normblog

Thinking and tweeting on the same day

I do wish those hostile to the practice of tweeting would refrain from maligning others of us who make some time for it. Here is the opinion of Lysiane Gagnon, a columnist for the Globe and Mail:

This need to tweet all the time and everywhere has become a compulsion.

The mere idea of being reduced to 140 characters when you could write so much more on e-mail is bizarre - but, of course, this doesn't have to do with a love of writing or even with a need to communicate. What it reveals is a pathological incapacity to be alone with our thoughts for more than a few minutes.

Gimme a break already, Lysiane. A bit less of the 'pathological'. I do assure you that I spend much more than a few minutes - and daily - with my thoughts.

The gains and the fears of Afghan women

In a column that starts by emphasizing Hillary Clinton's commitment, on behalf of the US, to protecting the gains made by Afghan women in the last decade, but wondering if that pledge will be honoured, Trudy Rubin summarizes some of those gains. It may not be regarded as the most topical of subjects right now, but... anyway - Rubin writes:

As Clinton noted, in 2001, life expectancy for women in Afghanistan was just 44 years. Now it is 62 years. In the Taliban era, almost no girls went to school, but today 3 million do, making up almost 40 percent of primary-school enrollments. In the past decade, nearly 120,000 Afghan girls have graduated from high school, and 15,000 are enrolled in universities.

There's no doubt that the life of women and girls in rural areas and even in cities is still seriously restricted in accordance with local custom. And many girls no longer attend school in areas where the Taliban have returned.

But, having visited Afghanistan in 1999, when it was under Taliban rule, I can assure you that women's progress since then has been substantial. On that trip, I spoke with little girls who were attending secret schools at great risk. I interviewed widows who could not get medical care because no women could venture outdoors without a male relative age 16 or older. I talked to educated women who were virtually imprisoned because they could not go outside or work.

Today, one-fourth of government posts and 28 percent of parliamentary seats are held by women. Afghan women and girls make up 24 percent of doctors and medical workers.

Yet, in talking with women in Kabul by phone or during visits, I have heard deep fear that they will be sold out by their government, and by the United States, in talks with the Taliban. Despite Clinton's assurances, they do fear the old days will return.

The nine women members of the 70-member Afghan High Peace Council, which is charged with seeking reconciliation with the Taliban, are left out of major discussions. (Indeed, the council itself has been sidelined since its head, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was assassinated last year.)

U.S. diplomats have been holding secret talks with the Taliban to try to get negotiations going in the Gulf state of Qatar. But Afghan women have no input to those discussions; they can only wait and wonder whether U.S. negotiators would, or could, ensure their rights.

You can read the rest here.

Only - the lonely

Chris has responded to me on the matter of whether or not 'the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie'. I'm afraid his response is based on failing to grasp - or is it to accept? - the logic of the 'but' in that claim. Taken literally the quoted words from the Communist Manifesto encourage people to think that this is all the modern state is: a committee with the single purpose of managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. Here's the German version of the sentence:

Die moderne Staatsgewalt ist nur ein Ausschuß, der die gemeinschaftlichen Geschäfte der ganzen Bourgeoisklasse verwaltet.

And the key word is 'nur', meaning 'only' or 'merely' or 'simply'. Now, it could well be that the claim by Marx and Engels is rhetorically overstated, and that the point it exaggerates - as I allowed in my two previous posts on this issue - is that the modern state is mainly, or at least importantly, about the management of bourgeois interests. But if that is so, then the way to defend the truth of the Communist Manifesto sentence, if that is what one wants to do, is to uphold what one takes to be its unexaggerated meaning and to distinguish this from the literal and totalizing claim.

This, however, is not Chris's choice. He asks us to believe that the assertion that the modern state is but - i.e. only, or simply, or merely, or no more than - a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie - will be true provided that the aforesaid state does nothing which is incompatible with that purpose.

His suggestion defies every canon of straightforward usage. If I were to say that Miguel MacTeague is but a decision centre for calculating how to keep himself alive, my statement will be false in the case that Miguel is also a husband, father and sibling to various people and sometimes makes decisions with other purposes in mind. It will be false even if these other purposes do not jeopardize Miguel's life; for the other purposes will demonstrate that Miguel is more than a decision centre governed by just the one aim. If you say that this small room in your house is only - or merely or no more than - a place for storing books, that will be false if you also keep medicines and elastic bands in the same room and sometimes sit there and read; even though it is true that you do keep lots of books there. If Deirdre says that hospitals in this country are devoted simply to looking after the very rich, that's false if the hospitals also look after the poor as well as the rich, and some people in between - true even in the case that the needs of the rich get priority.

