes focus on our attachments to the human estate as such. They may be theists or nontheists. Such a sense usually hums in the background of everyday life, crystallized periodically through artistic work and existential threats. Melancholia dramatizes a sense, already woven into life, that humanity matters to us immensely. It matters in part through connections we have to other humans, past and future, and in part through our affinities to nonhuman beings and processes of indefinite variety. We do not face the probable prospect of a collision between planets in which everything is pulverized, though the possibility of an asteroid shower or huge volcano is nothing to sneeze at. We do face a variety of ecological and military dangers that, if enacted, could radically transform human life on the face of the earth. We both sense these dangers and feel pressure to divert attention from them.
Much of life is organized around daily routines and struggles that distract attention from larger attachments. Such routines are not to be denigrated; they form part of the fabric of life. Even denial and deferral harbor some degree of rationality, since total immersion in the dangers of the future leads to a neglect of daily duties and needs. Still, such routines can be re-enforced too much, to divert attention from dangers that no individual, family, locality, or state can resolve alone. The world, today, is replete with ideologies that ridicule folding a sense of the fragility of things into parochial interests, identifications, and practices of responsibility. Watch Fox News more often to see how this ridicule works.
As abundantly clear, I am a critic of what might be called, in honor of Charles Taylor, “exclusive humanism”. To him, that is the dangerous idea that humanity is sufficient to itself, without God. As I rework the theme, exclusive humanism expresses the idea that humanity is unique, either in itself or in its unique relation to God. Only we matter, because only we embody reason, or language, or consciousness, or reflexivity, or God, or a long time horizon. But we are not unique; we are merely distinctive. Most things about us commonly treated as unique are either profoundly contestable (e.g., the ideas of God and a naturalistic universe) or shared to varying degrees with other beings and things. Bacteria, for instance, pursue simple desires and ends, though ours are more reflexive. Moreover, we could not be human in the absence of innumerable nonhuman entities within and outside our bodies, including bacteria and viruses. Many become infused into our neurons and viscera helping to constitute their performances. Everywhere you turn such connections abound. To be attached to humanity is to be attached to a variety of other things.
Exclusive humanism is a dangerous conceit. Seeing that, we feel how the call to stretch our awareness, sensitivities and attachments by artistic means is acute. Transcendental arguments that purport to set strict, universal limits to human understanding and sensibility must be resisted in order to stretch and revise that species provincialism in which the Euro-American world has been stuck for so long.
However, to act as if there is no species priority falsifies much of experience and pulls attention away from those artistic explorations, role experimentations and political militance that deepen the attachment to the human estate as they also broaden our appreciation of debts, affinities, dependencies and symbiotic relations with other things. So, the terms “anti-humanism” and “post-humanism” leave me cold, too. They do challenge the excesses of classical humanism—a good thing. But they too readily leave the impression of giving no ethical priority to the human. E coli is a bacteria to defeat. Climate change is something to reverse by radical action if possible, for us and the processes to which we are connected.
The problem is that neither theistic nor nontheistic sources of attachment to the future of the human estate have proven to suffice. These connections must be dramatized and cultivated more actively, as we seek new ways to diminish the priorities constituencies give to the short over the long term and to close over broad identifications. It is unwise to eliminate the former tendencies because a parent must give some priority to its children, a teacher to its students, a consumer to its needs. But many forces conspire today to render short term and close identifications too exclusive. Our practices of production, consumption, investment, teaching, and spirituality engender such closures. And the prevailing ideologies of today, led by neoliberalism, exacerbate those very tendencies. We must expose the simplicities, dangers, and conceits of these ideologies, as we work to stretch our perceptions, experiment upon role expectations invested in us, and up the ante of political militance. I continue to think that it is wise to set a simultaneous general strike in several countries as a beacon to pursue over the next few years.
The facts are well known. A recent ad by the Romney campaign ran a video allowing viewers to watch and hear the very words of Barack Obama: “If we keep talking about the economy we’re going to lose.” That quote closed a series of statements attributed to the President. But the quote was undated and, well, incomplete. It turned out that it had been delivered by Obama during the 2008 campaign. It read in full “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘if we keep talking about the economy we are going to lose.’”
Outraged Democrats protested the ad. “Neutral” commentators said it was “egregiously misleading” and a sign that the campaign in general was going to be rough. Romney refused to apologize. He said “what is good for the goose is good for the gander”--a quote that hovers somewhere between almost saying that he could identify similar misrepresentations from Obama and expressing identification with a base that is eager to have him run such lying attack ads. A senior advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, announced that the ensuing controversy worked to the advantage of Romney because it called people’s attention to the economy: “...their reaction was quite hysterical,” he said, “But that was the point.”
