Ethics: Social Class & Karp

Power dynamics exist in earliest societies between the ruler(s) and the common people. Hierarchies exist in ape societies and the earliest human societies. We saw the divide in Grossman of the officers from the soldiers, of those who make the call and those who carry out the orders. We have seen how in the Egyptian wisdom the earliest societies created systems of class and ability as they gathered cultures and technologies and developed them.

Class is a very important issue for Americans today. From propaganda week, we know that A, we are systematically taught that ‘there is no class in America because it is a freedom place’, and B, ‘class is something that OTHER cultures are brutal with, but we are free of that problem’. This was what we said about the Soviets, and they said about us. We amplified our accusation of them in our media (including both news and fiction), and muffled anything that could help their accusation of us. The same messages go on today with Islam and China. In truth, class and power have been a very familiar problem since we were apes. Power and authority are a two edged sword. On the one hand, one wants leaders and followers to organize and coordinate human society. On the other hand, one also wants equality and sympathy which power tends to distort and ignore.

America is caught in this bind still today (as is all of humanity). According to some statistics, the powerful today own more than ever before in history, both in amount and in percentage, in spite of the equal and opposite truth that the middle class and class mobility are also larger today than ever before. With modernity and life saturated with devices, humans are more enabled than ever before. This means that the common people are more enabled than ever before AND the gap between common people and the powerful is greater than ever before, which is counter-intuitive. Consider that in the year 1000 in Europe, the average nobleman owned one horse, one sword and shield, and often could not write their own name. The gap today between rich and poor is far greater than the gap between the toiling serf and the noble lord of the middle ages. This is very similar to Grossman remarking that Alexander only lost 700 soldiers in his entire quest for empire in 300 BCE, an absurdly low body count for a modern conflict.

What is Class?
Class is any division of people into recognizable groups. If any group is recognizable to themselves and other groups, this is enough to claim the group is a self-conscious social class. When talking about social class, we often concentrate on the differences of power and ability that people have in a society. There are two types of class status, ascribed (born with it) and achieved (gained in time). The common indicators of ascribed class status are ethnicity (race and tribe), family (royal lineage), gender (male, female or other), and culture (religion, language). The common indicators of achieved class status are position (job or role in society), wealth (property which includes money), ability (skills, education and experience), and fame (honor, success, celebrity).

There is plenty of evidence that apes know the difference between a privileged position on top and a marginalized position on the bottom. In Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy In the Flesh, Lakoff (a Berkeley professor of ability and fame) says that the human mind is ‘hardwired’ to think up as powerful and down and weakness. Thus we can draw a simple chart of upper and lower class. While the extremes have always been there, as society has developed we have developed and complexified the arrangement. The growth of the middle class is an age old process, but with modernity and devices the middle classes have become quite complicated.

On top in society are those who have enough that if they hold on to it they do not need to work. On the bottom are those who have so little that if they do not work then they have nothing at all. In the middle are those who are using all sorts of strategies to get employed and gain property.
The middle thus includes everyone from field workers and janitors to doctors and attorneys.

In ancient societies, often the leaders were from privileged families that had it made in the shade owning everything, and beneath them would be warriors, merchants, artists, farmers and workers. What we have seen over time through the common history of cultures is that as the devices increased different groups gained power and could raise their status. This leads all the way to the complex middle class of today. We saw in ancient Egypt how the classes of scribes flourished, and specialized classes of scribes leads us to academia today. Both Mahavira of Jainism and the Buddha both came from the warrior 2nd caste in India between 800 and 500, which scholars have said indicates that the second class was making power grabs from the highest priest Brahman class at this time. Consider that artists were not rich or famous among the population until modern art made the painter a celebrity.

The complex of the middle class today shows us many types of people who have condensed cultures and strategies for maintaining their position and authority. Consider that a doctor’s opinion is worth something to the patient or the toothpaste company advertising agent, but the doctor has to be backed by the state. Doctors have great power, and thus the ability to acquire greater status individually through money, ability, fame, marrying into the right family, but the doctor who has to earn money is still not upper class. A true upper class member does either management or no work at all and simply owns property. A doctor who sees patients is thus upper middle class, or professional class.

The one to bring all of this out into public discussion was Karl Marx, who we already heard from in objection to utilitarianism (though Marx could be called a utilitarian himself). Marx was disillusioned by the German failed revolutions of 1849. Moving to England, Marx saw the growing classes of factory workers and others in harsh conditions, and began writing books. The French Revolution had shown everyone that the leaders can be removed (the French noble families). Marx was convinced that just as the French had removed the noble families, there was a new upper class that was settling into modernity that would have to be removed. The old upper class in all societies were the noble families. Now, just as warriors had risen up against the Brahmins in the time of Buddha, the merchants and traders had come in modernity to raise themselves with wealth to be equal to or even above the nobles. This means that modernity has seen wealth rise to trump family as the biggest class indicator. This is not to say that family or ethnicity no longer matter (consider the Walton family who founded Wal-Mart, three of whom are in the top 10 wealthiest individuals in the world), but now an owner of a wealthy company is as upper class as one can get in America. This is in part due to American culture which ditched the British nobility system in its breaking off from the Empire.

In America today, in spite of ditching the British noble heraldry, the top 1% are ‘super-rich’ upper class (who earn over $350,000 a year or get that in returns on investments), the next 5% are ‘rich’ upper class (over $100,000 a year), the 44% are middle class (over $40,000), and the remaining 50% are ‘working-class’ and lower class (under $40,000). This means that the lowest upper class members earn just under 9 times what the lowest middle class members earn.

How in America is such power and privilege maintained? Don’t we have a democracy in which everyone can be heard? Didn’t we ditch the British nobility? How is it that the rich and powerful seem to be able to do whatever they want without much attention, but when the common people need schools or medical coverage there is always too much resistance?

In the first short article I gave you from the Race, Class & Gender reader, Class & Inequality, Sklar puts together interesting statistics on wealth and poverty in America. All gains in household income since 1975 essentially went to the top 20%. Since 2000, the US has gained 76 billionaires (putting the number at 374) and 5 million additional people below the poverty line (to make 37 million, the population of the East Coast). Our infant mortality rates, especially for inner city impoverished people, rival rates in Malaysia and India.

In the second article, Media Magic, Mantsios argues that the media (TV and movies in particular) make class disappear from America. In propaganda week, we talked about the messages that the Soviets and US sent back and forth. In American media, not only are black people as tokens doing just great (often as cops and soldiers), but no one is starving or living in their car with their family, picket fenced houses have plenty to eat and a large shopping budget, and class difference rarely makes a difference. In the 80s there were many evil rich guy villains, but the fantastic plot always thwarts the evil guy with too much money and a moustache (great example is Goonies, where the families were going to loose their houses to a golf course run by evil rich father and son, up to the father’s final line ‘No one will ever loose their house again!’ while throwing pirate treasure up into the air).

Poverty is increasing at twice the population growth rate, yet less than 1 in 500 articles in the NY Times is on poverty (and ask Chomsky, they set the nations news). Welfare cheats and aggressive pan handlers take up a sizable portion of the space given to the impoverished in print. Visually, they are never given a face with photographs or clips (a particularly important factor – tell people to go look up the whistle tips clip, compare the tipsters to the middle class white woman complaining ‘I have to get up for work’). Whenever the poor are covered, it is ALWAYS from a middle class white perspective, never from the perspective of the poor. This is lined up next to Democrats unabashedly supporting the middle class but never the poor with words and programs. Obama as other Democrats support “middle class families”, and no one mentions needed programs to help the impoverished get out of poverty. They have to speak as if there IS no poverty, that America’s way of life does not have harmful and increasing side effects.

It is estimated that 2/3rds of the Senate is composed of millionaires. This is quite disproportionate to the population. The media never point this out or indicate it is a problem.

Walter Karp’s Indispensable Enemies
Walter Karp (1934-1989) was a writer and journalist largely for Harper’s magazine. His favorite subjects are the crooked nature of America getting into wars, which he argues are power grabs for the upper class, and the shallow and deceptive two party system of American politics, the subject of Indispensable Enemies, which he argued is a device to keep power in the hands of the upper class and out of the hands of the common people.

Some great quotes:
“The left and right wings of the party establishment- two claws of an ancient bird of prey.”
“The public school system…a 12 year sentence of mind control…destroying the exerxise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.”
“The most esteemed journalists are the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’ sources.”
And, my favorite: America has one party with two wings.
(Note similarity to spectrum within one communist party system, left and right leaning)

In Indispensable Enemies Karp starts by noting that in American politics there is always a powerful ‘other’ to blame for not getting what one’s group wants, but no group seems to be able to get what it wants for itself. Karp gives as example country and city folk (farms vs. roads and schools), where both seem to stop the other from getting what they want but neither can get what they want. Karp will spend much of the book examining the two party system in this light.