To go through all this is tedious, but it is made necessary by Chris's style of riposte, which is to take any apparently other function of the modern democratic state than managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie and to say that, well, this is in the interests of the bourgeoise too. But the fact, when it is one, that the state does this too, doesn't mean it doesn't do the other thing. And since, on Chris's own account, it does do the other thing, it is not reducible to its bourgeois-management function.

Chris pauses to ask whether his argument doesn't make the Marxian 'but a committee' claim unfalsifiable, and quickly dismisses his own question by asserting that it doesn't. I'm not so sure. According to him, so long as the state continues to preside over a capitalist economy and society without attacking capitalist interests the Marxian claim remains both intact and falsifiable in principle. But how does this work? If a rightwing union-busting, welfare-eroding government openly assaults the living standards of working people, that presumably is an attempt, wise or otherwise, to manage the common affairs of the bourgeoisie by increasing capitalist opportunities for profit. If a reforming social-democratic government introduces labour legislation, a generous minimum wage, progressive welfare measures, that also is managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, since a happier and healthier labour force will make capitalist firms function better. Savage cuts in the education budget and generous increases alike will suit bourgeois interests, the former saving money from the taxes of the rich, the latter contributing to the quality of the human resource pool in the long run. And so on.

But another, and more compelling, way of looking at the same thing is that political policies which better serve the needs of working people, whatever they do for the 'whole bourgeoisie', are evidence that modern democratic states have functions wider than managing the affairs of that (ruling) class. Chris's failure to recognize how the simple logic of 'both-and' is crucially different from the logic of 'but a committee etc' comes out in his various examples, of which I will cite just one:

Capitalists want their lives and property to be protected. The easiest way to do this is for everyone's basic rights to be so protected, whether they have property or not.

Whether this is in fact the easiest way or not I leave aside; but to assert of a polity in which the fundamental rights of all human beings are by and large protected that it remains only - nothing more than - a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie is not only a violation of simple logic; it bespeaks a serious misjudgement concerning one of the things that matters most of all in this anguished world.

A final observation. Chris's reply to me focuses on a matter I raised as an example. He bypasses what was the starting point of my post, which was to indicate the folly of an approach to the world in which Marx is still said to be, simplistically, 'right'. Whether or not his (Chris's) silence on this point represents an acknowledgement that he accepts it, I do not know. But his poor attempt to persuade people that 'only x' means roughly the same as 'not directly contrary to x' is yet one more proof that defending the view of Marx - or anybody - as more right than the evidence will support is not a fruitful enterprise.

Don't vote for Livingstone

Please read Jonathan Freedland's brilliant piece on this man. I don't even offer a pull-quote; just read it in full. My only quibble is that the news about Livingstone was already bad enough four years ago.

And Ed Miliband could also do with pondering what Jonathan says. Livingstone may or may not have a prejudiced bone in his body, but it's his mind and his words that the leader of the Labour Party ought to be concerned about. (Thanks: L.)

Occupy the playpen

I have read a fair amount about the achievements of the Occupy movement and I haven't disagreed with all of it. That, for example, Occupy succeeded in articulating discontents which were widespread concerning the rank inequalities of contemporary capitalism, and that it somewhat shifted the terms of mainstream political debate, are two points with something going for them. But I see from reading Simon Critchley in today's Guardian that I have vastly underestimated the extent of Occupy's triumph.

How so? The background against which we must assess it, according to Critchley, is one in which '[w]hat we call democracy has become a sham'. Explaining why, he continues:

Power has evaporated into the supra-national spaces of finance, trade and information platforms, but also the spaces of drug trafficking, human trafficking and immigration - the many boats that cross the Mediterranean and other seas.

But the space of politics has remained the same as it has for centuries, localised in the nation state with its prosaic variations of representative, liberal democracy. Politics still feels local – we might feel British or Greek or whatever – but it isn't. Normal state politics simply serves the interests of supra-national power. Sovereignty has been outsourced.

What this means is that beliefs to the effect that citizens exercise power and can change things through voting, through the representatives they elect, and that governments have effective power, are wrong.

In this context, the Occupy movement was a reassertion of democracy - but direct democracy:

If the nation state or the supra-national sphere is not a location for politics, then the task is to create a location. This is the logic of occupation. The Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park taught us that much.

I'm trying now to come to a remeasurement of the achievements of the Occupy movement. By recreating (direct) democracy in place of the moribund representative kind, Occupy has... ummm... how should this go?... taken back power from where it had been outsourced, from those supra-national spaces and... reasserted popular sov...

Hang on, though. It did this, did it, even though most of the Occupy sites have now been cleared or faded away, and governance in every major country of the world goes on as before? What have I missed? What I've missed, evidently, is that Critchley wasn't talking about actual results already chalked up, achievements concluded. He was merely gesturing towards potentialities in view - his view and that of a lot of others, no doubt. Neverthless, this is stuff worthy of the political playpen. If he wants to talk about direct democracy as either a substitute for or addition to national representative democracy, he needs to ponder some difficult questions.

