The Final Exam will cover the material from the second half of the course: Islam, Europe, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. You may use material from Lewis Carroll, Humor or Art for your essay, but they will not be on the test.
The test will be 15 multiple choice questions (2 points each), 3 short answer questions (10 points each) and an essay (40 points). For each short answer you must write a paragraph explaining a key concept we covered. For the essay you must take two of the thinkers we covered and in two to three pages compare them and argue which one (if either) you support. You may use thinkers for the essay that you cover in the short answers, but do not waste space writing explanations of their key concepts twice. If you have another sort of essay you would like to write, please check with me first and I will likely let you write it.
Islam:
Rise of Islam, systems of scholarship, technology, cryptanalysis (pulling out the essential factors), philosophy and science, Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment (and Descartes’ Demon), Sufis and the Blind Men & Elephant.
Descartes:
Descartes deceiving demon, proof of self-consciousness, trustworthy God, world and rational facts (2 + 3 = 5), radical dualism of mind and body, intention and mechanics, animals as bodies without minds that cannot think or feel like machines or robots
Hume:
2 types of perceptions: Impressions vs. Ideas, Ideas always come from Impressions, 2 billiard balls and causation as an idea, not an impression, prejudice, assumption, association, and belief (Indian skandas), no ‘true’ facts, just events that are consistent with belief, Induction and Deduction both based on the leap of assumption.
Hegel:
Historical explanation, picture of history (“Orientals”, Greeks, Germans), Master-Slave dialectic and the constant revolution/evolution of history, Dialectic (positive, negative, synthesis as the next positive), Dialectical logic and contradictions as the tensions that structure things and movements, Dogmatism vs. Skepticism in the mind and in history.
Nietzsche:
German pessimism, turn from Reason to Will as central to world, Opposites work together: truth works with false, reason works with emotion, The True is the Beautiful, Truth and Reason are a drive that work to deceive us, Deception and falsehood are necessary to life and creation, Language, Grammar and Logic as deceptive, not trustable, Creative Individuality over all equalizing, Zarathustra as first dualist, thus first to see the whole beyond dualism.
Wittgenstein:
Language Games and Forms of Life (rule structured when things go wrong), Logic lives in the world, not hidden in logical crystal structures within, Against reduction to a single factor (psychoanalysis and reducing a human to ash), Material metaphors for the mental (toolbox, brake lever, train cabin, sign post), The ‘one-thread’ is in fact the chord of many threads together, Meanings and definitions are simply everyday use, not hidden within this.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The Southern Strategy & Dog Whistle Politics
I was reading an article on the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch website when I found the term "Southern Strategy". I looked it up, which then led to the term "Dog Whistle Politics". This is good stuff for studying racism, which we are doing for Social & Political Philosophy as well as Ethics. Please read if you are interested. Essentially, when Nixon, Reagan, Bush I & Bush II say, "State's Rights", Southern people often hear that as, "Keep the federal government from making you interact with black people".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Postcolonialism, Fanon & Said
Colonialism & Postcolonialism
Before Europe rose and dominated the world by the mid-1700s, China and Islam were vast empires that developed technology, science, law and culture. Islam was in fact the last great contiguous land empire, stretching from Spain to China. Ironically, Chinese achievements such as ships, gunpowder and magnetic compasses, developed further by Muslims with algebra employed in such fields as cartography (mapping the world), enabled Europe to sail to Africa and the Americas, and to set up colonial empires that could be controlled in spite of separation by great distances. America became the largest slave colony in all of history, and just as Britain ruled the sea less than a century ago America now rules the skies as well as corporate economics. We can now dominate independent others. Chomsky and Zinn are two critics of American empire and its brutality, as well as the fact that “the West” is still hailed as the authoritative voice, the voice of authority and objectivity above and beyond all other cultures.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture before Europe, and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of culture, technology and science. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant of Islamic achievements as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. Here are some awesome Ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians. Thus there is no reason to celebrate the rationality or freedom of the West over and above the rest of human history.
Postcolonialism is a movement in scholarship that argues the effects of colonialism persist in spite of decolonization. As Fanon and Said argue, the West and the white is privileged and pronounced the true humanity which knows itself while all others are marginalized and denounced as savage and ignorant.
Franz Fanon (1925 – 1961)
Franz Fanon was a philosopher, existentialist, Freudian and Marxist who began his career in psychiatry and became a revolutionary whose writings are one of the central sources of the Postcolonial school of thought along with Edward Said. Fanon’s two most famous works are the Wretched of the Earth (or Damned of the Earth, as an alternative translation of the French title) and Black Skin, White Masks. His writings have been an inspiration to many anti-racist and anti-establishment groups including the Black Panthers.
Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony as it remains today similar to US control of Puerto Rico. Though middle class, he witnessed the racist brutality of the French military toward the African population who were descended from slaves brought by the French to Martinique to work on plantations, as Africans had been brought to Haiti by the French and to Jamaica by the British. Nevertheless, Fanon joined the French military fighting Germany and Italy in Algeria. When Germany was defeated, the white soldiers were featured in parades while the black soldiers were removed from sight. Fanon went to France and studied psychology and medicine, becoming a doctor and psychiatrist. He also studied philosophy, and attended lectures by the Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, former student of Husserl like Heidegger, who argued that phenomenology and existentialism must be put in the context of the human body and physical experience like Freud and later Korzybski and Piaget.
In 1952, Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks as an expansion of his doctorial thesis, arguing that colonialism had a destructive impact on the physical and mental health of black people. Soon after writing the book he moved to Algeria to practice psychiatry, soon becoming the head of service for a major psychiatric hospital. Fanon began experimenting with therapy that took cultural background of Arabic and black patients and the effects of racism into account. When the Algerian Revolution against the French broke out (well portrayed in the famous French film The Battle of Algiers), he sided with and secretly supported the revolutionaries as a member of the Algerian Liberation Front, providing them with medical treatment and supplies. Fanon encouraged and trained interns and nurses to support the cause, and in 1957 Fanon was deported from Algeria and the hospital dismantled. Fanon became a member of the close existentialist circle of the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in France who followed the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and Sartre would later write the preface and lend his fame to The Damned of the Earth, writing famously that it was not a book for white people but white people should have the courage to read to come to a greater understanding of what is at stake for the oppressed in a world dominated by ignorant and racist first world European people.
In the Damned of the Earth, which was published only in 1961 just before his death, Fanon argued that colonialism had taught black people to interiorize racism such that they considered themselves evil and ugly and become self-destructive and violent against their fellow black people. Fanon, in accord with the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, saw racism as a form of lying to oneself to avoid the endless transformation of our existence and the questioning gaze of the other. The black body and mind is denigrated to affirm and celebrate the West, white culture and achievements including colonial control of the globe.
Just as Jews are marginalized as the abnormally mental human subspecies, black people are marginalized as overly physical, and thus sensual, musical, and sexual. While Marx argues that class is the central struggle, the rich oppressing the poor and the poor rising up in revolution, Fanon argues that racial inequality is the key to class oppression. Rather than merely “celebrate diversity”, all the while supporting the idea that Western culture is rational and other cultures are less rational, we must accept not only the rationality of all people but our own individual irrationality as human beings. Thus, we accept the rationality and irrationality of white, black and all people, getting beyond the Manichean categorical dualistic thinking that separates both black from white and rational from irrational.
However, going beyond the simple universal humanism of Sartre, Fanon argued that black culture asserting itself as an “other” to white culture is valuable in the struggle, so we should celebrate black culture as an independent and separate voice while celebrating human equality and unity. Rather than impose capitalism or communism, we should allow economies and nations to develop individually and see what works for each local group. Gramsci argued for the same in the wake of Stalin while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime. Through continuous bottom-up transformation of society (much like Trotsky had wanted for Soviet Russia), we can understand and enable the individual, the various cultures, and the whole.
Fanon argued that in some cases, such as the American Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, violence is an appropriate means for resistance to oppression and brutality. Many Black Panther leaders and supporters, including Marcuse’s student Angela Davis, read this text in Oakland and applied it to their own violent and brutal oppression by the Oakland Police and began carrying shotguns to defend themselves and their community, technically not a crime if the weapon is unloaded and unconcealed. Soon, city ordinances were passed to make this illegal in spite of the fact that no one had considered this a threat before the Black Panthers. Fanon remained a revolutionary for the rest of his life, writing on tactics and support structures to aid African rebels and all third world people attempting to gain independence from European colonial powers. For this, there were numerous assassination attempts made on his life. It is rumored that the CIA prevented Fanon from receiving treatment for leukemia just before his death in America. In 1965, four years after Fanon’s death, Time Magazine wrote that he was “an apostle of violence” and “a prisoner of hate” after the assassination of Malcolm X. Fanon likely would have replied, “You and I both, Time Magazine”.
Edward Said (1935 – 2003)
Edward Said, like Fanon one of the central sources of Postcolonialism, was a Palestinian American and professor at Columbia University who grew up Palestinian Christian during the founding of Israel and the wars that followed. Like Chomsky, he first got tenure in another subject (Comparative Literature) before he became a famous cultural critic and hip within left leaning academia like Marcuse and Foucault. He is most famous for his book Orientalism (1978), which argues that “the Occident” an old term that has been replaced since the 1950s by “the West”, views “the Orient” as other through a Manichean lens much like Fanon describes that Said labels “Orientalism”. European white people, including scholars, identify reason and freedom with the West, as Western virtues, while marginalizing other large cultural groups such as African, Chinese, Indian and Islamic as ignorant, authoritarian, emotional, and unselfconscious. Said is particularly focused on Eurocentric prejudice against Islamic cultures and populations, criticizing the romantic portrayal of the wonders of the East by Renaissance painters as well as modern day scholarship. The East, the Orient, is presented as an alien place full of wondrous splendor but also authoritarian despots and pre-scientific irrationality.