Karp argues that we are being given the run-around. We are being told that this is the unfortunate bi-product of living in a diverse land of freedom, but the powerful get what they want and the powerless are being told that they get nothing because they and the other groups of powerless are free and opposed to each other. We live in the most powerful nation thus far in history, but we can’t get anything done for the common people and are told this is BECAUSE of the common people and how free they are to oppose one another in their opinions. Karp says: this does nothing to explain how the things that get done do get done, and how they do benefit particular (and powerful) interests.

Karp argues that the basic assumption that parties are trying to win elections needs to be questioned. We need to rather ask what the two parties have done in the last 150 years (the time in which America has risen to be the wealthiest nation). When you look at it this way, we see that the two parties have controlled 50% of the country split down the middle since the civil war polarized the country. A landslide in American elections is 60-40, and neither party seems to push lasting popular legislation. Most states stay blue or red for decades, if they ever change at all. This means that, through all of the changes that Zinn, Grossman, Chomsky, Carson and the Corporation have been talking about, the two political parties have remained exactly the same.

Karp argues that, when we realize that the two parties are trying to maintain control over their 50%, we can see many things. This is the thesis of the book. We can see that anyone too left or right of center is sabotaged by the party. A party would rather see the other side win a district for a while then see someone who is intent on pushing forward real change. You must prove your loyalty and centrality to be big and get elected. If you show any independence or disloyalty the party will kill your campaign with the help of the other party and wait for the next election, concentrating on keeping a tight and simple lock on the 50%, not on pushing forward a program. Thus Karp charges that we have one party, with two wings, not two parties at all.

Remember that Karp started writing as a college student during the Vietnam War. He saw how the Democrats weakly criticized the way the war was run but helped kill the peace movement by “keeping the war out of politics”. This is what we have seen since Karp’s death in the middle east conflicts. We can say in light of the Corporation that both parties also keep corporations and their ability to pay both sides to play ‘out of politics’.

In addition, both parties collude to keep third parties out. If either gets significantly over 60% of the vote, one party could break into two. It serves the simple interests of both to keep just about 50%. That way, both can bank half the population without fear of a third party taking part, and the two can drive the people against each other with empty ideology and there is no competition either for the liberal or conservative establishment such that they would have to do something.

In political science classes, you can learn that most Americans do not vote because they do not believe that they can get anything done. Karp is arguing that the parties are in fact trying for this, to involve one with a polarized party such that one votes merely for right or left and nothing else concrete. You also learn that most powerful corporations and figures straddle both sides of American politics, contributing to both Democrat and Republican campaigns. This is the way that the device works. The upper class pay and play for both sides and further the interests of American power (which is held in particular American hands). The common people are set against each other and told that because the other side is as free as they are nothing can get done. The parties are not in fact trying to please the public at all, but merely polarize liberals against conservatives while getting next to nothing done any direction for the common people. The parties want your allegiance but no enthusiasm or interest. The decisions that are real, that affect power dynamics and class relations, are to be made by the powerful and not put into the awareness of the people at large. This is how the powerful maintain their ability and the common people are kept from doing anything meaningful or lasting. For example, if a war is on the table, all of congress votes for it and then the Democrats start hemming and hawing to the public about how this war could be better managed. What Karp describes of the Vietnam war, we see again post September 11th. Obama shifts the war back to Afghanistan, yet does not say the war should never have happened. BUT: conservatives can’t lobby congress to get complete freedom for gun ownership for the common people.

Karp argues that the real issues that deal with power in America are never put on the ballot. Consider gun ownership and gay marriage. These two issues will likely be kicked back and forth between liberals and conservatives without much concession. No matter which way either goes, opposite pressure can be mounted easily, and the upper class is not effected in the slightest. However, whether medical coverage should be free rather than owned by powerful people is an issue that changes class relations, and thus it is not a decision that should be given to the common people. It is clear that both liberals and conservatives would vote for free medical coverage even with conservative spin against government spending. Karp argues this is the reason you do not see anything like this on the ballot. In other words, it is all a game of good cop, bad cop, similar also to Operation Margarine.

Intro Philosophy: Nietzsche

Nietzsche (1844-1900)is often called the first modern thinker. In fact, depending on whether you say we live in modern or post-modern times, he is called the first modern OR post-modern thinker. He is without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe, and most skeptical thought is now deeply in his debt.

Nietzsche came from a long line of protestant Lutheran preachers. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was very little, and though his family sent the boy to school to become a preacher and theologian (like Hegel, Heidegger and many other German thinkers) Nietzsche rebelled and turned to philosophy.

German Pessimism and Schopenhauer:
Just before Nietzsche’s birth, Germany had been going through a great period of pessimism. Just like in China, Egypt, Greece and everywhere, human thought flourishes in the period after tragedy and warring states because people are forced to turn against old conceptions and institutions and ask hard questions that become very popular in these sorts of times.
German princes came together to crush the popular people’s movements for individual rights, and there was a great turning away from the German reason of Kant towards the German will of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Since reason failed in the world, the world is not a reasonable place but a tough place in which it is hard to push for what one sees as beautiful and true.
Marx wrote in this time, for this crowd.

Schopenhauer is deeply influenced by Buddhism and Indian thought, in a very pessimistic way.
He uses the image of a ship bobbing on the water, just hanging on in a watery, stormy ocean of a world. Rather than believe in a reason beyond, having the stomach to see the harsh reality of the situation became a value, a value that skeptical thought has retained.

German pessimism, including its famous thinkers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, flourished in two more recent periods of pessimism: WWI for Europe and Vietnam for America. In fact, Nietzsche was the original guy who said ‘my home country is stupid and think they are awesome’, bashing Germany and all things German quite openly, for which he has been honored as not only individualistic but incredibly courageous. Thus European thought following WWI and American culture following the 60’s (Berkeley a key player in this) found deep meaning in calling their society and ‘the system’ a bunch of chumps.


Nietzsche’s first book was The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the Greeks were not simply rationalists as was often said. He argued that there were two opposite strains in Greek society, the Apollonian (order, reason and law) and the Dionysian (chaos, emotion and revolt). Nietzsche suggests that this is quite human, and societies that develop do not simply become reasonable but struggle to both restrain and escape. This is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic of reason and understanding.

Nietzsche vs. Morality:
The text I gave you to read is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in which Nietzsche asks us to look at humanity critically and see that following the rules (like Kant) or ‘the greater good’ (like Mill) is for sheep. The individual rises above the masses and sees things in a new way. Nietzsche came up with these ideas reading Kant and Mill, reacting against their overall goods for everyone evenly. For Nietzsche, inequality are the beautiful mountain ranges to climb and conquer.

Nietzsche was a staunch individualist, believing that ANY group morality is a slave morality, and he called Christianity, Scientific ‘Objectivity’, German Nationalism and German Racism (very much centered in Anti-Semitism) out on this vocally. Again, he is seen as a hero by many for this. Consider: “When we create the master race, we will have to mix in a lot of Jews to get their good qualities”, a joke considering that Nietzsche would never advise creating a master race of equals but rather loves the individual who stands above the race as a herd.

It was a shame that Nietzsche was censored and used by the Nazis to support their ideas of the beautiful rising German will of the master race, taking Nietzsche’s individualism and twisting it into a racial and social doctrine. Nietzsche intended his words for individualists, as he says over and over again. In this, they famously used his concept of the Superman (and yes, Nietzsche is the first person on record to use this phrase, the UBERMENCH) to mean not the artist or visionary who creates but the German race.

Nietzsche vs. Nihilism:
While many would say ‘Nietzsche believes in nothing, then”, this would not be true. Nietzsche was just as vocal about believing in something as he was about not believing the herd mentality. Nietzsche saw himself as a new sort of thinker who would be followed and imitated by many. Because of this, he warns over and over again NOT to make his thought into a school or a system. However, he did not believe like Schopenhauer that one could believe or not and it makes little difference. Nietzsche believed that the whole worth of the individual is that, in the face of nothing being absolutely true, staring into the void of being, you create something and stand for something in a beautiful way, creating your own meaning in life. He was very critical of ‘Nihilism’, believing in nothing, thought this is just what his critics, religious and not, have called him.

Nietzsche believes in Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming between Being and Nothing. He avoids believing in eternal positives, but also believing in nothing whatsoever. It is the overturning of the old into the new by the true individual who wills something created beyond themselves and the world that stands in the face of Nihilism that Nietzsche sees as modernity’s greatest threat. He sees a world where everyone sits on their couch, believes in nothing but is afraid to contradict the state or church and do SOMETHING other than sit there.