What should be the sites for any effective longterm direct democracy? A bunch of people, self-selected, just showing up at Wall Street, St Paul's or wherever is not a serious answer. So: workplaces, neighbourhoods, what? Then, how to articulate the multiple sites together, so that they function as a unified democratic system? And how maintain the directness of the democratic mode when not everyone is able to sit around in tents, or sit around period, because people have work to do, or jobs to find, family commitments, other obligations, and they may even feel that they deserve some time to relax and not want to be at long and frequent meetings? These are genuine organizational problems for anyone thinking seriously about democratic politics. There is a literature, from Weber and Michels onwards; there is experience of democratic structures becoming bureaucratized. This doesn't mean one gives up on democracy. But it does mean that mature people shouldn't peddle fairy tales.

What methods of decision-making? Critchley refers blandly to consensus. But decision by consensus gives minorities and even single individuals a veto power, and it's not obvious why this is preferable to majority voting. Another question. Should there not be a national parliamentary-representative assembly (even if supplemented by organs and practices of more localized and/or directly democratic rule) and if not why not? There are questions of national import and national relevance. And so on.

Critchley's piece ends with a beautiful illustration of how the proponent of direct democracy in the clouds, so to put it, is in touch with the popular mood:

Where to occupy next? It is not for old men like me to offer advice, but a massive occupation of Olympic sites in London in order to stop the dreadful, sad jingoism of the whole tiresome spectacle would be nice.

Good luck with that one, comrade! And I speak as someone with very little interest in the Olympics but with a hunch that Occupying to wreck them, were it to happen, might not be Occupy's most resounding success.

All-powerful

Gary Gutting, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has me puzzled. He's talking about whether knowing for certain of the existence of God - 'understood as all-good and all-powerful' - would assure us of our salvation, and he writes as follows:

Suppose that the existence of such a God could be decisively established. Suppose, for example, we were to be entirely convinced that a version of the ontological argument, which claims to show that the very idea of an all-perfect being requires that such a being exist, is sound. We would then be entirely certain that there is a being of supreme power and goodness. But what would this imply about our chances for eternal salvation?

On reflection, very little. Granted, we would know that our salvation was possible: an all-powerful being could bring it about. But would we have any reason to think that God would in fact do this? Well, how could an all-good being not desire our salvation? The problem is that an all-good being needs to take account of the entire universe, not just us.

And Gutting then goes on to explain that, for example, God may have to allow certain evils in order to ensure greater goods, that 'some evils may be necessary for the sake of avoiding even worse evils', that even a good God's efforts to minimize necessary evils could still involve 'eternal suffering', and so on. Yet even saying all this Gutting continues to refer to this struggling and constrained God as all-powerful. Well, there's the source of my puzzlement. This God looks to me a lot like an ordinary person, incapable of doing some things, having to navigate limits that just seem to be there, to weigh some outcomes against others. If that's all-powerful, then I could be God.

Oh no, for a moment there I forgot the all-good bit. I do try on this, but I don't always succeed.

Should the German football team visit Auschwitz?

The issue has arisen because Euro 2012 is being hosted by Poland and Ukraine, and Dieter Graumann, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has called for the German team to make a visit to the former death camp. He is reported as saying - see here and here (£) - that though the German footballers bear no blame for what happened at Auschwitz, they should be willing to take some responsibility.

I'm not sure exactly what Graumann intended by these words, but they can be given a coherent and sensible meaning. People who weren't born at the time of the Holocaust are not in the slightest to blame for it; but it is perfectly possible for young Germans to assume a responsibility for commemorating the event and showing by their actions that they see it for the terrible crime it was, a stain on the moral record of their country. The acknowledgement of this kind of responsibility is no more to be ruled out as pointless or incoherent than are apologies by individuals for events they weren't themselves involved in, but which they issue nonetheless on behalf of some collectivity to which they belong.

My own view, all the same, is that the German team should not - as a team - visit Auschwitz. A visit by a German political leader, for example, makes perfect sense. He or she officially represents Germany as a country and consequently has the appropriate status for carrying this kind of responsibility. A national football team is a collection of individuals united by the purpose of playing football for their country. No more than that. A visit by the team as such concerts the actions of all these indviduals whether or not they are in fact of one mind about the politically symbolic act their visit represents. And the individual footballers should not be so obliged. I therefore agree with the view of Henryk Broder, a German-Jewish writer, when he says that the German footballers shouldn't go to Auschwitz 'unless some of them choose to go there on their own... for personal reasons'.