Today, we see much of the same in pundits labeling Muslims as a violent and unreasonable people. Bush saying “They hate our freedom” rather than looking to economic oppression originally structured through colonialism and now alive and well in spite of decolonization is a perfect example. Rather than understand September 11th as a result of colonialism, it is presented as a clash of civilizations between the reasonable and free West and the ignorant and authoritarian Islamic Middle East. Asia and China, as Russia was, is seen in a similar light. Russia was the East, vs. America and Britain as the West openly in the rhetoric. My professor Ken Jowitt, a specialist in Eastern Europe during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, told a full auditorium, his political science classroom, that since the fall of the Soviet Union America needs a new enemy, and that it is either going to be Islamic terrorism or communist China. This was less than a year before September 11th. He had argued this in 1990 in a piece included in his book, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, published in Berkeley. This was 10 years before September 11th, and we are still involved in multiple wars in the Middle East 10 years after.
Especially given this situation today, Said is hip on campuses around the world, his work spawning many followers including the author of the book Said and the Unsaid, a joke only funny to humanities graduate students. The TV show Lost, which names several characters after philosophers and scientists, named its Middle Eastern character Said, a name which means 'happy' in Arabic.
You can watch Said speak on YouTube. We will be watching these clips in class.
Edward Said On 'Orientalism'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjlRR-qRkcc
Edward Said, "The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations" 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo
Before Europe rose and dominated the world by the mid-1700s, China and Islam were vast empires that developed technology, science, law and culture. Islam was in fact the last great contiguous land empire, stretching from Spain to China. Ironically, Chinese achievements such as ships, gunpowder and magnetic compasses, developed further by Muslims with algebra employed in such fields as cartography (mapping the world), enabled Europe to sail to Africa and the Americas, and to set up colonial empires that could be controlled in spite of separation by great distances. America became the largest slave colony in all of history, and just as Britain ruled the sea less than a century ago America now rules the skies as well as corporate economics. We can now dominate independent others. Chomsky and Zinn are two critics of American empire and its brutality, as well as the fact that “the West” is still hailed as the authoritative voice, the voice of authority and objectivity above and beyond all other cultures.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture before Europe, and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of culture, technology and science. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant of Islamic achievements as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. Here are some awesome Ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians. Thus there is no reason to celebrate the rationality or freedom of the West over and above the rest of human history.
Postcolonialism is a movement in scholarship that argues the effects of colonialism persist in spite of decolonization. As Fanon and Said argue, the West and the white is privileged and pronounced the true humanity which knows itself while all others are marginalized and denounced as savage and ignorant.
Franz Fanon (1925 – 1961)
Franz Fanon was a philosopher, existentialist, Freudian and Marxist who began his career in psychiatry and became a revolutionary whose writings are one of the central sources of the Postcolonial school of thought along with Edward Said. Fanon’s two most famous works are the Wretched of the Earth (or Damned of the Earth, as an alternative translation of the French title) and Black Skin, White Masks. His writings have been an inspiration to many anti-racist and anti-establishment groups including the Black Panthers.
Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony as it remains today similar to US control of Puerto Rico. Though middle class, he witnessed the racist brutality of the French military toward the African population who were descended from slaves brought by the French to Martinique to work on plantations, as Africans had been brought to Haiti by the French and to Jamaica by the British. Nevertheless, Fanon joined the French military fighting Germany and Italy in Algeria. When Germany was defeated, the white soldiers were featured in parades while the black soldiers were removed from sight. Fanon went to France and studied psychology and medicine, becoming a doctor and psychiatrist. He also studied philosophy, and attended lectures by the Phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, former student of Husserl like Heidegger, who argued that phenomenology and existentialism must be put in the context of the human body and physical experience like Freud and later Korzybski and Piaget.
In 1952, Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks as an expansion of his doctorial thesis, arguing that colonialism had a destructive impact on the physical and mental health of black people. Soon after writing the book he moved to Algeria to practice psychiatry, soon becoming the head of service for a major psychiatric hospital. Fanon began experimenting with therapy that took cultural background of Arabic and black patients and the effects of racism into account. When the Algerian Revolution against the French broke out (well portrayed in the famous French film The Battle of Algiers), he sided with and secretly supported the revolutionaries as a member of the Algerian Liberation Front, providing them with medical treatment and supplies. Fanon encouraged and trained interns and nurses to support the cause, and in 1957 Fanon was deported from Algeria and the hospital dismantled. Fanon became a member of the close existentialist circle of the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in France who followed the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and Sartre would later write the preface and lend his fame to The Damned of the Earth, writing famously that it was not a book for white people but white people should have the courage to read to come to a greater understanding of what is at stake for the oppressed in a world dominated by ignorant and racist first world European people.
In the Damned of the Earth, which was published only in 1961 just before his death, Fanon argued that colonialism had taught black people to interiorize racism such that they considered themselves evil and ugly and become self-destructive and violent against their fellow black people. Fanon, in accord with the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, saw racism as a form of lying to oneself to avoid the endless transformation of our existence and the questioning gaze of the other. The black body and mind is denigrated to affirm and celebrate the West, white culture and achievements including colonial control of the globe.
Just as Jews are marginalized as the abnormally mental human subspecies, black people are marginalized as overly physical, and thus sensual, musical, and sexual. While Marx argues that class is the central struggle, the rich oppressing the poor and the poor rising up in revolution, Fanon argues that racial inequality is the key to class oppression. Rather than merely “celebrate diversity”, all the while supporting the idea that Western culture is rational and other cultures are less rational, we must accept not only the rationality of all people but our own individual irrationality as human beings. Thus, we accept the rationality and irrationality of white, black and all people, getting beyond the Manichean categorical dualistic thinking that separates both black from white and rational from irrational.
However, going beyond the simple universal humanism of Sartre, Fanon argued that black culture asserting itself as an “other” to white culture is valuable in the struggle, so we should celebrate black culture as an independent and separate voice while celebrating human equality and unity. Rather than impose capitalism or communism, we should allow economies and nations to develop individually and see what works for each local group. Gramsci argued for the same in the wake of Stalin while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime. Through continuous bottom-up transformation of society (much like Trotsky had wanted for Soviet Russia), we can understand and enable the individual, the various cultures, and the whole.
Fanon argued that in some cases, such as the American Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, violence is an appropriate means for resistance to oppression and brutality. Many Black Panther leaders and supporters, including Marcuse’s student Angela Davis, read this text in Oakland and applied it to their own violent and brutal oppression by the Oakland Police and began carrying shotguns to defend themselves and their community, technically not a crime if the weapon is unloaded and unconcealed. Soon, city ordinances were passed to make this illegal in spite of the fact that no one had considered this a threat before the Black Panthers. Fanon remained a revolutionary for the rest of his life, writing on tactics and support structures to aid African rebels and all third world people attempting to gain independence from European colonial powers. For this, there were numerous assassination attempts made on his life. It is rumored that the CIA prevented Fanon from receiving treatment for leukemia just before his death in America. In 1965, four years after Fanon’s death, Time Magazine wrote that he was “an apostle of violence” and “a prisoner of hate” after the assassination of Malcolm X. Fanon likely would have replied, “You and I both, Time Magazine”.
Edward Said (1935 – 2003)
Edward Said, like Fanon one of the central sources of Postcolonialism, was a Palestinian American and professor at Columbia University who grew up Palestinian Christian during the founding of Israel and the wars that followed. Like Chomsky, he first got tenure in another subject (Comparative Literature) before he became a famous cultural critic and hip within left leaning academia like Marcuse and Foucault. He is most famous for his book Orientalism (1978), which argues that “the Occident” an old term that has been replaced since the 1950s by “the West”, views “the Orient” as other through a Manichean lens much like Fanon describes that Said labels “Orientalism”. European white people, including scholars, identify reason and freedom with the West, as Western virtues, while marginalizing other large cultural groups such as African, Chinese, Indian and Islamic as ignorant, authoritarian, emotional, and unselfconscious. Said is particularly focused on Eurocentric prejudice against Islamic cultures and populations, criticizing the romantic portrayal of the wonders of the East by Renaissance painters as well as modern day scholarship. The East, the Orient, is presented as an alien place full of wondrous splendor but also authoritarian despots and pre-scientific irrationality.
Today, we see much of the same in pundits labeling Muslims as a violent and unreasonable people. Bush saying “They hate our freedom” rather than looking to economic oppression originally structured through colonialism and now alive and well in spite of decolonization is a perfect example. Rather than understand September 11th as a result of colonialism, it is presented as a clash of civilizations between the reasonable and free West and the ignorant and authoritarian Islamic Middle East. Asia and China, as Russia was, is seen in a similar light. Russia was the East, vs. America and Britain as the West openly in the rhetoric. My professor Ken Jowitt, a specialist in Eastern Europe during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, told a full auditorium, his political science classroom, that since the fall of the Soviet Union America needs a new enemy, and that it is either going to be Islamic terrorism or communist China. This was less than a year before September 11th. He had argued this in 1990 in a piece included in his book, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, published in Berkeley. This was 10 years before September 11th, and we are still involved in multiple wars in the Middle East 10 years after.
Especially given this situation today, Said is hip on campuses around the world, his work spawning many followers including the author of the book Said and the Unsaid, a joke only funny to humanities graduate students. The TV show Lost, which names several characters after philosophers and scientists, named its Middle Eastern character Said, a name which means 'happy' in Arabic.
You can watch Said speak on YouTube. We will be watching these clips in class.
Edward Said On 'Orientalism'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjlRR-qRkcc
Edward Said, "The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations" 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boBzrqF4vmo
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Documentary Film List
I have been asked for a list of documentaries I have used in creating and teaching Ethics, Social & Political Philosophy. Here is the list, which I will add to over time.