Thus, Nietzsche relentlessly bashes reason and judgment in himself and in others, but he believes that you must have the courage to create as a contradictory and mortal being.

Nietzsche’s bashing of women: An Interesting Example of Nietzsche’s Skeptical Individualism
One of the most beautiful and deep parts of Nietzsche’s writings is his turn in Human, All Too Human from bashing Kant and others for believing in objective truth to say ‘here are some of my truths’ and without warning start bashing women repeatedly including the famous “When you go to woman, do not forget your whip”. The beauty of this philosophical performance, what inspires Bataille and Derrida, is that Nietzsche here is showing you both sides of himself at once. Unlike Kant or Mill who are writing like they can be consistent and not contradict themselves in the building or seeing of the truth, Nietzsche knows the truth is psychological and complex, and that beauty comes from tension and pain. Thus, even in his bashing he knows he is a human being and flawed. This has had an amazing impact on Art and Literature (particularly since Bataille and his open obscenity in following Nietzsche).

Passages of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:
N starts off with asking, why do we want or suppose we can simply get truth? Philosophy seems like it has barely even gotten started. Asking this question is perhaps the greatest risk: nihilism can result from q of ‘truth’.
Read BGE (2)
Faith in opposite values: categorical Ts and Fs, such that we can fully know.
Notice ‘frog perspective’, maybe same as frog in well of CT.
Read (3), selection. Instinct to simplify things in ‘truth’ but complex
Read (4), ending. “philosophy beyond good & evil”, this is first time title in the book.
Read (5) start and selection. Philosophers as naïve, trusting so far, critique of Kant. Why?
Read (6), middle. Naïve, because ALL DRIVES can pose as ‘truth’ or ‘good’.
Read (16) start: Notice beyond even Schopenhauer here. Thinking conceals itself such that we cannot be simply certain of it any way. (Notice lead to Freud here)
In 17, speaks more of the deceptive power of language to simplify things for us and shape our world. He mentions resemblance of Indian, Greek and German philosophy, says it is clearly explained by language- fits with growing German- our picture.
Why is language deceptive? How does grammar lie? Read (24), start and end.
Language, and science, have to simplify the world by making strict oppositions out of what is actually subtleties of gradation. Language, philosophy and science make things black and white, but things are actually shades of grey between ideals and extremes.
Nietzsche says that truth is alive, and doesn’t need such simple and artificial scaffolding as our beliefs or our knowing we are right. We should enjoy being wrong.
Read (25) start: Truth needs no protectors- or categorical certainties.
Says falsehood is the surest fact, continually in all truth and discovery.
Read (34), middle to end. Philosophers need to suspect the certainties they have taken for granted, and grammar plays a serious part in the simplifying deception, he says even poison against life. (Note: Hegel’s judgment is the one sided acid).
Also Great: (78), (94) (126)


Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
This is one of the most famous of Nietzsche’s books. The opening passages are quite famous and are quoted often. The prose is intentionally mocking the Bible, Plato and other classics.
Nietzsche believed that the Persian prophet Zarathustra, one of the first monotheists, was also the first dualist to separate good from evil, so Nietzsche has Zarathustra become the first to go ‘beyond’ good and evil, to recognize the error of his dualism, and see the interdependence and totality of the whole. Zarathustra starts in his cave, then ‘goes down’, a theme that recurs.

Zarathustra first encounters after going down out of cave a forest dweller (very Indian), who is avoiding people and loving god as people are too imperfect. This sage in the woods is what Zarathustra has overcome. He gets to town, and addresses the people, who have gathered to watch a tightrope walker. Note that the superman is one who the people watch and love, who straddles an abyss and creates and dances like the tightrope walker, but the tightrope walker is a mere spectacle and the people are not supposed to do the same.
Read (3) start, several sections going through (4).


Operation Margarine by Roland Barthes
This short piece by the French literary critic and philosopher is an excellent afterward to Nietzsche, as it shows us the way that conformity and values are sold and packaged today.

Social & Political Philosophy: Chomsky & Foucault

Today we consider two thinkers who are not only affiliated with anarchism but increasingly important today: Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Both criticize the way power and information are held in society and the oppressive nature of human institutions. However, Chomsky is very much a positivist who believes that there are true human rights and objective facts while Foucault is very much an existentialist and Nietzschean who believes that any conception of true rights or objectivity is itself oppressive in the same way as all human institutions. Both agree that power as it is practiced today marginalizes the truth, perspective and reality of the oppressed, but they disagree over whether this is monstrous or all too human. This is an important debate within not only anarchism but many other schools of thought. Are human beings always dominating and marginalizing, or are there just forms of social life that liberate us from domination? Are there true human rights, or are human rights another form, perhaps more evolved, of political domination and control? On the one hand, with positivism, we can agree that there are human rights and social forms we believe in and push for, but on the other, with skepticism, we know that America, Britain and the Soviet Union have paid great lip service to human rights while ignoring and marginalizing brutality and domination at home and abroad. Either way, we should push for the good while maintaining skepticism.

Noam Chomsky (1928 – present)
Chomsky, who has openly declared himself an anarchist, is one of the foremost critics of American empire and colonialism as was the late Howard Zinn. He first became famous and secured tenure at MIT in the 50s as a linguist and philosopher of language with his theory of universal grammar, also called x-bar y-bar theory (essentially, that there are basic structures of grammar inherent to all human language such that ancient Chinese has nouns and verbs just like modern English). In the late 60s, he gained far more fame across many academic disciplines and the reading public as a critic of the Vietnam war and American empire. One of his most famous books is Manufacturing Consent (1988) that he co-wrote with Edward Herman, which argues that the American mass media maintains silence about the brutality of our military, corporations and allies while repeatedly putting the brutality of our enemies and opponents on display. For example, TV news programs and newspapers devoted many minutes of airtime and inches of print discussing suppression of dissent in communist countries while maintaining media silence about the same forms of suppression here at home and in Central and South America.

Chomsky on Anarchism
Chomsky states that all forms of authority and domination should be challenged and if the forms are unjustifiable they should be dismantled. Chomsky clearly has the political, economic, and military domination of America over much of the rest of the world in mind. Because power is by nature domineering and potentially abusive, the burden of proof should be on the authority itself to justify its own existence and importance. Chomsky is consistently critical of academic journals maintaining silence as he is of the mass media, arguing that even left-wing academics are either brainwashed into believing that the West and America stand for freedom and democracy in the face of the evidence he collects or know what not to say and practice self censorship to maintain and advance their careers. Chomsky criticizes forms of democracy and libertarianism as practiced in America and Britain that give property rights overriding support (like Locke) while maintaining silence about poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor, as well as Soviet communism for being an enemy of true socialism. Chomsky argues, unlike Foucault, that there is a true human nature and that unjust institutions contradict and violate this nature, however he does also say that we do not know enough about human nature to know whether it is basically anarchistic and libertarian or oppressive and domineering. In other words, he hopes that Mencius is right but we do not know enough to rule Xun Zi out.

Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)
Foucault is now a very celebrated and well studied thinker not only in philosophy but also in history, sociology and political science. He also taught briefly at Berkeley. His books are critical historical studies of social institutions and practices such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, science and sexuality. Foucault called himself a Nietzschean (a follower of Nietzsche, who we will study next class along with how some Nazis misused his philosophy) and his critical philosophy centers on the idea of the human tendency to privilege what is labeled as good while marginalizing and dominating what is labeled as evil. The famous story is that Foucault went on vacation to the Riviera and brought Nietzsche, who he had not yet read, with him, and then stayed in his hotel room the entire time reading Nietzsche. As a Nietzschean, Foucault is deeply critical of any claim to absolute or objective knowledge, distrusts binary dichotomies such as good/bad, true/false, opinion/knowledge or sane/insane, and understands truth as a struggle between competing forces, institutions and interpretations. Institutions must support binary divisions to maintain power and pronounce themselves objective holders of genuine knowledge and truth. This bends our view of reality such that the dominant system (religion, science, politics, etc) is simply identified with truth and the messy historical process and evolution of systems of thought is obscured.