The original ad was not simply an instance of misrepresentation; it was a Big Lie. A Big Lie is a representation that not only attributes to the opponent things he did not say but joyously reverses what was actually said to express loyalty to its base and disdain for the opponent. A Big Lie is joyous not simply because it misleads. It is so because it speaks to a portion of its base who welcome and demand such misrepresentations even if they are exposed as misrepresentations. A Big Lie, then, is a BIG lie, a lie expressing a perverse symbiosis between leaders and audience that allows its effects to reverberate even after it has been exposed. Thus correction of a Big Lie is insufficient to counter it. We now have a rather long record of Obama being called a Muslim, a socialist, and a Kenyan who is not an American citizen; these widely circulated charges express the characteristics of the Big Lie. And we have a record of followers of Palin and Bachmann introducing editorial changes into Wikipedia entries to alter the record so their gaffes have the look of historical accuracy. Perhaps we should think a bit more about how a Big Lie works.
A Big Lie works because the most intense devotees who receive it are eager to have it circulate widely even if and when they know at one level that the evidence points in the other direction. The repeated charge that Obama stimulus package–-which in fact was far too small--did not decrease the unemployment rate that would otherwise have arisen possesses some of these characteristics.
Adolph Hitler introduced the phrase into popularity. He did so in a vintage manner. He attributed it to Jews and the Marxists who, he said, blamed German generals for the loss of WWI instead of casting blame upon “betrayers of the fatherland”. He then said in Mein Kampf:
All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily...”
Hitler only got it partly right. He universalized a tendency that varies significantly from place to place and time to time. And, at least in this statement, he does not emphasize enough how a big lie requires a constituency already primed to receive it at one level even when at another level they know it is a lie. A Big Lie speaks to multiple levels of self and culture, calling up a visceral will to believe among resentful constituencies that overwhelms their awareness at a more refined level that the evidence is at odds with that will. Even if the factual correction is admitted, a residue of distrust and vilification of the candidate is retained.
A Big Lie today contains a yet more complex, layered message. Yes, it expresses a campaign to increase intensity of support among a core constituency eager to vilify opponents. But it simultaneously amplifies a vague sense already there among inattentive moderates that politics itself has become dysfunctional. This asymmetrical combination endows the Big Lie with its contemporary power. Thus it was not surprising when the former Chair of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, in a recent edition of “Hardball”, refused to condemn the Romney ad. Instead, he treated it--if vaguely and without examples--as a generic sign that the campaign was intensifying on both sides. Politics is rough, Michael Steele says, so this sort of thing is to be expected from all parties as the campaigns proceed.
Steele’s response may seem off base and banal at first hearing. But it actually performs asymmetrical functions for two different constituencies: it refuses to take back what their most ardent followers want to hear and it justifies Romney’s Big Lie to others by equating it with all statements that exaggerate or abstract from context. It thus retains the base while also speaking to inattentive moderates and “independents” who they need to conclude that politics in general is and must be dysfunctional. A dysfunctional politics, after all, encourages the inattentive to identify with the fantasy of unregulated markets pried free from a dysfunctional state. The Republican use of filibusters works in a similar way. They want people to forget (or never notice) that they are the ones who have used this tactic more than anyone else in American history, and they want to help them remember that there is a stalemate in Congress. The inattentive who respond to the second part of that message thus vindicate themselves in remaining inattentive. Such an effect increases the power of the right edge of the Republican base, a base that is primed already to respond to messages of aspirational fascism.
There is an element of truth in what Steele says. That is part of its power. Both sides do misrepresent and simplify too often. That needs attention whenever it occurs. But to draw every instance of misrepresentation under the same umbrella is to recapitulate the Big Lie. Again, it justifies that mode of politics to a receptive base as it encourages moderates to either withdraw from politics or to internalize lies they are already tempted to believe.
The politics of the Big Lie becomes viable in a society in which one segment of the populace welcomes it, another attributes it to politics in general to avoid having to think about what it portends, and a third fails to explore how to engage a world in which factual correction is insufficient to contemporary politics.
We form part of the third constituency. We have to learn how to challenge Big Lies as we remember how factual correction is pertinent but insufficient to the challenge. Correction is insufficient because there is never a vacuum on the infrasensible register of politics. We thus have to participate ourselves on that register without allowing our participation to contribute to the Big Lie. Perhaps John Stewart provides an example of how to proceed as he enacts image laden messages with a complex character. His messages expose lies; they suggest alternatives; and they disclose by parody how his own messages themselves also work on the infrasensible register of politics.
I have tried to think about the indispensability, complexity and dangers of such a politics in “Experience and Experiment” and in some postings on this blog. John Protevi also engages this issue. In a world of 24 hour cable news and a society riven by the politics of ressentiment more reflective intervention is needed on this territory by those who seek to preserve the life as well as the form of democracy.
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