Italian Fascism in Color
The Russian Revolution in Color
The Sorrow and the Pity – French acceptance of Nazi occupation
The Fog of War – McNamara discusses his role in the Vietnam War
Control Room – follows Al Jazera in reporting during the Iraq War
Hearts and Minds – America’s distortions of the Vietnam War
The Trials of Henry Kissinger – Kissinger’s role in Vietnam and Latin America
War on Democracy – John Pilger shows us the Pink Tide of Latin America
South of the Border – Oliver Stone shows us the Pink Tide of Latin America
Our Brand is Crisis – US democrat strategists work in South America
American Drug War: The Last White Hope
The Corporation – how corporations are powerful and problematic
Inside Job – how Wall St. and economics professors caused the financial crisis
Life & Debt – how the US and IMF are making Jamaica poorer
The End of Poverty – how economic policy makes the poor poorer
American Anarchism
The Weather Underground – 60s radicals and violent activism
Food Matters – the poor state of healthcare and lack of nutrition awareness
Food Inc. – corporate food production and its impact on health and the environment
Supersize Me – Fast food and its effect on health and economics
The Botany of Desire – how four plants have interacted with humans over history
Italian Fascism in Color
The Russian Revolution in Color
The Sorrow and the Pity – French acceptance of Nazi occupation
The Fog of War – McNamara discusses his role in the Vietnam War
Control Room – follows Al Jazera in reporting during the Iraq War
Hearts and Minds – America’s distortions of the Vietnam War
The Trials of Henry Kissinger – Kissinger’s role in Vietnam and Latin America
War on Democracy – John Pilger shows us the Pink Tide of Latin America
South of the Border – Oliver Stone shows us the Pink Tide of Latin America
Our Brand is Crisis – US democrat strategists work in South America
American Drug War: The Last White Hope
The Corporation – how corporations are powerful and problematic
Inside Job – how Wall St. and economics professors caused the financial crisis
Life & Debt – how the US and IMF are making Jamaica poorer
The End of Poverty – how economic policy makes the poor poorer
American Anarchism
The Weather Underground – 60s radicals and violent activism
Food Matters – the poor state of healthcare and lack of nutrition awareness
Food Inc. – corporate food production and its impact on health and the environment
Supersize Me – Fast food and its effect on health and economics
The Botany of Desire – how four plants have interacted with humans over history
Ethics: Sexism & Feminism
Introducing Prejudice (Sexism & Racism)
A friend of mine had a horrible experience last year when I was preparing this lecture on sexism and the next on racism for the first time. He was playing video games online, and one of the players asked if anybody was black in the most offensive way possible. My friend, who is black, said he did not know how to respond and simply said nothing in return. He said he was still not sure if he should have said something or not, and that this was the first OVERT racism he had experienced in the new millennium. He made a further observation that I have found quite valuable in describing racism and sexism in America today: While OVERT prejudice is often and in most places rare today, COVERT prejudice is constant and continuous. While slurs, mob violence and other open acts of racism are rare, we still live in a culture that is racially divided with institutions plagued by institutional racism. While women wear pants and are not openly called “doll” or “baby” so much anymore, the glass ceiling remains alive and well.
Just a little while ago, overt prejudice was the law of the land. Women were told openly, by teachers and scientists, that they were intellectually and socially inferior to men. I have an older co-worker who told me that when he was in elementary school in San Diego in the early 1950s, his class put on a production of Little Black Sambo, a British children’s story about a boy in India. He got the main part of Sambo which he performed in blackface, applied by his teacher. Because the British called Indians and Africans “blacks”, but this term is not applied to Indians in America, the children in the chorus were dressed up in overalls and mammy dresses and the teacher had them sing ‘Camp Town Races’ and other traditional black songs from the days of slavery even though Sambo is Indian and not ‘black’ or from the South.
It is a sign of progress that overt racism and sexism has become covert. This change has happened almost entirely in the last 50 years, since the 60s and the triumphs made by the civil rights and feminist movements. Unfortunately this change has convinced many, both right and left wing, that racism and sexism no longer exist in America. The media, which downplays America’s social problems (as we looked at with propaganda), ignores racism and sexism for the most part. Worst of all, the few times it pays attention to these problems is when they serve the interests of the dominant majority or powers that be. As my friend noted, if you point at covert racism as a marginalized person, YOU are called racist. We hear about white people losing opportunities to affirmative action policies, but not about racism against minority groups that cost them the same sorts of opportunities. Just after 9/11, feminists made brief appearances on news programs to tell us of the evils that traditional Islamic culture inflicts upon women, and then feminism disappeared again from our televisions.
I enjoy looking at the animal kingdom to see the root behaviors of our human problems. While the apes are our most direct ancestors, the octopus is studied by researchers as one of our most important and ancient ancestors because it has a brain very much like our brain stem, the most basic and early part of our brains. Thus, studying octopi allows us to study the most basic behaviors of animals and ourselves. In one study, researchers took an octopus and shocked it whenever they showed it a teddy bear. Quite understandably, the octopus soon became very scared of the bear, but the experiment did not stop there. They took a second octopus, put it in a separate tank next to the other traumatized octopus so the two could not communicate other than by sight. They then showed the teddy bear to the first octopus, and let the second octopus watch the first be frightened. They then took away the first octopus and showed the second the teddy bear. Surprisingly, the second octopus was even more frightened of the teddy bear than the first. The researchers concluded that octopi can watch each other, as all animals with brains can, and learn about what they should like or fear from the behaviors of others. They also concluded, important for considering prejudice, that the second octopus was more scared than the first because it knew it should be scared of the teddy bear but did not know why it should be scared.
Consider that covert and institutional prejudice are learned reactions and fears, and they need never be consciously or overtly expressed or explained by those who teach or learn these reactions. In this sense, covert prejudice can be more severe and harder to unlearn because it is never consciously or overtly expressed and so there is no opportunity for direct criticism.
A good (or rather horrible) example of covert racism is covered in a famous article The Myth of Model Minority. The article was written in the 90s by Rosalind Chou, then an Asian-American college student who was upset by many articles in Time and Newsweek that warned of rising Asian-American voices as a new “special-interest” group. These articles seemed to speak with the voice of the “average” American, in the name of “the common interest”, a voice that feared Asian voices becoming like African and Latino voices of dissent. Apparently, the “common interest” is threatened by minority groups who have “special interests” that can pull in the opposite direction, and warns that while Asians have been quiet and supportive of the common interest in the past there are signs that they are becoming dissenting opinions like the voices of Africans and Latinos. Chou notes that Time, Newsweek and the mainstream media often speak with such a voice, a voice which does not identify itself as particular or white at all but is speaking in opposition to all other interests. Why are Asian and African and Latino American interests not “our” common interests? This is one of the dominant ways that covert racism remains a constant and very real experience for many Americans.
Today, we cover sexism and the reactions of feminists to the oppression of women. Just like for Asian Americans, feminists are not “us” in the media but a special interest group that opposes the common interest.
Myths and Realities of Gender Differences
The myth is that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and emotional. Grossman already has told us that there is no difference between men and women in combat physically or psychologically. Women are capable of violence and even rape, though our society does not recognize this yet (Melody’s lesbian serial rapist story, female gang members story, female serial murderers as poisoning, girls style of picking on people vs. boys). Women are not unconfident or emotional compared to men. Consider that it has been said women have a emotional-sexual cycle that lasts 28 days, men’s lasts 6 minutes.
What, then, are the differences between men and women?
Most obviously, there are physiological differences that relate to sex and procreation. In addition, there are two dynamics of psychology in which women differ from men.
First, men tend to seek power through NOT being social, isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek power through BEING social, interacting with others. The two best examples are 1) classic women ‘let’s talk’ vs. men ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ that becomes strained in many heterosexual relationships (choosing a restaurant, where women wants to discuss and man wants her to just pick), and 2) male boss ‘don’t bring it to me until it’s done and done right’ vs. female boss ‘let’s go over the details so we are on the same page’ difference of support offered.
Second, in sexuality, men like to watch women and women like to be watched, as one author has said, to watch themselves being watched. Women want to be desired, whereas men want to get what they desire. BOTH OF THESE differences are relative and to a degree, a leaning apart as I like to say. Thus, men like being watched and desired, and women don’t want to talk about everything.
Other than these RELATIVE oppositions, there is no good evidence to suggest that men and women are very much different at all. The work of Piaget suggests that men and women undergo the same mental development in the same set of stages at roughly the same ages.
History of Sexism and Feminism
In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions. Women were shamans, leaders, and there were often central female mother gods. As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase.
Why did this happen? The best explanation so far, one that does not rely on any inability of women, is the increased size of the community. When people lived in small communities, women could raise children at the center of the village, as the political center. As city states increased in size, it made it increasingly difficult to raise one’s children at the public center. Thus, women retreated into the home, and men, who had to be the go-for before now were the ones who could venture out of the home and into the centers of political activity. Today, devices allow women to raise children while fully participating in public life, but women are still confined in a way to the home in balancing life between home and career.
When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new movements have to appeal to women to take off. Consider that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam (the three largest cultures yet) all had to offer women better status and rights than they had previously (Naga princess story of Buddhism, stories of Jesus involving women and men cheating equally bad, Islamic law and divorce and consensual sex), but all three oppressed women (nuns can only teach kids).
Modern society has continued the trend, such that today women have equal legal status in many nations but covert sexism and a lack of women owning property persists. A united Nations 2004 report claims that women work 20% more a day on job and home together than men do (10 ½ hours to men 8 ¾ hours). Women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and worldwide own 1% of the property. Thus, sexism (overt AND covert) is quite alive, in spite of counter claims.
(Performance art piece with empty area of museum with card that says women who clean are the artists who have performed in this space).
Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women. The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too” (Kate Weber from high school assembly asks crowd ‘Who thinks women are equal to men?’ most everyone raised hands, ‘Then you are all feminists!’, impressed me much). It is a shame that people, men but ALSO women, are afraid of calling themselves feminists, largely from the backlash of the 80s between the second wave and third wave of feminism which said that “militant feminists” “hate men”.
There are three waves, each building on the last and addressing new issues from the last wave.
The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the 1920s in America and Britain.
The most famous figure is Susan B. Anthony. She argued that the abortion issue should be set aside to concentrate on women’s right to vote as an adult citizen and women’s right to refuse sex to their husbands (note Mohammed in the Ahadith says this in 600 CE, with problems today).
The first wave, not of course known as that till the second wave, ended in 1919 with 19th amendment to the constitution.
The second wave was the civil rights movement, the late 60s and early 70s which is also called the women’s liberation movement or ‘women’s lib’. Defined by Carol Hanisch’s phrase “The personal is political”, took off in early 60s and culminated in the civil rights act of 1966 (backed by both NOW and NAACP, the biggest US anti-sexism and racism groups together). While the first wave said ‘this is America so we deserve to vote’, the second wave was part of anti-establishment left movement that said that America was a corrupt institution that needed to be changed.
Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic (my German Hegel professor ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ speaking of feminists using Hegel).
.
The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another big book of the time (much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s), arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers, and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family (valium in the 50s, TV’s Madmen).