For Foucault knowledge is always involved with serving power, just as for Nietzsche truth is always involved with desire. We have all heard ‘Knowledge is Power!’ as a good thing, but for Foucault knowledge is not only power, it is domination. He states that truth is not outside power, but is a thing of this world. Foucault studies the complicated historical situations when one form of power, knowledge and dominance shifts to become another form as circumstances change. A dominant theme of his work is that with industrialization people have to learn to police and dominate themselves and the authorities have to convince them that it is their own idea and independence. Marcuse describes something similar in One-Dimensional Man. Thus, science such as psychiatry serves powerful interests while baptizing itself as disinterested objective truth, and the average person believes that they are smart and free for believing what they are told in a magazine rather than understanding the complicated and brutal process of various forms of truth that compete with each other. However, Foucault believes that we should push for what we want and strive for greater understanding while knowing that we are naturally greedy, abusive, marginalizing, and ignorant. Power is not just a negative thing, but everything, so the form of the bad is the form of the good. Thus, communists who declare themselves to be liberators are also oppressors, and people who feel oppressed by society are also helping to oppress themselves through fear and desire. Human nature is neither good nor evil, but the two together. While not openly calling himself an anarchist, Foucault distrusted all forms of authority and became disenchanted with communism and other forms of left wing thought. His conception of power is very similar if not identical to anarchist criticisms of society.

Social & Political Philosophy: Anarchism

We have been studying political philosophies that support or advance toward bottom-up democracy through top-down structures of authority. Anarchism also aims at bottom-up democracy, but more radically does not propose any top-down authority for support. Just as Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience, “That government is best which governs the least”, Anarchists believe in getting rid of government as much as possible. This may or may not leave room for a diminished government that leans towards capitalism or socialism, but it is at odds with communism imposing a dictatorship even though it also ultimately aims at direct governance by the people. Hard capitalism could be similar if not identical to anarchism (remember that communists consider capitalism to be anarchism already but anarchism for the wealthy rather than for the common people), however capitalism traditionally relies on the state for money and military support. Socialism is not compatible with complete anarchism because it presupposes a state structure, but a more libertarian socialism would aim at anarchism as much as it is possible and feasible, just like communism.

How feasible is anarchy? Some say it is impossible. Others say it is entirely possible and we can figure it out and live it now. Others say we cannot figure it out, but we should dream the impossible and strive to achieve what may only be a dream for now. To many anarchism is no different than Hobbes’ state of nature: nasty, brutish and short-lived. Without government, the police and military for example, how would the powerless and marginalized be defended from the powerful and dominant? Anarchists would side with Saint-Simon, the socialist, and argue that technology and culture have advanced to a point where power can be held by the people without the necessary abuses of the state. Government and structures of power, they would argue, are already inherently abusive, and anarchism would be less abusive than the current structures of power. For instance, while the powerful could still hire private armies to do what they want without fear of the state police, international wars would become virtually impossible.

One can find the idea that power is inherently abusive in ancient Chinese and Greek thought (Daoism and Stoicism specifically), in the thought of Rousseau and Thoreau, as well as libertarianism of 1800s France and America today. The term ‘anarchism’ was used as a negative term by the Royalists against the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War (involving Hobbes and Locke). During the French Revolution, progressives who began opposing the dictatorship of Robespierre began using the term in a positive way. This prefigured the split between communists and anarchists. The question is, is centralized authority more or less abusive than decentralized authority? All the political philosophies theoretically aim at decentralized authority, but none trusts decentralized authority like anarchism. One could equally say that none trusts dictatorship like communism that we have studied so far, but fascism (which we study next week) believes in dictatorship like communism but does not believe in evolving toward direct democracy.

Proudhon
The first to call himself an anarchist by name was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865). He is best known for the quote, “Property is theft”, from his work, “What is Property?”. He is also quoted famously for saying, “Anarchy is order”, the possible origin of the A surrounded by an O which is the symbol of anarchism. Marx and Proudhon were friends for awhile in Paris before splitting over differences. Proudhon argued for a collectivism of co-ops and communes without the need for a centralized state. Unlike Marx and communism, Proudhon did not believe in the nationalization of property under state ownership. Through free association, individuals labor in collectives and reap the fruit of their efforts without individual or collective ownership of the kind Locke felt the state must protect. Rather than property, Proudhon argued for possession through mutual and voluntary use.

While communists such as Marx argued that dictatorship was necessary to transform society, Proudhon and his followers recalled the French Revolution and argued that this would be a step backwards that would take power from the people rather than giving power to the people. Proudhon repeatedly spoke of “the people”, and regarded all government as tyranny. This goes beyond Rousseau, who believes in central government that has the support of the general will. Proudhon argued that property was the cause of all wars, including religious wars and the French Revolution, and so if possession through use made property rights unnecessary war would become a thing of the past. Towards the end of his life, Proudhon began to compromise with the idea of a balance of central authority as a socialist, but retained his belief that mutualism was superior and more trustworthy than authority.

Bakunin
Socialists in Europe became polarized at this time between the communists who followed Marx and the Anarchists who followed Proudhon and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1876). A Hegelian like Marx, Bakunin had met both Marx and Proudhon in Paris and translated Hegel and the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels into Russian. Like Lenin and Trotsky, Bakunin was exiled from Russia for his criticism of the tyrannical power of the Tsar. Unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky however, Bakunin had come to distrust authority even under the guise of socialism and communism. At meetings of the First International socialist congress, Marx argued that they should participate in European national elections while Bakunin argued that they should abstain from voting and complying with state held power. Bakunin argued for rising up against the state in acts of open rebellion, what he called “the propaganda of the deed” (actions speak louder than words). Later anarchists would use this phrase to describe bombings and assassinations against those they believe oppress the common people. The Marxists, who dominated the congress, expelled Bakunin and his followers. Bakunin continued to argue that no one should be given political power, not even the workers, as this power would come to exploit the workers themselves. All dictatorship is self-perpetuating, and a communist dictatorship would merely claim to be the voice of the people. Marcuse and Chomsky have both been influenced by Bakunin in their criticism of communist dictatorship.

Spanish Civil War
During the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), the fascist general Francisco Franco fought for control of a divided Spain with the support of the fascist governments of Italy and Germany and American corporations such as General Motors, Ford and Texaco. Those on the left, the communists, socialists and anarchists, saw the war as a struggle for freedom, while those on the right saw the war as a struggle for Christian civilization. On the left were peasants, workers and intellectuals. On the right were the clergy, the military, land owners and business interests. Anarchism had gained more influence in Spain than elsewhere in Europe, and for a brief time, especially in Andalusia and Catalonia, land and industries were collectivized and run as mutualist co-ops. Unfortunately, this success frightened the communists as well as the fascists, and infighting between communists and anarchists weakened the left side of the war. With the victory of Franco in 1939, these communities were crushed and thousands of anarchists and communists shot. I personally saw walls in Barcelona that were riddled with pockmarks from this period. This is known as a brief period where anarchism did flourish and work as a political form, but because it was so brief and crushed by fascism its feasibility remains controversial. Would it have survived and flourished had Franco and the powers that backed him not been victorious, or would it have been swallowed up by communism or another form of power?

Squatter’s Rights
One concept of anarchism that still has a following today is squatter’s rights. Do the poor have the right to seize unused property such as houses and factories and use them as they see fit, gaining possession of these lands and facilities through use? Capitalism and communism would say no, because property is the right of the individual or the state, not to be seized voluntarily. Anarchists argue that people should take possession of buildings that are not used and put them to good use for the good of any who wish to contribute to the effort. There are countless squatter’s communities around the world, especially in impoverished areas (consider homeless camps visible underneath freeway overpasses here in the East Bay). In Detroit there have been activists for decades who help poor families break into unused homes and repair them so that they can be used, resulting in continuous struggles with local police. Some of these activists even call the police and let them know what homes they are “liberating” to wear down police already busy with other matters.

Free Love & Women’s Rights
Anarchism is often in solidarity with free love and women’s rights movements. Just as anarchism wants an end to the domination of the wealthy over the poor, it also seeks an end to other forms of oppression such as the tyranny of the male over the female. Anarchists often are champions of free love, the voluntary sexual association of individuals rather than the prescribed and state sanctified sexual union of marriage, as well as women’s rights such as equal treatment, suffrage, contraception, and abortion. While this is much more accepted today under state systems, sexual relations outside of marriage were considered criminal in the past and remain so in many places today. Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) was a feminist and anarchist who argued the real anarchist and social revolution should be concerned with ridding society of gender inequality. Critical of both American capitalism and Soviet communism, she is considered one of the first revolutionary feminists who hoped that one day women would be recognized as full individuals who are able to get married or not and have children or not without the coercion of the state or culture.

Ethics: Environment & Carson

Reading: Silent Spring and Selections on Environmental concepts

In the earliest cultures, humans and animals were understood to share a world together as very much equals. As humanity began domesticating livestock, humans are increasingly understood to be above all animals, the god-like animal. Adam in the Bible is namer and master of all.
At same time, world as balance with humans (like Leviathan and Behemoth). We have done so well as a species that we have become quite unbalanced with nature. While many cultures have spoken of being in balance (Egyptian Wisdom for instance), it was only with the growth of mechanization and technology that Islamic scholars first wrote consciously of the impact that humans had systematically on the environment. This makes sense, as Europe got its machines and chemistry from Islamic civilization.