An interesting footnote here is that both the Times and Guardian reports refer to the article in Der Spiegel in which Broder makes this argument. The article concludes with another suggestion altogether:

Perhaps the team could play a friendly match against Israel in Sderot, the town on the border with Gaza that frequently comes under fire from Hamas rockets. With an advance warning time of about 15 seconds, the players would quickly realize what it means to be constantly on the alert.

Tongue in cheek, I assume. Anyway, the Times report (£) quotes Broder's suggestion. The Guardian's doesn't. No big surprise there.

Marx was right - oh yeah

Never fearing to stumble, Chris put up a post yesterday making just that claim - that Marx was right. It's something going about lately. Last year Terry Eagleton published a book entitled Why Marx Was Right. Now, in fact, neither of these guys thinks that Marx was right about everything; they both acknowledge that he was also wrong. So why, then, the Marx-was-right-ism? Naturally 'Marx was sometimes right and sometimes wrong' isn't a very punchy claim; and naturally, also, anyone calling themselves a Marxist will think that some of what Marx got right was important. So maybe the announcement that Marx was right is intended simply (a) to catch people's attention and (b) to emphasize, against opinion to the contrary, that Marx's intellectual contribution to the modern world was a valuable one. Even if this is the intention, the apparently all-or-nothing form of the claim is misguided - as I now go on to argue.

It invites derision and deservedly so. It invites derision for at least two reasons. First, Marx was a political and economic thinker, writing works about the history and anatomy of different kinds of social formation, capitalism in particular. He was not a religious leader, however much some have wanted to see him in that light. But no thinker, formidable as may be, is ever simply right. All of them stumble somewhere. To speak of Marx as if he might have been above this fallibility is not a rational form of discourse for those who truly admire him. Second, if Marx was simply right - even if he was more right than wrong - how is it possible to explain the catastrophic history that unfolded under the guidance of so many would-be Marxist followers? This had nothing, nothing at all, to do with gaps and deficiencies, mistakes, in Marx's thinking about politics and morality? To affirm that it had nothing to do with any such intellectual failures in Marxist thought is today worthy of derision, no more and no less.

To see how the temptations of Marx-was-right-ism can lead its proponents astray, let us look at just one of Chris's theses supposedly vindicating Marx's rightness:

A lot of work in public choice is quite consistent with the Marxian view that "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

One may think that the executive of the modern state does a lot in the way of managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie, but to uphold, more than 100 years after Marx's death and in the light of how democratic states have evolved in all that time, the view that it is but a committee for this purpose is laughable. I have already argued the point here, detailing some of the non-negligible and indeed important functions of contemporary democratic states that are of more general benefit than to the bourgeoisie; so I will not repeat myself on that score.

I will simply add that the 'but a committee' thesis is one of those tropes underlying the variety of verkrappt leftism that makes little of the differences between democratic, even social-democratic, capitalist states and out-and-out political tyrannies. If 'the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie', then democracy is no more than a facade and a pretence. One might as well have naked dictatorship. Here's a clue though: Marx in fact mostly didn't think that it made no difference. Which shows that these words from The Communist Manifesto were badly wrong.

Books exploding out of buildings

Judy Berman says, 'these massive sculptures symbolize the boundary-busting, life-changing power of literature':

As she also says, 'but we don't want to over-think them... because they're also just breathtaking to behold'. That's the one. Eight pictures here.

Natural goodness - and badness

In today's New York Times, David Brooks argues for the view that human beings are a mixture, combining compassionate, virtuous impulses with more depraved ones. Apart from straying towards the common but false thesis that everyone is a potential murderer, Brooks's view is unremarkable. However, one of the steps he takes on the way to it did rather surprise me:

Any of us would be shocked if someone we knew and admired killed children. But these days it's especially hard to think through these situations because of the worldview that prevails in our culture.

According to this view, most people are naturally good, because nature is good. The monstrosities of the world are caused by the few people (like Hitler or Idi Amin) who are fundamentally warped and evil.

Is that really the view prevailing in our culture - that most people are naturally good and that nature itself is? I must have been reading different stuff and talking to different people. Nature is not only wonder, bounty and so forth, it is also disease and illness, earthquakes and red in tooth and claw. As for people, I have no desire to malign anyone by denying their good tendencies, but naturally good is a rather one-sided characterization in view of the actual history of the human species. It is true that there's a view of things among would-be progressives according to which human beings are by nature benign and only led astray, so to speak, by society - badly influenced by imperfect social structures and practices. But this view is as credible (in other words, not) as the opposite thesis: that people are by nature wicked and only restrained and civilized by societal norms and customs.

It could be, of course, that it's me and not Brooks who's 'out' here: that most people do indeed think that nature and human nature are good. But they sure don't behave as if they think this - as witness the existence of morality itself and of the paraphernalia of law and sanctions; to say nothing of the modern explanatory literature on the perpetration of atrocity.