The major criticism of the movement, which only fully rose in the third wave:
Gloria Jean Watkins, known as ‘bell hooks’, early critic of 2nd wave as white middle class women empowerment that ignores all else in the name of ‘feminism’, thus hooks’ ‘womanism’.
The third wave was after the 80s backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early 90s and continues today. The third wave tried to not only pay attention to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal.
The two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them oppressed? I was talking with a co-worker the other day, and she said her son and his friends in high school think that feminists are hippie women who don’t shave their arm pits, hate men and think that the oppression of women is a thing of the past. Notice that this deals with these two issues: the kids misunderstand feminists as both anti-sex and not recognizing the battle is over.
First Issue: Structuralism of 50s & 60s vs. Post-Structuralism after 60s. De Beauvoir says that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’. Judith Butler (I saw speak on Wed) says that gender identity is performative. Both of these figures thus back the poststructuralist conception, that identity is created and performed.
Second Issue: If a woman puts on makeup and wears a short skirt, is she being oppressed or is she actively expressing her individual sexuality? Second wave came under fire from the third wave because feminists often told women that if they tried to be sexy they were being deceived and made into property (vs. my friend from Berkeley at the Lusty Lady, working for prostitute’s rights here and in the third world). This drew a fight between anti-pornography and prostitution feminists and younger pro-sex feminism. Pro-sex feminists ask, even if we are talking of abusive male style porn (vs. porn FOR lesbians), do you want to make porn illegal? Should we try to deny men watching women and lust, or should we empower the individual woman to live as freely and equally as men in a complex and messy world?
This is still a big issue, as many feminist authors have argued that TV and movies today SEEM to be pro-feminist (Sex and the City, Ali McBeal, Brigit Jones’ Diary) but in fact they are stories where a working white woman (and her friends) try to find the perfect man to find happiness.
Grrrl punk movement of the 90s, lead group Bikini Kill as third wave branch.
A friend of mine had a horrible experience last year when I was preparing this lecture on sexism and the next on racism for the first time. He was playing video games online, and one of the players asked if anybody was black in the most offensive way possible. My friend, who is black, said he did not know how to respond and simply said nothing in return. He said he was still not sure if he should have said something or not, and that this was the first OVERT racism he had experienced in the new millennium. He made a further observation that I have found quite valuable in describing racism and sexism in America today: While OVERT prejudice is often and in most places rare today, COVERT prejudice is constant and continuous. While slurs, mob violence and other open acts of racism are rare, we still live in a culture that is racially divided with institutions plagued by institutional racism. While women wear pants and are not openly called “doll” or “baby” so much anymore, the glass ceiling remains alive and well.
Just a little while ago, overt prejudice was the law of the land. Women were told openly, by teachers and scientists, that they were intellectually and socially inferior to men. I have an older co-worker who told me that when he was in elementary school in San Diego in the early 1950s, his class put on a production of Little Black Sambo, a British children’s story about a boy in India. He got the main part of Sambo which he performed in blackface, applied by his teacher. Because the British called Indians and Africans “blacks”, but this term is not applied to Indians in America, the children in the chorus were dressed up in overalls and mammy dresses and the teacher had them sing ‘Camp Town Races’ and other traditional black songs from the days of slavery even though Sambo is Indian and not ‘black’ or from the South.
It is a sign of progress that overt racism and sexism has become covert. This change has happened almost entirely in the last 50 years, since the 60s and the triumphs made by the civil rights and feminist movements. Unfortunately this change has convinced many, both right and left wing, that racism and sexism no longer exist in America. The media, which downplays America’s social problems (as we looked at with propaganda), ignores racism and sexism for the most part. Worst of all, the few times it pays attention to these problems is when they serve the interests of the dominant majority or powers that be. As my friend noted, if you point at covert racism as a marginalized person, YOU are called racist. We hear about white people losing opportunities to affirmative action policies, but not about racism against minority groups that cost them the same sorts of opportunities. Just after 9/11, feminists made brief appearances on news programs to tell us of the evils that traditional Islamic culture inflicts upon women, and then feminism disappeared again from our televisions.
I enjoy looking at the animal kingdom to see the root behaviors of our human problems. While the apes are our most direct ancestors, the octopus is studied by researchers as one of our most important and ancient ancestors because it has a brain very much like our brain stem, the most basic and early part of our brains. Thus, studying octopi allows us to study the most basic behaviors of animals and ourselves. In one study, researchers took an octopus and shocked it whenever they showed it a teddy bear. Quite understandably, the octopus soon became very scared of the bear, but the experiment did not stop there. They took a second octopus, put it in a separate tank next to the other traumatized octopus so the two could not communicate other than by sight. They then showed the teddy bear to the first octopus, and let the second octopus watch the first be frightened. They then took away the first octopus and showed the second the teddy bear. Surprisingly, the second octopus was even more frightened of the teddy bear than the first. The researchers concluded that octopi can watch each other, as all animals with brains can, and learn about what they should like or fear from the behaviors of others. They also concluded, important for considering prejudice, that the second octopus was more scared than the first because it knew it should be scared of the teddy bear but did not know why it should be scared.
Consider that covert and institutional prejudice are learned reactions and fears, and they need never be consciously or overtly expressed or explained by those who teach or learn these reactions. In this sense, covert prejudice can be more severe and harder to unlearn because it is never consciously or overtly expressed and so there is no opportunity for direct criticism.
A good (or rather horrible) example of covert racism is covered in a famous article The Myth of Model Minority. The article was written in the 90s by Rosalind Chou, then an Asian-American college student who was upset by many articles in Time and Newsweek that warned of rising Asian-American voices as a new “special-interest” group. These articles seemed to speak with the voice of the “average” American, in the name of “the common interest”, a voice that feared Asian voices becoming like African and Latino voices of dissent. Apparently, the “common interest” is threatened by minority groups who have “special interests” that can pull in the opposite direction, and warns that while Asians have been quiet and supportive of the common interest in the past there are signs that they are becoming dissenting opinions like the voices of Africans and Latinos. Chou notes that Time, Newsweek and the mainstream media often speak with such a voice, a voice which does not identify itself as particular or white at all but is speaking in opposition to all other interests. Why are Asian and African and Latino American interests not “our” common interests? This is one of the dominant ways that covert racism remains a constant and very real experience for many Americans.
Today, we cover sexism and the reactions of feminists to the oppression of women. Just like for Asian Americans, feminists are not “us” in the media but a special interest group that opposes the common interest.
Myths and Realities of Gender Differences
The myth is that women are docile, non-violent, unconfident, incompetent, and emotional. Grossman already has told us that there is no difference between men and women in combat physically or psychologically. Women are capable of violence and even rape, though our society does not recognize this yet (Melody’s lesbian serial rapist story, female gang members story, female serial murderers as poisoning, girls style of picking on people vs. boys). Women are not unconfident or emotional compared to men. Consider that it has been said women have a emotional-sexual cycle that lasts 28 days, men’s lasts 6 minutes.
What, then, are the differences between men and women?
Most obviously, there are physiological differences that relate to sex and procreation. In addition, there are two dynamics of psychology in which women differ from men.
First, men tend to seek power through NOT being social, isolating themselves and their opinions, whereas women tend to seek power through BEING social, interacting with others. The two best examples are 1) classic women ‘let’s talk’ vs. men ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ that becomes strained in many heterosexual relationships (choosing a restaurant, where women wants to discuss and man wants her to just pick), and 2) male boss ‘don’t bring it to me until it’s done and done right’ vs. female boss ‘let’s go over the details so we are on the same page’ difference of support offered.
Second, in sexuality, men like to watch women and women like to be watched, as one author has said, to watch themselves being watched. Women want to be desired, whereas men want to get what they desire. BOTH OF THESE differences are relative and to a degree, a leaning apart as I like to say. Thus, men like being watched and desired, and women don’t want to talk about everything.
Other than these RELATIVE oppositions, there is no good evidence to suggest that men and women are very much different at all. The work of Piaget suggests that men and women undergo the same mental development in the same set of stages at roughly the same ages.
History of Sexism and Feminism
In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions. Women were shamans, leaders, and there were often central female mother gods. As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase.
Why did this happen? The best explanation so far, one that does not rely on any inability of women, is the increased size of the community. When people lived in small communities, women could raise children at the center of the village, as the political center. As city states increased in size, it made it increasingly difficult to raise one’s children at the public center. Thus, women retreated into the home, and men, who had to be the go-for before now were the ones who could venture out of the home and into the centers of political activity. Today, devices allow women to raise children while fully participating in public life, but women are still confined in a way to the home in balancing life between home and career.
When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new movements have to appeal to women to take off. Consider that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam (the three largest cultures yet) all had to offer women better status and rights than they had previously (Naga princess story of Buddhism, stories of Jesus involving women and men cheating equally bad, Islamic law and divorce and consensual sex), but all three oppressed women (nuns can only teach kids).
Modern society has continued the trend, such that today women have equal legal status in many nations but covert sexism and a lack of women owning property persists. A united Nations 2004 report claims that women work 20% more a day on job and home together than men do (10 ½ hours to men 8 ¾ hours). Women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and worldwide own 1% of the property. Thus, sexism (overt AND covert) is quite alive, in spite of counter claims.
(Performance art piece with empty area of museum with card that says women who clean are the artists who have performed in this space).
Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women. The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too” (Kate Weber from high school assembly asks crowd ‘Who thinks women are equal to men?’ most everyone raised hands, ‘Then you are all feminists!’, impressed me much). It is a shame that people, men but ALSO women, are afraid of calling themselves feminists, largely from the backlash of the 80s between the second wave and third wave of feminism which said that “militant feminists” “hate men”.
There are three waves, each building on the last and addressing new issues from the last wave.
The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the 1920s in America and Britain.
The most famous figure is Susan B. Anthony. She argued that the abortion issue should be set aside to concentrate on women’s right to vote as an adult citizen and women’s right to refuse sex to their husbands (note Mohammed in the Ahadith says this in 600 CE, with problems today).
The first wave, not of course known as that till the second wave, ended in 1919 with 19th amendment to the constitution.