As we see in The Corporation, in the 1940s and 1950s, just as US became the wealthiest nation, petroleum products were used to make huge varieties of products. Wood and metal gave way to plastic. Remember that it is not ‘the oil stupid’ as far as just gasoline. All our life is permeated with petroleum products and synthetic chemicals. Monsanto and DuPont are the big giants.
What has happened: we are in a culture that can give us immediate things according to our intentions, but such that we ignore the long and complicated process of nature. Nature can sift things out, but not as fast as we can synthesize just what we want while externalizing the unneeded and then ignoring it until it snowballs up into our face. Cancer rates, birth defect rates, and other problems are evidence of the environmental impact.

Add on top of externalization the competition between corporations in a culture that ignores the consequences and people are racing to screw things up and put money in their own pocket before someone else does. This imbalance creates further imbalances. Modern plantations and corporate farms have created surges in pests, and then we spray tons of pesticide to kill the swarms of pests, and then the pests resurge because all of the other pests were killed, and the cycle grows steadily out of control. As silent spring suggests, we need human rights to not be poisoned. While many thought DDT ban was point of book, actually Carson calls for rights. Consider differences in infant mortality rates and who lives in the inner city.


Environmental Issues (from the Blackwell Environmental Reader):

Wilderness: We have seen that this is an interesting issue for utilitarianism. Does one consider best use in the long term to be using everything, or do we leave things unused for long term?

Sustainability: Nature and economy must both be preserved, or both will collapse.

Environmental Justice: Who gets benefits and who gets harm of processes in the culture? One fifth of world consumes four fifths of resources. Some, like Rev. Chaviz Jr., argue for the concept of Environmental racism, that pollution and cleaning products affect those who are ostracized in the worst areas of town far more than others. The horrifying infant mortality rate among American black people, twice that of white Americans, is evidence of this.

Intro Philosophy: Kant & Hegel

Last time we ended with Hume and his very skeptical philosophy. Hume argues that we have impressions and ideas, and because all of our ideas come from our impressions, our ideas are assumptions. The famous example Hume uses is the billiard table, arguing that we have an idea or assumption of a cause when ball A hits ball B.

This total skepticism is quite welcome to some, but positivistic thinkers are not happy with cause being an assumption in the head and not a fact in the world. Another problem is that Hume does not tell us where our idea of cause comes from or how it is related to our other ideas.

This got to Kant, who said thing in itself with categories we can know (big influence on Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein’s early thought)

Kant (1724-1804) read Hume and famously wrote that Hume awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”. Kant is one of the biggest philosophers in the modern European cannon, loved by positivists and hated by skeptics. He was a big influence on Schopenhauer (who was a big influence on Nietzsche, the focus of next week), and a big influence on the early thought of Wittgenstein (who we focus on the week after next).

Kant believes very much in the aim of Descartes, the world does contain certainties and facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, but Descartes as we saw did not spend much time proving this. Kant’s major work, A Critique of Pure Reason, tries to bridge this gap with an air tight argument for true positive knowledge in the face of Hume’s skeptical challenge that all we know is merely assumption.

Kant argues that Hume is correct that we learn the world through the senses and this is how we acquire our ideas. However, even though we do not experience the world directly but rather through our experience and ideas, we can construct true positive knowledge of the world and our ideas through reason which can reveal new certain truths by reasoning from our initial ideas like mathematics can derive additional propositions from beginning propositions. Remember that in the 1700s algebraic science had come to question many traditional truths and give new positive answers. Kant studied and wrote in the time when Newton’s laws of physics had risen to fame.

Kant argues that the world, the “thing-in-itself” as he calls it, we cannot know, but our ideas about it have a structure and order to them. Kant believed that there are twelve categories of ideas and cause is one of these categories. If we start from these basic categories, we can learn additional certain truths about science and the world in the same way that if we start with 2 + 3 = 5 we can come to additional certain propositions of mathematics. Kant calls this the synthetic apriori, a fancy term for what we can discover we know prior to our experience of the world. The metaphor often used is our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see the world.

Hegel (1770-1831) was as upset with Kant as Kant was upset with Hume. Like Kant thought of Hume, Hegel did not think that Kant gave much of an explanation or exploration of our ideas. It is one thing to say we have an idea of cause as a category for our experiences, but it is another to explain how cause functions, both in itself and together with the other ideas that we have. Hegel thought that Kant declares that we have a category of causation, but he does not show why we have this category or how it fits together with the other eleven categories.

Also, just as Kant was critical of Hume for putting the facts of the world out of reach by declaring everything to be an assumption, Hegel was critical of Kant for putting the world behind our ideas as “the thing-in-itself”. Do we experience our ideas as separate from the world in this way, like a pair of eyeglasses, or are our ideas experienced in and as the world itself? If cause is a lens through which we view the world, then the world itself remains something unknown and my certain knowledge of causation is still quite useless for practical knowledge of the world. Why should we know nothing of our experience of the world, but be certain of our experience of the mind?

Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things in which they become what they are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud and Feuerbach were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin, and how this questions our human-centered view of reality.

Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is not only similar to Lao Zi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.

While this has become controversial, many believe that Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Hegel often presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole. Remember Lao Zi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).

Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and how they are in the world.

In his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology. We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each, spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites. Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of Piaget the child psychologist.


THE PHENOMENOLOGY

I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history, but it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.

For Hegel, the first stage of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European. In the 60s, 70s and 80s this term was still used by many to refer to East Asian people such as the Chinese. As archeology in Hegel’s time had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development. It is good that this is the non-European start, but unfortunate that all further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the development is a course of Europe becoming different from others (again, this is overly simplistic and quite racist and eurocentric, but funny enough this is still largely the view preached on campuses today).

The Orientals understand objectivity and the state, two powerful positives. The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. In some cases, such as Buddhism in India, Hegel believes that they realized skepticism but did not develop it further, turning the world into a simple void or nothing. Thus the Orientals get simple one-sided Being or Non-Being, but do not put these two together to see the unity of the opposition. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.

The Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of objectivity as subjectivity. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more complex and also that the Greeks were only one civilization of many that made leaps forward like this (Jaspers calls the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese, the three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age).

Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary and perspective. Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being together as Becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks still put Being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire or Plato’s static ideal forms. It is the Germans, and specifically Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity, of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all.

The Europeans, but specifically the Germans who are in Hegel’s time becoming the foremost champions of philosophy, history, science, and politics are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification. Also, as a teenager Hegel heard about the French Revolution and was, like many youth, an enthusiastic supporter of the left-wing progressive removal of the aristocrats and traditional ways. We get our terms left-wing and right-wing from the French Revolution, as liberals and conservatives sat on opposite sides of the congress hall. Unfortunately for the French, and for young Hegel, the revolution collapsed and Napoleon, a dictator, took over. Hegel developed his ideas about ideas working in the real world as oppositions watching the French Revolution.

Hegel believes that history is almost at its completion in his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with individual subjectivity. He also believes that religion evolves exactly as philosophy and politics does, and that German Lutheran Christianity is the final form of religion that unites the individual directly with God (living objectivity) because each man is the priest of his household.


THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC

The Master/Slave dialectic is the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next. It works on the level of idea, individual and social movement.

At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views. The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops while the master deteriorates and grows lazy. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone else, so he can do things no one has thought up yet for himself, and thus triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.

This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied by Hegel and confirmed by historians today. While Hegel is quite eurocentric, he is right to this extent.

The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx. Feminist Hegelians, like Simone de Beauvoir, uses it for women in ‘The Second Sex’, Franz Fanon uses it for black people in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as does the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s).


THE LOGIC

After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.

Like Neo-Platonism, thought has to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity, objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.

At each stage, the Understanding comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.

Why is it opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).

Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding. (God)(IS), (You)(Are), (this)(is), the anchor points of Descartes. However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One or All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty. This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he leaves between mind and world.

(68) “Kant, it is well known, did not put himself to much trouble in discovering the categories.”

“Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”

(118) “However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.”

Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.

BEING, NOTHING AND BECOMING

In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and nonbeing as one like Heraclitus. It is merely recognizing it that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare. In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new idea and the common understanding of the people.

Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.

Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.

Thought now tries to understand things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and quantities. Remember that Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel acknowledges he owes many insights.

Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It puts these as essences outside the world as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things even as it puts them in groups. Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they do not understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.

