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Opposites in History

A recurring phenomenon in history is that certain key figures represent a merging of opposite tendencies.  One early figure of this nature is Brasidas, the Spartan officer lauded by Thucydides in his history The Peloponnesian War.  Unlike the most of the terse-speaking Spartans, he was a gifted orator much like his enemies the Athenians.  He died in an attack on Amphipolis  in which he led by making an example of bravery and was one of the few Spartan casualties, though he prefaced the attack with a claim that he would conduct himself in action following the advice he gave to his comrades.  But earlier, he also led covert operations and engaged in deception of cities the Spartans wished to conquer or ally with. Thucydides was actually the Athenian general who led excursions against Brasidas, but he nonetheless praised Brasidas more than almost everyone else in his entire history of the war.  Characterized by his “charm”, that really meant Brasidas excelled at the qualities that his enemies prized, namely oratory.  He also acted quickly with bold, decisive and dramatic surprise attacks.  This quick action was not common among Spartans more known for endless deliberation and caution.  He was an example of one side, the Spartans, succeeding on the terms of the opponent, the Athenians.

John Muir, with the help of many others, remained the primary catalyst for the creation of National Parks in the United States.  He was undoubtedly a pantheist, and perhaps an atheist (as much as would be accepted at the time in his cultural setting).  But reading some of his writings, the overarching tendency is to rely on religious and moral argument.  He especially leans on the tone of fundamentalist christian writing.  Yet his advocacy pointed to a return to a simple appreciation of nature.  This resembled the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the critic of civil society.  In this he merged opposite tendencies.  He used the language of the socially conservative religious status quo to advance a position that was ultimately a radical critique of the foundations of the economic system operating in his society.

Of course, history provides plenty of counter examples.  But it is worth pausing on some of the ways opposites do merge from time to time with spectacular effect.

The Flaw(s) of Libertarianism

Libertarianism is a flawed doctrine, from the viewpoint of general public well-being.  At least some of its support comes from the partial awareness of a very real phenomenon:  there are spheres of power, and government is one of them.  Government power can act as a limit and constraint on the power and actions of individuals, business, etc.  Libertarians are usually either very naive or very disingenuous in focusing on how government can constrain individuals (usually framed as curtailing their liberties and freedom), while ignoring the way that other forms of power, such as that arising from business, can also constrain individuals (and government, etc., for that matter).  The result is that a few intelligent but nefarious operatives use these doctrines to try to build support for the concentration of power in the hands of business/finance/etc., bringing along a rabble of “useful idiots” who want individual freedoms but lack an understanding of the full range of constraints on individual freedoms (not to mention that some of the particular individual freedoms that come up again and again, like a right to be a bigot, carry little moral authority on their own).  This critique of libertarianism arises from something like a hybrid of the sociological analysis that people like G. William Domhoff advance (the class-domination theory of power) and the economic analysis that people like Simon Patten advanced, which said reducing one monopoly merely frees resources to be captured by another (economic rent capture).  It also draws on the field theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Loïc Wacquant has applied that approach to neoliberalism in a similar fashion).  But a similar critique has been astutely summed up by Corey Robin, who has written that what most libertarians want is not feedoms and liberties, but rather the maintenance of a particular social hierarchy–with particular men (always men) at the top of some node within it, of course.  Robin notes that these people are reactionaries because they seek to suppress emancipatory movements from below (Wacquant goes further to say neoliberalism is a revolution from above).  This is what distinguishes them from anarchists.  But the most superficially irksome flaw in the discussion of libertarianism in today’s context is not the political choice of inequality, per se (that topic is omitted entirely from mainstream discourse), but rather the hypocrisy that lies in obscuring that political choice behind rhetoric that speaks of liberty and freedom without explicitly admitting that it is advocacy of freedom and liberty for some at the expense of others.  This dissipates any credibility that libertarian advocates might otherwise have, but also explains their apparent inconsistencies and selective, limited application of doctrines that are usually stated as if universal.  It is the false appeal to universal principles, while always limiting their application to the maintenance of particularized hierarchies (making property ownership the only fundamental issue), that libertarians use to feign the support of a popular majority with policies that are plainly only in the interests of a minority.  It is a kind of political arbitrage, making a play against being called out for the underlying lies by the media or simply an uninformed public realizing the scam on their own.  For that reason, a captive and submissive media is essential for these flawed policies to have any chance in the public sphere.  Of course, eliminating hypocrisy does not prove or disprove libertarian theory.  However, doing so is a first step in debating its real merits, if any, as a political program.