The second wave was the civil rights movement, the late 60s and early 70s which is also called the women’s liberation movement or ‘women’s lib’. Defined by Carol Hanisch’s phrase “The personal is political”, took off in early 60s and culminated in the civil rights act of 1966 (backed by both NOW and NAACP, the biggest US anti-sexism and racism groups together). While the first wave said ‘this is America so we deserve to vote’, the second wave was part of anti-establishment left movement that said that America was a corrupt institution that needed to be changed.
Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic (my German Hegel professor ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ speaking of feminists using Hegel).
.
The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another big book of the time (much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s), arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers, and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family (valium in the 50s, TV’s Madmen).
The major criticism of the movement, which only fully rose in the third wave:
Gloria Jean Watkins, known as ‘bell hooks’, early critic of 2nd wave as white middle class women empowerment that ignores all else in the name of ‘feminism’, thus hooks’ ‘womanism’.
The third wave was after the 80s backlash against the 60s progressive movements that began in the early 90s and continues today. The third wave tried to not only pay attention to black women, Latina women, third world women, but also to break down the idea of women as essentially different from men but equal.
The two big issues, which are still being fought out today, are 1) Is gender a subjective construct (in the mind) or social reality (in the world)? And 2) Did feminism accomplish what it set out to achieve, or did it in part hurt its own efforts in telling women that sex makes them oppressed? I was talking with a co-worker the other day, and she said her son and his friends in high school think that feminists are hippie women who don’t shave their arm pits, hate men and think that the oppression of women is a thing of the past. Notice that this deals with these two issues: the kids misunderstand feminists as both anti-sex and not recognizing the battle is over.
First Issue: Structuralism of 50s & 60s vs. Post-Structuralism after 60s. De Beauvoir says that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’. Judith Butler (I saw speak on Wed) says that gender identity is performative. Both of these figures thus back the poststructuralist conception, that identity is created and performed.
Second Issue: If a woman puts on makeup and wears a short skirt, is she being oppressed or is she actively expressing her individual sexuality? Second wave came under fire from the third wave because feminists often told women that if they tried to be sexy they were being deceived and made into property (vs. my friend from Berkeley at the Lusty Lady, working for prostitute’s rights here and in the third world). This drew a fight between anti-pornography and prostitution feminists and younger pro-sex feminism. Pro-sex feminists ask, even if we are talking of abusive male style porn (vs. porn FOR lesbians), do you want to make porn illegal? Should we try to deny men watching women and lust, or should we empower the individual woman to live as freely and equally as men in a complex and messy world?
This is still a big issue, as many feminist authors have argued that TV and movies today SEEM to be pro-feminist (Sex and the City, Ali McBeal, Brigit Jones’ Diary) but in fact they are stories where a working white woman (and her friends) try to find the perfect man to find happiness.
Grrrl punk movement of the 90s, lead group Bikini Kill as third wave branch.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is one of the most important thinkers in academics today. His early book, the Tractatus, and his later book, the Philosophical Investigations, are considered two of the most important influences for the American and British Analytic school of philosophy, the dominant school of philosophy in America.
In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.
Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.
The Life and Thought of Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.
The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.
Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.
He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.
He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.
When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.
Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.
While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.
In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.
In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.
In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his collegues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.
THE TRACTATUS
In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.
If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.
Logic consists of things that are always necessary or impossible. For instance, if one knows A is necessarily true, then one also knows that it is impossible that A is false. Notice that in his early thought Wittgenstein follows Russell and Frege in believing the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and from these alone we can build the perfect interlocking system of necessary truths that is logic.
THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein put forward a system of tautologies structured by truth tables, arguing that basic elements like ‘true’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ have a necessary structure but do not mean anything in themselves while propositions that have meaning are always contingent, dependent and possible. In this early period, Wittgenstein believed that ‘and’ always has exactly the same structure but no meaning in itself, while a proposition like ‘I have an apple and a pear’ has a meaning but is only true if I have both an apple and a pear. This is why Wittgenstein became upset with positivists, like his teacher and friend Russell, who tried to use his system to discover primary and necessary facts in the world.
At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.
In the early thought of his Tractatus tried to lay the ground for a complete system of logic, such that ‘and’ always has the same, perfectly defined meaning. In his later thought, Wittgenstein argued against this view. Just as he argued against positivists that there are no necessary facts in the world, he came to argue that no individual thing, not even ‘and’ or ‘true’ in logic, can have a single or necessary meaning. He came to see that, like the positivists, he had attempted to provide singular meanings for things that merely have common uses.
There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.
Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation of Freud for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.
Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially ashy or wet because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work.
In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud had tried to boil human relations and the mind down to sex or he himself had tried to boil logic down to its necessary truths.
The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to describing and re-describing things. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possibly description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things.
One favorite way to approach this today is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models, are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
In this monumental work, one of my favorites, Wittgenstein is arguing for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the objectivist position of positivism and the subjectivist position of skepticism. He argues against scientific positivism/realism (facts are in the world), and also psychological skepticism (meaning is in the head). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against each quote in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act.
In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either in the head or (exclusively) in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place.
Games and rules gather people together, but also individuals can always variously interpret rules and meanings. Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Lao Zi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.
Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy.
7- Language games (actions and language are interwoven as forms of life)
11- Language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity
12- cabin in a locomotive, with crank wheel, pump, switch and brake
15- Naming is like attaching a label, and just this (hello my name is sticker).
17- Classification always is with purpose/point of view, like chessmen classes.
18- Language is like an old city, with side streets and squares (vs. logic matrix of Tractatus)
22- vs. Frege’s inner assumption of a sentence is rather the sentence in its place.
57-58- Red exists, yes, but not just in my head or in the world, but in my seeing, using and talking about red here and there with others, not apart from this.
65- no essence other than the family resemblance association.
66- use ‘games’ as example of family, a complicated network.
67- vs. Confucius, not one thread within (compassion as essence) but rather the twist of the chord is itself the only consistent thread that runs all the way through.
69- When we do draw rigid boundaries, it has a use and purpose in a game/culture we share with others. We do not draw boundaries because ‘that is what there is’, nor ‘simply how I see it’.
Read 80- example of disappearing chair
Read 83- Rules to aimless ball game of catch, but unwritten (who do you throw it to?)
Read 84- We don’t need to stop up all the cracks to live games.
85- a rule is like a signpost, not a guarantee in stone.
89- it seemed like the essence lay within the thing, waiting, but in fact we want to interconnect the thing with many other things, expanding it, getting more of its interrelations and possibilities interacting with other things.
90- It is investigating the possibilities of X, not penetrating X. Analysis is comparison and substitution, not getting to secret core. 91- Lang misleads.
99- Trying for definite sense other than sentence is like ‘locking’ man in room with the window open. We want a ‘must’, but too many openings to plug all (HD and Alice).
106- It would be like repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers.
107- A Tractatus logic would be slippery ice, no friction, like ‘being’. Back to rough ground!
108- Need to remove crystalline by reversing investigation (Foucault and capillary)
109- do away with explanation, description takes its place (all we really were doing).
IN FACT, this means that our explanations are descriptions, sketches, not anchors or bedrock.
118- There is no need for final definitions or explanations, and saying this is not a nihilism that can mean nothing but rather CLEARING GROUND for meaning.
133- the real discovery is that we can start and stop philosophizing when we want to
478- fearing hand in flame, 1000 voices/reasons drown each other out together
498- towards nonsense and humor, like philosophy, showing us forms of life.
499- Calling something ‘nonsense’ or ‘no sense’ or ‘crazy’ is setting up a fence for a purpose, in a game/culture with others. It is not just that there is no meaning there.
500- ‘Senseless’ is like withdrawn from circulation (of library)
513- Consider, no sense unless trying to fit on a rollercoaster or something, a context could give it sense, but it sounds funny at first to everyone.
514-515- Rose in the Dark (Dada and Surrealism)
Book II- ‘Jastrow’ (Wittgenstein’s) Duck Rabbit, more towards art next time.
In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.
Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.
The Life and Thought of Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.
The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.
Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.
He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.
He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.
When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.
Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.
While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.
In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.
In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.
In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his collegues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.
THE TRACTATUS
In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.
If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.
Logic consists of things that are always necessary or impossible. For instance, if one knows A is necessarily true, then one also knows that it is impossible that A is false. Notice that in his early thought Wittgenstein follows Russell and Frege in believing the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and from these alone we can build the perfect interlocking system of necessary truths that is logic.
THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein put forward a system of tautologies structured by truth tables, arguing that basic elements like ‘true’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ have a necessary structure but do not mean anything in themselves while propositions that have meaning are always contingent, dependent and possible. In this early period, Wittgenstein believed that ‘and’ always has exactly the same structure but no meaning in itself, while a proposition like ‘I have an apple and a pear’ has a meaning but is only true if I have both an apple and a pear. This is why Wittgenstein became upset with positivists, like his teacher and friend Russell, who tried to use his system to discover primary and necessary facts in the world.
At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.
In the early thought of his Tractatus tried to lay the ground for a complete system of logic, such that ‘and’ always has the same, perfectly defined meaning. In his later thought, Wittgenstein argued against this view. Just as he argued against positivists that there are no necessary facts in the world, he came to argue that no individual thing, not even ‘and’ or ‘true’ in logic, can have a single or necessary meaning. He came to see that, like the positivists, he had attempted to provide singular meanings for things that merely have common uses.
There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.
Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation of Freud for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.
Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially ashy or wet because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work.
In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud had tried to boil human relations and the mind down to sex or he himself had tried to boil logic down to its necessary truths.
The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to describing and re-describing things. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possibly description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things.
One favorite way to approach this today is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models, are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
In this monumental work, one of my favorites, Wittgenstein is arguing for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the objectivist position of positivism and the subjectivist position of skepticism. He argues against scientific positivism/realism (facts are in the world), and also psychological skepticism (meaning is in the head). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against each quote in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act.
In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either in the head or (exclusively) in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place.
Games and rules gather people together, but also individuals can always variously interpret rules and meanings. Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Lao Zi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.
Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy.
7- Language games (actions and language are interwoven as forms of life)
11- Language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity
12- cabin in a locomotive, with crank wheel, pump, switch and brake
15- Naming is like attaching a label, and just this (hello my name is sticker).
17- Classification always is with purpose/point of view, like chessmen classes.