Just as qualities are non-beings within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize. Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Remember Kant left a complete gap between the fully certain categories of the mind and the unknown world-in-itself. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others, Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.

What, then, moves us beyond Kant’s categories and isolated essences? The process of dialectic, which grasps the unity of sameness and difference, of one and many, and of necessity and freedom, as it did with Being and Non-Being before at the first stage. The idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all that it is or could be.

Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and more modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. This would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock as thing and perception/assumption.

Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and simply Nature itself, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, that is one with the world.

Unlike Hegel and Right wing Hegelians, who believe that the system has been achieved, Left Hegelians (most famously Marx) believe that evolution is constant and unending for the system, not just the knowledge it acquires and that we are constantly taking positions that are one-sided that need to be complimented by the opposite perspective. Many of the latest European thinkers have been powerfully affected by this leftist Hegelian view.

Social & Political Philosophy: Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci & Mao

Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924)
While Marx believed that the workers would rise up and create the communist revolution, Lenin argued that a small vanguard party of professional revolutionaries must take power to make the transition from capitalism to dictatorial communism to democratic communism possible. This became known as Leninism, along with specific economic theories Lenin believed would be the best way of implementing Marxism. Lenin, like Trotsky, was exiled from Russia for these views and organizing as a communist. In the midst of WWI, with starvation throughout the land, the Tsar abdicated the thrown as the people of Russia rose up demanding revolution in February 1917. The social democrats (like the US democratic party, who push for social reforms without nationalization) continued to invest in fighting the war, which upset the starving Russian people and led to the return of Lenin and Trotsky and the October revolution, the second and final stage of the Russian Revolution. Lenin, who famously announced, “I bring you peace, land and bread”, found himself politically on top of a volatile and unstable situation with many parties demanding many things. Unfortunately, after the Tsar and social democrats running the country were overthrown, Lenin called together a democratic assembly but disbanded it when it did not support a majority for Lenin’s Bolshevik party.

Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940)
After Lenin’s death in 1924, not very long after the October Revolution, Trotsky and Stalin vied for power. Stalin argued that the Soviet Union should create “socialism in one country”, concentrating on Russia but supporting communist parties worldwide. This became known as Stalinism, though Stalin’s supporters called it Marxism and Leninism. Trotsky opposed this, arguing as Marx and Engels had done in the Communist Manifesto that Russia must work for revolution in developed countries like France, Germany, Britain and America. When Stalin seized power, Trotsky was exiled from Russia yet again, but this time by the communist government that he had played a large part in creating. Not only was Trotsky for internationalism, he was for democratic continuous revolution that would keep the top-down party structure in check, the Theory of Permanent Revolution. This became known as Trotskyism, and Stalin worked hard to eliminate all Trotskyites from power. Stalin became a brutal dictator, like Lenin suppressing all democratic dissent and criticism of his regime as counter-revolutionary enemies. Trotskyites argue to this day that their version is the true Marxism, just like the Stalinists, calling each other counter-revolutionaries who want to destroy true Marxism and the communist state. Today, in the wake of the tragedies of Stalin and Mao, most hard lining communists today ascribe to Trotskyism.

Antonio Gramsci (1891 - 1937)
Gramsci’s thought, contained in his Prison Notebooks, has become hip for many left leaning people including socialists and communists who do not like what happened in Russia or China. One of the founders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he was jailed by Mussolini after he took fascist control of the country in 1922 while Gramsci was visiting Russia as a representative. The prosecutor at Gramsci’s trial famously said, “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning”. Gramsci died in prison, but not before writing extensively in his prison notebooks which were smuggled out by visitors. Gramsci’s centrally celebrated concept amongst socialists, Marxists and post-Marxists is cultural hegemony. In the wake of Stalinism, communists began wondering why the revolution was not succeeding worldwide as planned. Gramsci argued that while Marx and Engels reduced all conflict to the struggle between workers and owners, society is more complex and certain groups dominate others (ex: Christians are predominant in America and this can lead to demonization of Muslims, just as Europeans are predominant such that minority groups are suppressed). The process by which these dominant and marginal forces work out their struggles is known as hegemonic discourse. With such a complex situation, communists should switch from an outright war of frontal attack to one of social positioning. Only such a long and patient effort would succeed given the divisions that exist in the world population. Like Trotsky, and following his lead, Gramsci believed that Lenin and Stalin had come to betray the revolution not because they wished to but because they did not grasp the need for a slow process of continuous revolution in setting up the dictatorship of a vanguard party. All dissent was labeled “reactionary” and “counter-revolutionary”, which masked the real divisions and issues.

Mao Zedong (1893 - 1976)
Mao had his own take on Marxism and Leninism. While the communist symbol is a hammer (for factory workers) and sickle (for farm workers), Mao argued that Lenin and Stalin had paid too much attention to the factories in the city and not enough to the farmers of the countryside. Mao shifted his attention and reforms to agriculture and farm life, which made sense considering China. Mao argued that communism in a developing country would only succeed if it did not try to jump to advanced industrialization in imitation of Britain and America but rather developed the life of the farming peasants. Mao famously said that the leader must be down on his knees with the peasants in the soil, or else there would be alienation between the rulers and the workers of the sort Marx had hoped to overcome. Unfortunately, Mao surrounded himself with supporters who wanted to please him while brutally suppressing dissent, and this created a situation where everyone was telling Mao the farms were producing overabundance when they were in fact creating massive starvation. In the wake of Mao’s death, factions accused each other of undermining Mao’s policies and thwarting the revolution. Since 1978 and the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, capitalist free-market reforms were introduced and China remains an officially communist country that has a mixed economy that leans far towards socialism. Bob Avakian, who participated in the 60s Free Speech Movement and worked with the Black Panther Party, is the most well known American Maoist.

I gave you Slavoj Zizek’s (1949 – present) introduction to the writings of Mao to read. Zizek, a post-Marxist socialist philosopher himself, argues that people make the mistake of trying to find the single moment when communism became dictatorship, but there may not be a single famous figure who “got it wrong” as Judas to Marx’s Jesus. As a Slovenian socialist, Zizek has particular interest in this because Slovenia was one of the lands brutalized under Stalin. He argues that the primary struggle today is between the first and third world, and that communism, like capitalism, can become the oppressive force that it attempts to oppose. Zizek often takes controversial figures like Jesus, Descartes and Mao and finds important contributions that are often overlooked in the wake of tragedy, opposing the externalization of the enemy. I appreciate this reversal of perspective. Thus, Zizek applauds Mao’s turn towards the farmers who Lenin sidelined for the sake of city development, as well as his return to a Hegelian understanding of the pervasiveness of contradiction and continuous struggle.

Social & Political Philosophy: 3rd Response Essay Topic

Given that capitalism, socialism and communism are all based on the idea of greater democracy from the bottom up through a system from the top down, which system do you think has the greatest chance of success and why? Include at least one of the thinkers we have covered since the last response and their ideas (Adam Smith, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Marcuse, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao).

Social & Political Philosophy: Communism & Marxism

COMMUNISM
As mentioned last week, communism is radical socialism. While socialism argues that some industrial production should be publicly owned and controlled for social interests rather than private interests in a mixed economy, communism argues for an entirely planned economy in which the “anarchy” of private ownership of industrial capitalism is transformed into a centralized system of social interests and production. Marx and Engels argued that just as the French Revolution threw off the first and second estates, the clergy and nobility, giving all power to the third estate, the common people, so must the communist revolution throw off the industrial capitalists and give all power to the laborers, the industrialized farmers and factory workers. Though the French Revolution fell apart and Napoleon took over, they viewed history much like Hegel and argued that industrialization signaled the final stage of economic development when an egalitarian revolution could finally succeed.

As we discussed with Saint-Simon and socialism, Marx and Engels argued that socialism would lead to communism such that there would be no more “thieves” who contribute nothing to society and “to each according to contribution” could become “to each according to need”. Saint-Simon argued for meritocracy, but Marx and Engels argued for a more radical egalitarian democracy that have no need to take benefits or voting rights from anyone. This assumes two things: first, that society would maximize the productivity and contribution of all members of society, and second, that society would produce a superabundance of wealth such that all could take as needed.