Gareth Porter – Robert S. McNamara and the Real Tonkin Gulf Deception

Link to an article by investigative historian Gareth Porter:

“Robert S. McNamara and the Real Tonkin Gulf Deception: Pushing LBJ Into War”

It is interesting to consider Porter’s perspectives on this in light of the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the “bureaucratic field”.  That is, Porter does not view the “state” as a monolithic entity, but a field established by and through its agents (and groups of agents) struggling amongst each other for authority.

Lexus Drivers

Something I realized long ago is that when walking or riding my bike around town, there is a very strong correlation between drivers who carelessly–or knowingly–endanger my life through reckless driving and those driving luxury vehicles like Lexus and BMW luxury sedans and fancy sport utility vehicles.  That is not to say that those are the only reckless drivers on the road.  I also noticed a strong correlation between aggressively reckless driving and driving extremely low-cost dilapidated cars or having carloads of many young men in any type of vehicle.  What always seems to stand out the most, though, were the luxury cars that were routinely driven in a way that put my life in danger only to save a fraction of a second travel time for the driver.  It gave the impression that my life was not worth the seconds saved by the driver.

As it turns out, Paul Piff, a social psychology researcher at the University of California Berkeley, has recently studied this very issue.  Not surprisingly, his data backs up what was already quite clear.  The affluent tend to have a feeling of entitlement over others.  They do feel that they are better and more worthy than others, particularly when driving.

“The Age of Entitlement: How Wealth Breeds Narcissism”

“The Money-Empathy Gap: New Research Suggests That More Money Makes People Act Less Human. Or at Least Less Humane.”

“Does Money Make You Mean”

The connection here is pretty clear if you view “money” as a unit of measure of “power” (arising from a milieu of credit and moral debts), and then consider the age-old saying often attributed to Lord Acton, “power corrupts.”  That ties this, by only an slight degree of separation, to psychology research like Philip Zimbardo’s “Standford Prison Experiement” (see also Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil).

There is also the question of so-called “Lexus lanes” that allow drivers to pay a premium for access to special, uncongested traffic lanes.  These more or less reinforce feelings of entitlement.  But that’s also a whole other issue.

It is good to see research like this being done.  It furthers efforts like The Spirit Level that show how inequality produces worse outcomes for everyone.

Loïc Wacquant – Crafting the Neoliberal State

Link to an article on the substitution of prisons for social welfare programs in the USA by Loïc Wacquant, author of Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009), which came out around the same time as Michelle Alexander’s similar (but more well-known) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010).

“Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity”

On “The Appearance of Impropriety”

Many organizations stress the supposed importance of reducing or eliminating entirely the “appearance of impropriety”.  These policies should be viewed for what they really are:  attempts to reduce transparency, encourage misinformation, and concentrate power.  Shouldn’t the real goal be to reduce or eliminate actual impropriety?  And should an organization that is engaged in actual impropriety not visibly reflect that actual impropriety to the public?  This latter question gets to the heart of the matter.  These “appearance of impropriety” policies are all about manipulating public confidences to maintain power within a small group, to the exclusion of others.  Organizational leaders attempt to control the flow of information.  They only reveal to the outside world selected facts.  Any that tend to portray the organization as corrupt, inept, malicious, etc. are suppressed, as best as possible.  The public is thereby cajoled and misled to form an opinion of the organization, and of individuals within it, that is not based on all available facts, but rather only those that portray the organization in a positive light.  This ideological “filtering” is a form of coercion, albeit one that does not rely directly on the use of physical force.  Robert Lee Hale noted this long ago.  For that matter, so did Leo Tolstoy in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894).  They argued against a very old concept though.  Plato’s endorsement in The Republic (380 BC) of a “noble lie” used by elites to maintain social harmony within a system of their design is one of the earliest recorded examples.  The question of the “appearance of impropriety” comes up extensively when dealing with the lawyers and the judiciary (see the Judge Kopf affair), but also with other governmental branches, businesses, churches, journalistic publications, or any other organization.  These sorts of policies, at worst, protect the social status of the relevant organization–especially the leaders of those organizations–while suppressing actual impropriety involving particular individuals.  Quite hypocritically, many calls for reducing of the appearance of impropriety simultaneously call for increased transparency, without noting that these are contradictory objectives in the end, when viewed from the standpoint of public welfare rather than from a self-interested viewpoint of the organization (and its leaders) involved.  With these ideas in mind, it is actually quite brazen that organizations publish any guidelines seeking to limit the “appearance of impropriety”.  Such rules speak in condescending, anti-democratic tones.  They imply that the public cannot properly assess facts. Nonsense.