18- Language is like an old city, with side streets and squares (vs. logic matrix of Tractatus)
22- vs. Frege’s inner assumption of a sentence is rather the sentence in its place.
57-58- Red exists, yes, but not just in my head or in the world, but in my seeing, using and talking about red here and there with others, not apart from this.
65- no essence other than the family resemblance association.
66- use ‘games’ as example of family, a complicated network.
67- vs. Confucius, not one thread within (compassion as essence) but rather the twist of the chord is itself the only consistent thread that runs all the way through.
69- When we do draw rigid boundaries, it has a use and purpose in a game/culture we share with others. We do not draw boundaries because ‘that is what there is’, nor ‘simply how I see it’.
Read 80- example of disappearing chair
Read 83- Rules to aimless ball game of catch, but unwritten (who do you throw it to?)
Read 84- We don’t need to stop up all the cracks to live games.
85- a rule is like a signpost, not a guarantee in stone.
89- it seemed like the essence lay within the thing, waiting, but in fact we want to interconnect the thing with many other things, expanding it, getting more of its interrelations and possibilities interacting with other things.
90- It is investigating the possibilities of X, not penetrating X. Analysis is comparison and substitution, not getting to secret core. 91- Lang misleads.
99- Trying for definite sense other than sentence is like ‘locking’ man in room with the window open. We want a ‘must’, but too many openings to plug all (HD and Alice).
106- It would be like repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers.
107- A Tractatus logic would be slippery ice, no friction, like ‘being’. Back to rough ground!
108- Need to remove crystalline by reversing investigation (Foucault and capillary)
109- do away with explanation, description takes its place (all we really were doing).
IN FACT, this means that our explanations are descriptions, sketches, not anchors or bedrock.
118- There is no need for final definitions or explanations, and saying this is not a nihilism that can mean nothing but rather CLEARING GROUND for meaning.
133- the real discovery is that we can start and stop philosophizing when we want to
478- fearing hand in flame, 1000 voices/reasons drown each other out together
498- towards nonsense and humor, like philosophy, showing us forms of life.
499- Calling something ‘nonsense’ or ‘no sense’ or ‘crazy’ is setting up a fence for a purpose, in a game/culture with others. It is not just that there is no meaning there.
500- ‘Senseless’ is like withdrawn from circulation (of library)
513- Consider, no sense unless trying to fit on a rollercoaster or something, a context could give it sense, but it sounds funny at first to everyone.
514-515- Rose in the Dark (Dada and Surrealism)
Book II- ‘Jastrow’ (Wittgenstein’s) Duck Rabbit, more towards art next time.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Hitler
Heidegger, his Use of Nietzsche and Support of the Nazis
For a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Martin Heidegger, one of the most celebrated German philosophers today, was a member and supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took authoritarian control. Though he eventually came to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was for this under surveillance by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he enthusiastically embraced their rise and seizure of power, spoke at propaganda rallies in several cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a rebirth of Western civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of ancient Greece.
Because I myself am into and influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well as Marcuse and Foucault who have both been influenced by these three, and because Heidegger took the worst of Hegel (Eurocentrism, the birth of self-conscious individualism in ancient Greece and the destiny and realization of ancient Greek thought in Germany) and the best of Nietzsche (existentialism, the idea of absolute truth as denial of death, perspective, interpretation and transformation), for me Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is the question we would often prefer to ask our opponent rather than ourselves: how is it that our systems aim for the greatest human fulfillment yet support the worst practices of humankind, including genocide, slavery, and censorship?
Heidegger wrote in his major work Sein und Zeit, Being and Time (1927), that authentic being is questioning, that categorical and absolute truth are ignorance of one’s own human nature, and every revealing is a concealing. How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent chance for questioning, renewal and transformation? Just as Heidegger argues that being is authentic as questioning or inauthentic as a denial of questioning, this is a question that philosophers should ask rather than avoid, particularly as all varieties of philosophy, including the religious and anti-religious, joined the Nazi cause.
Let us examine Heidegger’s thought, with a particular focus on his use of Nietzsche. For Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning of self-conscious questioning that is philosophy began in glorious ancient Greece with Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle. This set the European West apart from other cultures as philosophical. For Hegel and Heidegger, Germany was the natural culmination and destiny of Greek thought and philosophy, while for Nietzsche the Germans were fooling themselves through science, religion, nationalism and antisemitism into thinking they were the great race, and he moved to Switzerland, renounced his German citizenship and declared himself to be a citizen of no country. I myself would have preferred Nietzsche to be as critical of ancient Greek superiority as he was of German nationalism and antisemitism. In the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, Heidegger looks to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece in the hopes that he can reclaim this glorious past and rebirth of thought. Heidegger believed, like Hitler and Nietzsche though he was far more critical and cynical, that one should look to the Greeks to be German, as the Greeks were the rebellion that gave birth to authentic thinking and learning. Heidegger, as countless other professors and academics, confuses his own self easily with the identity of the ancient Greeks and the Western mind.
The Great Depression, the 1920s and 30s, was the time when Heidegger did his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time when many feared the fall of the West and the death of Christian European civilization. Heidegger, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an anti-modernist anti-technology romantic who spoke of Greece as a more glorious and meaningful time. These thinkers in turn influenced Marcuse, Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Later Adorno, Jewish like Marcuse, both having fled the Nazis for Switzerland and then New York, wrote a 1964 pamphlet, The Jargon of Authenticity, criticizing Heidegger for supporting the Nazis while calling for self-questioning, which is ironic given Adorno hated jazz and argued that music is over after Beethoven.
Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but in studying Neoplatonism he switched his study to philosophy and wrote his thesis on Duns Scotus. Husserl, the phenomenologist, took him under his wing as his star pupil, and as phenomenology (the school of studying the mind by focusing on how we experience the phenomena or things around us) rose to fame and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and followers of his own. Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical criticism of all philosophy and psychology up through Kant and Hegel. Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that consciousness is always directed toward something or away from something by intention. Nietzsche similarly believes that thought is always instinct and drive. Wanting, fearing, loving, and assessing objects is never neutral, nor is our own philosophical grasping of our grasping cold or objective. Husserl studied the various and often subtle ways we are intentional in our world under the banner of phenomenology, a term invented by Hegel but intended as an open speculative psychology by Husserl. The world and subject co-develop together in an evolving symbiotic relationship. Husserl kept writing and expanding his work, but rather than develop a new alphabet for thought as he had originally intended his work snowballed out of control and continued to amass until his death. Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work, but merged this with Nietzsche and took it in an anti-scientific existential direction. Heidegger forms his own insights based on the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl. Husserl’s scientific Freudian ego becomes Hegel’s dasein, or being-there. Heidegger emphasizes the open-ended multiplicity of being and interpretation romantically like Nietzsche.
Heidegger argues in Being and Time that philosophy means being a beginning, the way one weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean. We are thrown into the world, called “thrownness”, as a being-there, or there-being, in German, “dasein”. Heidegger is famous, some would say infamous, for inventing his own vocabulary and Heideggerians follow this jargon to an equally infamous extent. Welcome to Heidegger-speak 101. Heidegger asks, how do we experience reality before and as we arrange it? What is the ground of being that supports our views and values? The world is “worlding” around us and as us, and thus we are “being-in-the-world”. We approach the world, each other, and objects either as closed and identified or as mysterious, uncanny and miraculous. Industrialization and technology have disenchanted the world, and so we must question the world and re-enchant it. Mystery and truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when things break or go missing. My good friend who got me interested in philosophy, who was at the time a Heideggerian, used the example of dropping the soap as you take your morning shower. Objects and persons disappear until they are out of place or misused, and then we become conscious of them. Consider a poster on a wall that we stop seeing after time, which then becomes new again and leaps out if we call attention to it again. Consider Nazis, and times of crisis.
This tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can become ruptures. This is remarkably similar to ideas in communism and anarchism (especially among artists such as the Dada who believe we can reanimate and enchant the world to break beyond its boxes). Nietzsche, an existentialist like Heidegger, similarly romanticized ruptures and struggle with the categorical and the dead in thought. We build meaning as individuals, as groups and as cultures in the face of the infinite. While Nietzsche would implore us to strike out on our own here as an individual, and only individuality could give our meaning and perspective authenticity, Heidegger parts ways with Nietzsche and declares that our being-there is always a they as much as it is an “I”. As with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the individual comes into the world already populated by a “they”, and one is a part of this “them” as much as one is thrown against it. While I am in favor of this view, we must note that Heidegger’s identification with Germany and the Nazis is in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s renunciation of German citizenship and denunciation of German nationalism.
Heidegger famously argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight. Being and beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them. Time continuously gives us the present as it takes the present from us. Meaning is always historical, always has “historicity”. Remember that one of Hegel’s great contributions to philosophy was to understand all thought as historical process. For Heidegger, being is always bound up with time, and thus the title, “Being and Time”. Time is the horizon of being. As time and being are seen and unseen, so there can be no absolute judgment, interpretation or meaning. Nietzsche argues for a multiplicity of interpretation and meaning that cannot be reduced to a single objective truth. Care and life are always as much for oneself as much as for another who never fully arrives, just as we never reach the horizon as we walk.
For Freud, all thought is denial of sex. For Heidegger, all thought is denial of death. Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being, the conception of closed scientific facts and categorical eternal truths, is the way we cope with the fear of death. We are in a basic state of anxiety towards our world that extends over the horizon just as we are afraid of particular people and objects. Nietzsche gives Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can inauthentically ignore the void by turning to absolute immutable truths, or we can give up and find no meaning in life, but rather we should authentically give and create our own meaning as life itself, though again Nietzsche sees this as an individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social movements. Heidegger agrees that we must make our way from absolute being to nihilism and beyond to understand ourselves as essentially becoming and transformation. We imagine we and our truths simply exist as a denial of death and meaninglessness which have just as central a role to play in our questioning, discovery, and living. Out of the basic state of anxiety spring love, fear, rejoicing, suspicion, and a variety of ways we interact with our world. True freedom is realizing this and gaining self-conscious transparency. We must resist reducing ourselves, our truths and even objects as “ready-to-hand” if we wish to truly live. We kill the world and ourselves continuously in the attempt to avoid death, but if we accept death and meaninglessness, we are free to live and give our lives meaning. If we realize we are running off into the woods to avoid being lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at home. As for Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that new truths can freely grow in their place.