In theory, communism was supposed to be a radical form of direct democracy in which free-associating individuals participate in labor and labor councils (soviets, in Russia), which then form larger groups that form society as a whole. This would be very similar if not identical to bottom-up socialism and anarchism. The problem arises, most famously in Russia and China, in the transition to this final stage by process. Just as the French Revolution fell first to the dictatorship of Robespierre and then Napoleon, the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions did not come to erase divisions of power and create classless direct democracy but rather resulted in the dictatorships of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. In every case, a top-down radical communist government was installed to transition the people into a bottom-up communist direct democracy. Unfortunately, in both Russia and China (North Korea, Cuba) the people were never deemed “ready” by the oligarchs and the dictatorships persisted, unwilling to relinquish control. The most famous case is the duel between Lenin and Trotsky. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Lenin was not willing to compromise with opinions different than his own so he quickly abolished the democratic assembly and took power. Trotsky, who argued that there should be continuous revolution and democratic criticism of power, was tossed out, Stalin took power after Lenin and eventually had Trotsky killed. This was parodied by Orwell in his famous book Animal Farm.

To play devil’s advocate, all of these societies were under barrage by European wealthy capitalist nations and had reason to fear that communism would be overthrown without a strong leader shepherding the people and protecting them from communism. Consider the US blockade of Cuba and the jokes Reagan makes about the poverty of Cuba and Russia. In addition, there were large portions of the population who did not believe in either socialism or communism, and the leaders could easily convince themselves that they were acting out of the people’s interests in a top-down capacity even if the people were not yet capable of seeing their own advantage in communism from a bottom-up perspective. Would you trust America to be a direct democracy at this moment? Both the left and the right would worry that a democratic vote might sweep away their own programs and reforms. Those on the left would be afraid of popular racism, distrust of intellectuals and nationalism, while those on the right would be afraid of socialism, multiculturalism and internationalism.

Today many Marxists, or post-Marxists as the most critical call themselves after Stalin, acknowledge the serious problems with the Russian and Chinese revolutions and propose many different forms other than vanguard party dictatorship for the transition from capitalist to communist society. Unlike socialists, who would compromise with a mixed economy, they would still argue that an entirely planned economy is possible and most beneficial for all members of society. The question is that between top-down and bottom-up forms of power, the struggle we find in all societies that has certainly been raised wherever there has been leadership and division of labor. How much can leaders or the common people be trusted to work from their own particular individual interests and view toward the overall common social interest and view. From the top one can more easily take a longer view and social view (in line with Mill’s Utilitarianism) but one is detached from the labor and struggles of the common people. From the bottom one is involved with the labor and struggles of the common people, but one has more trouble taking the detached view while attached to one’s own position and in-group.

Another important idea of communism is internationalism. Nationalism, of course, is the allegiance to one’s homeland. Just as communism proposed common property and interest, internationalism proposes a common society beyond the boundaries of nation-states and a system that benefits all people of the world equally.


MARX & ENGELS
Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was a German political philosopher and economist who co-wrote the Communist Manifesto with Engels in 1848. He wrote many works, his most famous other than the manifesto being Capital, a massive three volume work on capitalism and the possibility of communism. Born upper-middle class in Prussia, he became involved with the Young Hegelians at the University of Berlin. He spend most of his life in London writing, supported by Engels in poor conditions. His tombstone in London reads, “Workers of all lands unite”, the final line from the manifesto, and “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways – the point however is to change it”.

Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895) was the son of a wealthy German cotton cloth manufacturer who read Hegel and began denouncing the conditions of the laborers in factories such as those owned by his father. With Marx, he attended the University of Berlin, joined the young Hegelians and co-wrote the Communist Manifesto. While he wrote many works on his own, including The Conditions of the Working Class in England, he considered Marx to be a better writer and philosopher than himself, at one time calling Marx the greatest philosopher who has existed so far, and he used his family’s wealth to support Marx and his writings.


THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
I gave you the Preface to the Russian Edition of 1882 as a preface to the manifesto because not only do you find Marx & Engels mentioning that the first Russian edition was translated by Bakunin, obviously before he broke from the communists to become a major leader of anarchism though the break is not mentioned, you also find them telling Russia that America will clearly overtake Europe as the greatest industrial power and that the revolution can only succeed if Russia, Europe and America all develop together. Considering the resistance of England and America in particular to the Soviet Union and its fall, this is quite remarkable to hear coming from Marx and Engels who would both be dead for decades before the Russian Revolution.

Marx and Engels start by noting that communism is feared by the powers that be in Europe, and so communism is clearly strong enough to publish its views openly in spite of persecution. The opening line famously reads, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism”. The French philosopher Derrida wrote a book Spectres of Marx in which he, like the postmodernist he is, shows that every Marxist believes they follow what Marx really believed but this is taken in many different directions such that one may wonder if there is a single meaning behind or correct interpretation of Marxism.

Marx and Engels write that all history is the history of class struggle. As already mentioned, Gramsci and others will be critical of this reduction of all struggles between oppressor and oppressed into the single struggle of owners and workers. Marx and Engels believe that the final polarized struggle is crystallizing in their lifetime such that the final battle has been set by industrialization. The world has been united through international trade such that industrialization covers the globe. Factories and industrialized farms (hence the hammer, industry, and the sickle, agriculture, crossed as the symbol of communism) have created great alienating divisions between great masses of laborers who view each other as common in interest and the small number of wealthy capitalist owners who control the laborers. Notice how similar this is to Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

As mentioned, a new time calls for a new stage of development. Between the owners and laborers is the bourgeoisie, what we often call the middle class (doctors, lawyers, professors, business managers, scientists, priests, artists, etc), who are the privileged servants of the capitalist owners but are in a prime position to lead the workers to liberation and a new way of life. The middle class is needed by the owners because the modes of production, the theories of management, academics, art and science, are in constant need of revolution and new ideas. Because of this, the middle class must be kept under control or they will revolutionize the structure of society in a way that does not benefit the small number of owners. However, because the world has become a smaller place and the machines allow for greater and greater achievements, capitalism is like a sorcerer whose magical spells have gotten too powerful for the sorcerer to control. All the peoples of the world are now in communication and exploited in the same ways by a small minority while the human individual becomes ever more capable of achievements through technology and science.

The manifesto argues that communists have no interests other than the interests of everyone, and that their theories and conclusions are not based on ideas or principles but rather the actual historical relations of the class struggle. Here we see the scientific positivism of Saint-Simon, a positivism that I myself do not admire for the same reasons Marcuse is critical of it. Marxists often argue that Hegel was an idealist, but Marxism avoids idealism and is scientific and materialistic. Marcuse argues, in the wake of Stalin, that this positivism is an unwarranted defense against criticism that does not liberate people but helps to enslave them. Next time, we will see that Trotsky would say the same and became the hated enemy of Lenin and later Stalin for it. This is a particularly interesting problem given that Marx was a great admirer of Hegel’s Logic, calling it fundamentally revolutionary, and thought the bourgeoisie who did not share his views were not critical enough of society.

The manifesto argues that communism is called the abolition of individuality and liberty by the middle and upper classes, and this is correct insofar as this sort of freedom is only provided by brutality and exploitation. Here again we see socialism and communism leaning toward equality where capitalism leans toward freedom. Marxists argue that they want freedom, but the sort of freedom that capitalists are afraid of losing is unsustainable in an economically just and egalitarian society. We read, “you reproach us with intending to do away with your property…Precisely so, for is just what we intend”. Middle and upper class individuality should be made impossible. Only then can common people be given their just due. The middle and upper class say that society will fall apart because everyone will be lazy, but the manifesto argues that if this is so, society should have collapsed already because those who work do not gain and those who gain do not work.

The manifesto calls for the abolition of the family, that children and women are objectified and exploited by the household head who seeks for his own gain rather than society or equal benefit throughout the family. Nationality and religious divisions need also be swept away, as these also divide the people who should view and share in common. Inheritance will be abolished, public education established, rebel property seized, central services nationalized, and heavy taxes on the wealthy imposed. In the beginning, these radical changes must be established through dictatorship or the property and power of the ruling class will thwart the revolution. Once the changes have taken, the dictatorship can be gradually dismantled and society will be ready for direct bottom-up democracy. Unfortunately, as we will see next time with Trotsky, Gramsci and Mao, this did not go according to the manifesto’s idealistic plan.

Ethics: Violence & Grossman

Apes & Violence
Monkeys and apes are some of the only creatures that can rotate their shoulders as we can.
This means that they, like us, are the only creatures that can throw things and club things.

There are three major groups of apes, Gorillas, Orangutans and Chimpanzees. Gorillas kill kids, but they don’t rape. Orangutans never kill kids, but they rape all the time. Our direct ancestor is the Chimpanzee, which comes in two major sub-species. Bonobo Chimps, the smaller group, are quite non-violent and solve all social issues with sex. The main group of Chimps, our direct relatives, do all the kinds of violence known to human kind. Once again, like every ethical issue we examine, the issue is older than humanity.

Early Civilization & Violence
Violence, like sex, was a part of life since childhood in the beginning. As Grossman says, in Victorian England sex became something shameful and best kept out of sight, and similarly with the butcher and refrigeration violence became something out of sight. Consider David Foster Wallace’s FX Porn article about T2 and Jurassic park. Sex and killing are specialized spectacles, quite unrealistic and pieced together with bad dialogue. Interestingly, serial killers and aggressive personality types often start and practice by killing animals, which used to be something everyone had to do. These are disassociating fantasies.

In the ancient world cosmology picture of the world, sacrifice and dismemberment play a major part in the creation of the world. To eat, one must kill livestock. Similarly, sacrifice was seen as giving food/thanks back in balance and exchange. The cosmos was thought of as a great sacrifice in which the All is carved up for everyone’s use and consumption. Thus, one should carve up animals and humans and give them back to be fair.

Consider the scepter of the king. Often in early cultural art we see the king holding a stick that symbolizes his authority. It has been suggested that this is the king as judge, jury and executioner. If you do something stupid, you get hit with the stick. How hard you get hit depends on what you did. The Egyptian Pharaohs have crossing stick and hook, ‘rod and staff’ from the psalm, in crossed arms, signifying that the king has power over life and death, which cross over into one another (like any pair of opposites).

Society became complexified and highly specialized. We now have specialized individuals who kill animals, who cook meat, who order acts of aggression, and who carry out the orders. As Grossman says, this specialization has made violence unnatural and fantastic, like sex.

Consider now that the US spends more on War than anyone has ever in all of world history. Objective ‘science’ is a myth in so far as the US Military has been one of the biggest supporters and funders of science (physics, mathematics, psychology) so far. Addicted To War says: over 50% of budget and taxes go to US Military.


LT. COL. GROSSMAN’S ON KILLING

The book is written in 1995, and Grossman says that there has never been a book on killing or dealing with killing from the individual perspective until this time. As an officer and psychologist of the US Marine Corps, Grossman tells us many things that are surprising but trustworthy about the capability of individuals and groups to be violent.

The overall message of the book I find to be quite positive. We all have violent thoughts, but very few humans will be violent, no matter what culture or ethnicity or gender. Normally, there is a safety catch in the human mind that prevents us from being violent (notice the gun metaphor, useful for teaching troops). However, in certain situations with particular factors, most everyone becomes capable of violence. 2% of the population have an aggressive personality, potentially psychosis (these individuals are often, Grossman says, drafted into the hardcore units, the marine spearhead squads dropped behind enemy lines or the frontal advance groups). Regardless of whether one is of the 98% or the aggressive 2%, violence is a kick at first but then psychological problems set in that are difficult for the individual.

The overall message is: though human beings are constantly getting themselves into violent situations, there are no human beings who find violence easy or simply justifiable. They pose this way to seem tough, but as Grossman says violence is about impressing the enemy and making them submit much more than it is about the killing. The killing is always in the service of something else, such as staying alive. Grossman, as a psychologist, is convinced that post traumatic stress disorder is natural and most will carry it silently their whole lives, afraid of what others will say or say about them if they question the things they did for the highest ideals.

In my terms: there is a balance that is quite brutal in the head. We can pretend like others don’t matter to us, but only for awhile. Grossman says: the one who takes life cheapens his own, in his own head, and argues this point well.

Non-firing Rates:
Grossman starts off from a very military pragmatic point of view. He argues that we have every reason to believe that most humans who have been involved with war have not tried to kill anyone the whole time. He notes studies that say that WWI and II troops would routinely fire over the heads of the enemy. He says that he and others examined these studies and the military celebrated a 95% firing rate in Vietnam, although he later tells us the factors that make this seem much better for the military than it really was. There were 50,000 rounds per US kill in Vietnam.

Grossman argues that, in all cultures and times, the majority of soldiers were posturing in war, doing everything to make the enemy back down, cease fighting and submit. Before guerilla war became the norm, this is the beating of the drums and the war chants, the clashing of shields. Grossman says we see nonlethal fighting with one’s own species in piranhas, rattlers, and the whole animal kingdom. Alexander the great only lost 700 men the whole 20 years of war.
This is quite similar to Hegel’s idea of the master/slave, reversed: submittal is primary.

American media is quite gifted with the myth of the easy kill, for both the hero and villain. Ex: Schwarzenegger’s Commando (“I let him go”) and O Dog from Menace to Society watching tape. This myth, like the propaganda last week, is a cultural conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence according to Grossman. It’s not what it says that’s the lie, but what remains unsaid.

What this myth conceals: there are far greater chance of being a psychological casualty of conflict then there are of being killed or wounded. 60 days of continuous combat without rest means 98% rate of psychological casualties (why we keep ‘green zones’ and distance to target).

But: is this killing or being subjected to combat? Grossman argues that Britain and Germany bombed each other’s cities in WWII, the first massive bombardments of history (now our specialty, setting the bar in Vietnam, then Gulf War, now War in Iraq). The theory was that the civilian population would go into traumatic shell shock, that everyone would be quickly converted to psychological casualties, but this turned out surprisingly to not be the case.

It turns out that, unless one feels that one has done something to warrant being killed, one bunkers down and does not suffer post traumatic stress disorder. Depression sets in, but not PTSD. Prison guards in the cities DO suffer from PTSD during bombings, but NOT the POWS! This shows us the balance of self and other in the head. One compulsively sets the world up as THIS perspective vs. OTHERS, and one sets the others up as one sets up the self in the head. This means that when one knows that the other will feel JUSTIFIED in killing, one becomes conflicted with oneself. Consider that recon patrols behind enemy lines don’t suffer PTSD like hard core (2%) marine spearhead units that are dropped behind lines to sew death and confusion. If one is in the enemies home turf, but not killing, one does not feel like the justifiably killable target that one does if one is killing the enemy. Consider that killing someone in their home is much more traumatic and justifiable than killing someone in their home.

So: What factors increase or decrease the justification and the enabling of violence?
This is what Grossman and the US Military have been studying intensely. Grossman tells us many surprising things openly that are done to help US troops kill easier with less consequence.

Absolution by Distance:
Killing with a knife is much harder than killing with a 20 foot pike, and killing with an automatic weapon is far easier because one does not feel the other’s body at all (propaganda value of showing the enemy with fixed bayonets). Medium to long range is the easiest kill. The farther away, the less PTSD. The more equipment mediating the kill, the easier it is. Bomber pilots feel little to no PTSD. Grossman says ‘Nintendo Warfare’ in first Gulf War is intentional use of night vision goggles and TV screens in tanks, which lessens the PTSD (one would think the purpose was to take the enemy in the dark, but not so).

The less one sees eyes and faces, the easier it is to kill. This is why the executioner is hooded along with the executed. Both lessen the feeling of PTSD for the executioner. Apes and humans have an impulse to attack when the other turns and runs. This is why if one is caught or kidnapped, one always looks the captor in the eyes as much as possible, take off the helmet or hat (or hood), why military are taught to kill with a kidney strike from behind.

Intolerance and Racism are used actively as distancing mechanisms, making it easier to kill. The less one’s enemy is like oneself, the easier it is to justify killing. This is why it is fundamental to say the other ‘does not share one’s values’. This is THE WEST, earlier the EUROPEAN RACE.

Absolution by Authority:
Officers are separated from killing. The officer orders the aggression, the troops carry it out. The officer can feel distanced from the act because they themselves did not kill or see the kill, and the troops can feel distance because they did not decide to kill or order the kill.
Interestingly, the farther the authority is away from the troops, the less the authority is effective, BUT the farther away the authority the easier it is to do the ordering.

Group Absolution:
The more one is firing into the brush with many others, the more one is unsure that one is killing a particular target oneself. In firing squads, often only one person has a bullet, and the others have blanks and are told this to ease the actions. In defending the home (being amongst one’s group and the group turf) one feels justified in killing in a way that is reversed when one is on enemy soil, as mentioned.

Stages of Killing
1)Combat High, exhilaration, esp. medium to long range (automatic weapons are best).
2)Remorse (move from positive to swing negative)
3)Rationalization (wrestling with the contradiction of positive/negative, self/other)

Both soldiers and gang members find themselves having nightmares where those who have been killed come back to haunt them and ask why. It is as if killing a being does not kill the presence, that the negated presence comes back. This is likely why people believed in evil ghosts for so long across all cultures. One feels one is still indebted to beings long gone if one was involved in their disappearance. (ex: ghost of Jacob Marley, the telltale heart of Poe)

Grossman notes that for HR Bush, Gulf War surge in popularity and then fall in end show social process of these stages as well as individual (and now this fits W Bush in Iraq war as well).