Hitler and the Rise of the Nazis
In Germany during the Great Depression communists, many of the leaders Jewish, gained many members and for a brief period took over the city of Munich. The right wing, including the military, corporate leaders of industry, and traditional authority leaders, organized the Freicorps as a paramilitary group for fighting communists, many to join the Nazis as they rose to power. Hitler and the Nazi party began mobilizing, marching, demonstrating, and street fighting against communists in this period. As in Italy, in the hard times communism and fascism were the radical options and sources of hope and renewal.
Adolf Hitler, a failed painter and architect, found that he had a talent for giving impassioned speeches, and he rose quickly to leadership of the group and attracted many new members. After he and other Nazis were given extremely light sentences after beating a communist, they attempted the Beer Hall Putsch (or coup) in 1923. Marching into a traditional beer hall where many right sided drinkers were socializing, Hitler announced that the revolution had come and they were taking the city. Hitler hoped that the police would join them or at least look the other way as the police did often for fascists in Italy and Germany, but in the ensuing fight 4 cops and 16 Nazis were killed. Hitler was given, by the same judge who sentenced him to one month in prison before, the lightest sentence possible, 9 months in prison, during which time he wrote Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, a political autobiography and polemic.
Disturbingly, Hitler writes that as a boy he saw nothing in antisemitism and that there was a Jewish boy in his class (who may or may not have been the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) who was strange but not frightening, and that it was only in the Depression and reading antisemetic works that Hitler began to see that the Jews controlled both capitalism and communism to control Germany and the world. In this work, he argues that Jews should be removed from German society, stripped of citizenship and public positions (including professorships), and expelled from the country for the Treaty of Versailles and the communist takeover of Munich. Hitler argued for Darwinism, survival of the fittest and the law of nature. He believed that leaders, including those within the Nazi party, should take over by force and charisma, not by being appointed or elected.
While the Nazis were a fringe party in 1929 with 3% of the vote, the worsening depression brought them members and power. Banks were crashing, and the middle and upper class were beginning to suffer like the poor who could be sufficiently ignored. The Nazi message stayed the same, but the audience began to grow, such that in 1930 they had 25% of the vote. The communists were also picking up voters and members as the people polarized. Hitler began making plane trips to various cities to make speeches that were enthusiastically embraced by many. In 1932, the Nazis had 37% of the vote, the largest party but still a minority (the “majority minority” as some have said of white Americans living in diverse areas such as the Bay). Businessmen wrote to Hindenburg, the chancellor of Germany, arguing Hitler should be made chancellor to stop communism. By this time, the Nazis had received full corporate backing and had ceased to speak out against capitalism and support socialist policies that benefited workers such as union rights. The army was worried it would not be able to hold the borders if both clashed in a time of crisis. In 1933, Hindenburg resigned and Hitler went from vice-chancellor to chancellor. The communists waited, thinking Hitler would fail miserably and they would have a chance to take control.
After setting the Reichstag Fire and blaming the communists, Hitler declared a state of emergency and rounded up communists and other opposition leaders. A boycott of Jewish businesses and book burnings were organized. Storm troopers, the brown shirts who followed the Freicorps and the Italian black shirts of Mussolini, engaged in random beatings and killings. Concentration camps were established, but since the average German believed such things were inevitable under communists it was all seen as unfortunate but inevitable evil. At first, the concentration camps were temporary prisons where dissidents and communists would be sent for a year or two. It was only as Germany began to lose WWII in 1941 that the slave labor camps became extermination camps for the Jews, communists, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and counterculturals imprisoned.
Hitler was terrible as a political leader, preferring to not interfere with the work and projects of his highly disorganized underlings. Hitler would have visions, often architectural monuments to Nazi power. If an officer had enough power, they would approach Hitler with an idea for a project and Hitler would either approve and the officer would gain favor and try to stay close to Hitler and the top brass or Hitler would ignore the suggestion. The decision to make the concentration camps death camps came in just this fashion. This is strangely similar to bottom-up yet top-down arrangements of capitalism communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and other systems and thinkers we have studied.
Under Hitler’s regime, many Germans did much better than they had during the depression, as did many French, Polish and others under Nazi occupation. Through military industrialization, slave labor and seizure of Jewish businesses, jobs were created, consumerism supported and property maintained. This created many job opportunities, as it did for Heidegger in universities cleansed of numerous Jewish professors including Heidegger’s old master Husserl. There were new opportunities for doctors, lawyers, scientists, and even actors. If one was the wrong sort of person, one faced imprisonment and death, but because this was kept out of sight it was easy for those with money in their pockets to ignore. Synygogs were destroyed to make parking lots, marriage to Jews and foreigners outlawed, citizenship revoked and Jim Crow style laws imposed. Having Jewish or communist friends was enough to be sent to the camps.
Hitler was a great admirer of Britain and American power. He wrote in Mein Kampf, that Germany had lost WWI because they did not have the propaganda of Britain and America that demonized Germany such that the harsh Treaty of Versailles was imposed. Next time, he wrote, would be different. It was the British who invented the modern concentration camp fighting the Dutch. Hitler admired how Britain, a small island, maintained a world-wide empire, and believed that this was proof positive that the Aryan race, though a fraction of the world population, could truly become the master race. He wrote, “What India was for England, Russia will be for us”. Hitler hoped for an alliance with Britain and America that would dominate the globe, and many anti-communist authorities and corporations in the UK and US supported this.
Hitler, as he did in all areas, allowed economic experts and business leaders to do whatever they wanted as long as they were successful and supported his own visionary projects. Hitler liked radical ideas, and German and foreign economists were astonished at how well Nazi control was for business and industry. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are vast freedom for the powerful and successful, all the while slavery and death for the oppressed. Looking at British success, Hitler believed that Germany needed colonies and expansion to create an empire. As the Nazis had victory after victory in war, and the UK and US said nothing, Hitler told his generals to “Germanize” the new regions and no questions would be asked. In Poland, one general used a campaign of horror to break the spirits of Polish slave labor, while another general simply declared 80% of the population to be German. When rival factions complained about each other’s methods, Hitler often did nothing.
This would be remarkably existentialist, if it happily supported transparent self-questioning rather than brutally suppressing all questioning and dissent. Heidegger is strikingly like Trotsky. Both believed that they supported a regime that would lead to a new era of continuous revolution and questioning, but both came to see that even as power is renewed by new ideas and perspectives it learns to silence opposition and stifle transparency like the overthrown regime it replaces. In front of the Denazification Committee in 1945, Heidegger said that he truly believed Hitler would evolve beyond his views and policies, but by 1938 his dream had become a nightmare. Heidegger, like many in Germany, Britain and America, believed that communism was the death of Western civilization and individual thought, and it took him seven years to realize that fascism, like communism, fails to evolve toward freedom.
For a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Martin Heidegger, one of the most celebrated German philosophers today, was a member and supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took authoritarian control. Though he eventually came to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was for this under surveillance by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he enthusiastically embraced their rise and seizure of power, spoke at propaganda rallies in several cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a rebirth of Western civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of ancient Greece.
Because I myself am into and influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, as well as Marcuse and Foucault who have both been influenced by these three, and because Heidegger took the worst of Hegel (Eurocentrism, the birth of self-conscious individualism in ancient Greece and the destiny and realization of ancient Greek thought in Germany) and the best of Nietzsche (existentialism, the idea of absolute truth as denial of death, perspective, interpretation and transformation), for me Heidegger’s support of the Nazis is the question we would often prefer to ask our opponent rather than ourselves: how is it that our systems aim for the greatest human fulfillment yet support the worst practices of humankind, including genocide, slavery, and censorship?
Heidegger wrote in his major work Sein und Zeit, Being and Time (1927), that authentic being is questioning, that categorical and absolute truth are ignorance of one’s own human nature, and every revealing is a concealing. How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent chance for questioning, renewal and transformation? Just as Heidegger argues that being is authentic as questioning or inauthentic as a denial of questioning, this is a question that philosophers should ask rather than avoid, particularly as all varieties of philosophy, including the religious and anti-religious, joined the Nazi cause.
Let us examine Heidegger’s thought, with a particular focus on his use of Nietzsche. For Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger the beginning of self-conscious questioning that is philosophy began in glorious ancient Greece with Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle. This set the European West apart from other cultures as philosophical. For Hegel and Heidegger, Germany was the natural culmination and destiny of Greek thought and philosophy, while for Nietzsche the Germans were fooling themselves through science, religion, nationalism and antisemitism into thinking they were the great race, and he moved to Switzerland, renounced his German citizenship and declared himself to be a citizen of no country. I myself would have preferred Nietzsche to be as critical of ancient Greek superiority as he was of German nationalism and antisemitism. In the opening paragraphs of Being and Time, Heidegger looks to the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece in the hopes that he can reclaim this glorious past and rebirth of thought. Heidegger believed, like Hitler and Nietzsche though he was far more critical and cynical, that one should look to the Greeks to be German, as the Greeks were the rebellion that gave birth to authentic thinking and learning. Heidegger, as countless other professors and academics, confuses his own self easily with the identity of the ancient Greeks and the Western mind.
The Great Depression, the 1920s and 30s, was the time when Heidegger did his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time when many feared the fall of the West and the death of Christian European civilization. Heidegger, like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an anti-modernist anti-technology romantic who spoke of Greece as a more glorious and meaningful time. These thinkers in turn influenced Marcuse, Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Later Adorno, Jewish like Marcuse, both having fled the Nazis for Switzerland and then New York, wrote a 1964 pamphlet, The Jargon of Authenticity, criticizing Heidegger for supporting the Nazis while calling for self-questioning, which is ironic given Adorno hated jazz and argued that music is over after Beethoven.
Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian, but in studying Neoplatonism he switched his study to philosophy and wrote his thesis on Duns Scotus. Husserl, the phenomenologist, took him under his wing as his star pupil, and as phenomenology (the school of studying the mind by focusing on how we experience the phenomena or things around us) rose to fame and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and followers of his own. Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical criticism of all philosophy and psychology up through Kant and Hegel. Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that consciousness is always directed toward something or away from something by intention. Nietzsche similarly believes that thought is always instinct and drive. Wanting, fearing, loving, and assessing objects is never neutral, nor is our own philosophical grasping of our grasping cold or objective. Husserl studied the various and often subtle ways we are intentional in our world under the banner of phenomenology, a term invented by Hegel but intended as an open speculative psychology by Husserl. The world and subject co-develop together in an evolving symbiotic relationship. Husserl kept writing and expanding his work, but rather than develop a new alphabet for thought as he had originally intended his work snowballed out of control and continued to amass until his death. Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work, but merged this with Nietzsche and took it in an anti-scientific existential direction. Heidegger forms his own insights based on the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl. Husserl’s scientific Freudian ego becomes Hegel’s dasein, or being-there. Heidegger emphasizes the open-ended multiplicity of being and interpretation romantically like Nietzsche.
Heidegger argues in Being and Time that philosophy means being a beginning, the way one weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean. We are thrown into the world, called “thrownness”, as a being-there, or there-being, in German, “dasein”. Heidegger is famous, some would say infamous, for inventing his own vocabulary and Heideggerians follow this jargon to an equally infamous extent. Welcome to Heidegger-speak 101. Heidegger asks, how do we experience reality before and as we arrange it? What is the ground of being that supports our views and values? The world is “worlding” around us and as us, and thus we are “being-in-the-world”. We approach the world, each other, and objects either as closed and identified or as mysterious, uncanny and miraculous. Industrialization and technology have disenchanted the world, and so we must question the world and re-enchant it. Mystery and truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when things break or go missing. My good friend who got me interested in philosophy, who was at the time a Heideggerian, used the example of dropping the soap as you take your morning shower. Objects and persons disappear until they are out of place or misused, and then we become conscious of them. Consider a poster on a wall that we stop seeing after time, which then becomes new again and leaps out if we call attention to it again. Consider Nazis, and times of crisis.
This tendency to box and categorize the world is imperfect, and cracks can become ruptures. This is remarkably similar to ideas in communism and anarchism (especially among artists such as the Dada who believe we can reanimate and enchant the world to break beyond its boxes). Nietzsche, an existentialist like Heidegger, similarly romanticized ruptures and struggle with the categorical and the dead in thought. We build meaning as individuals, as groups and as cultures in the face of the infinite. While Nietzsche would implore us to strike out on our own here as an individual, and only individuality could give our meaning and perspective authenticity, Heidegger parts ways with Nietzsche and declares that our being-there is always a they as much as it is an “I”. As with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, the individual comes into the world already populated by a “they”, and one is a part of this “them” as much as one is thrown against it. While I am in favor of this view, we must note that Heidegger’s identification with Germany and the Nazis is in stark contrast to Nietzsche’s renunciation of German citizenship and denunciation of German nationalism.
Heidegger famously argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us our meanings as it removes others from our sight. Being and beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them. Time continuously gives us the present as it takes the present from us. Meaning is always historical, always has “historicity”. Remember that one of Hegel’s great contributions to philosophy was to understand all thought as historical process. For Heidegger, being is always bound up with time, and thus the title, “Being and Time”. Time is the horizon of being. As time and being are seen and unseen, so there can be no absolute judgment, interpretation or meaning. Nietzsche argues for a multiplicity of interpretation and meaning that cannot be reduced to a single objective truth. Care and life are always as much for oneself as much as for another who never fully arrives, just as we never reach the horizon as we walk.
For Freud, all thought is denial of sex. For Heidegger, all thought is denial of death. Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being, the conception of closed scientific facts and categorical eternal truths, is the way we cope with the fear of death. We are in a basic state of anxiety towards our world that extends over the horizon just as we are afraid of particular people and objects. Nietzsche gives Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can inauthentically ignore the void by turning to absolute immutable truths, or we can give up and find no meaning in life, but rather we should authentically give and create our own meaning as life itself, though again Nietzsche sees this as an individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social movements. Heidegger agrees that we must make our way from absolute being to nihilism and beyond to understand ourselves as essentially becoming and transformation. We imagine we and our truths simply exist as a denial of death and meaninglessness which have just as central a role to play in our questioning, discovery, and living. Out of the basic state of anxiety spring love, fear, rejoicing, suspicion, and a variety of ways we interact with our world. True freedom is realizing this and gaining self-conscious transparency. We must resist reducing ourselves, our truths and even objects as “ready-to-hand” if we wish to truly live. We kill the world and ourselves continuously in the attempt to avoid death, but if we accept death and meaninglessness, we are free to live and give our lives meaning. If we realize we are running off into the woods to avoid being lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at home. As for Nietzsche, all truths are idols to be smashed, such that new truths can freely grow in their place.
Hitler and the Rise of the Nazis
In Germany during the Great Depression communists, many of the leaders Jewish, gained many members and for a brief period took over the city of Munich. The right wing, including the military, corporate leaders of industry, and traditional authority leaders, organized the Freicorps as a paramilitary group for fighting communists, many to join the Nazis as they rose to power. Hitler and the Nazi party began mobilizing, marching, demonstrating, and street fighting against communists in this period. As in Italy, in the hard times communism and fascism were the radical options and sources of hope and renewal.
Adolf Hitler, a failed painter and architect, found that he had a talent for giving impassioned speeches, and he rose quickly to leadership of the group and attracted many new members. After he and other Nazis were given extremely light sentences after beating a communist, they attempted the Beer Hall Putsch (or coup) in 1923. Marching into a traditional beer hall where many right sided drinkers were socializing, Hitler announced that the revolution had come and they were taking the city. Hitler hoped that the police would join them or at least look the other way as the police did often for fascists in Italy and Germany, but in the ensuing fight 4 cops and 16 Nazis were killed. Hitler was given, by the same judge who sentenced him to one month in prison before, the lightest sentence possible, 9 months in prison, during which time he wrote Mein Kampf, or My Struggle, a political autobiography and polemic.
Disturbingly, Hitler writes that as a boy he saw nothing in antisemitism and that there was a Jewish boy in his class (who may or may not have been the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein) who was strange but not frightening, and that it was only in the Depression and reading antisemetic works that Hitler began to see that the Jews controlled both capitalism and communism to control Germany and the world. In this work, he argues that Jews should be removed from German society, stripped of citizenship and public positions (including professorships), and expelled from the country for the Treaty of Versailles and the communist takeover of Munich. Hitler argued for Darwinism, survival of the fittest and the law of nature. He believed that leaders, including those within the Nazi party, should take over by force and charisma, not by being appointed or elected.
While the Nazis were a fringe party in 1929 with 3% of the vote, the worsening depression brought them members and power. Banks were crashing, and the middle and upper class were beginning to suffer like the poor who could be sufficiently ignored. The Nazi message stayed the same, but the audience began to grow, such that in 1930 they had 25% of the vote. The communists were also picking up voters and members as the people polarized. Hitler began making plane trips to various cities to make speeches that were enthusiastically embraced by many. In 1932, the Nazis had 37% of the vote, the largest party but still a minority (the “majority minority” as some have said of white Americans living in diverse areas such as the Bay). Businessmen wrote to Hindenburg, the chancellor of Germany, arguing Hitler should be made chancellor to stop communism. By this time, the Nazis had received full corporate backing and had ceased to speak out against capitalism and support socialist policies that benefited workers such as union rights. The army was worried it would not be able to hold the borders if both clashed in a time of crisis. In 1933, Hindenburg resigned and Hitler went from vice-chancellor to chancellor. The communists waited, thinking Hitler would fail miserably and they would have a chance to take control.
After setting the Reichstag Fire and blaming the communists, Hitler declared a state of emergency and rounded up communists and other opposition leaders. A boycott of Jewish businesses and book burnings were organized. Storm troopers, the brown shirts who followed the Freicorps and the Italian black shirts of Mussolini, engaged in random beatings and killings. Concentration camps were established, but since the average German believed such things were inevitable under communists it was all seen as unfortunate but inevitable evil. At first, the concentration camps were temporary prisons where dissidents and communists would be sent for a year or two. It was only as Germany began to lose WWII in 1941 that the slave labor camps became extermination camps for the Jews, communists, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and counterculturals imprisoned.
Hitler was terrible as a political leader, preferring to not interfere with the work and projects of his highly disorganized underlings. Hitler would have visions, often architectural monuments to Nazi power. If an officer had enough power, they would approach Hitler with an idea for a project and Hitler would either approve and the officer would gain favor and try to stay close to Hitler and the top brass or Hitler would ignore the suggestion. The decision to make the concentration camps death camps came in just this fashion. This is strangely similar to bottom-up yet top-down arrangements of capitalism communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and other systems and thinkers we have studied.
Under Hitler’s regime, many Germans did much better than they had during the depression, as did many French, Polish and others under Nazi occupation. Through military industrialization, slave labor and seizure of Jewish businesses, jobs were created, consumerism supported and property maintained. This created many job opportunities, as it did for Heidegger in universities cleansed of numerous Jewish professors including Heidegger’s old master Husserl. There were new opportunities for doctors, lawyers, scientists, and even actors. If one was the wrong sort of person, one faced imprisonment and death, but because this was kept out of sight it was easy for those with money in their pockets to ignore. Synygogs were destroyed to make parking lots, marriage to Jews and foreigners outlawed, citizenship revoked and Jim Crow style laws imposed. Having Jewish or communist friends was enough to be sent to the camps.
Hitler was a great admirer of Britain and American power. He wrote in Mein Kampf, that Germany had lost WWI because they did not have the propaganda of Britain and America that demonized Germany such that the harsh Treaty of Versailles was imposed. Next time, he wrote, would be different. It was the British who invented the modern concentration camp fighting the Dutch. Hitler admired how Britain, a small island, maintained a world-wide empire, and believed that this was proof positive that the Aryan race, though a fraction of the world population, could truly become the master race. He wrote, “What India was for England, Russia will be for us”. Hitler hoped for an alliance with Britain and America that would dominate the globe, and many anti-communist authorities and corporations in the UK and US supported this.
Hitler, as he did in all areas, allowed economic experts and business leaders to do whatever they wanted as long as they were successful and supported his own visionary projects. Hitler liked radical ideas, and German and foreign economists were astonished at how well Nazi control was for business and industry. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are vast freedom for the powerful and successful, all the while slavery and death for the oppressed. Looking at British success, Hitler believed that Germany needed colonies and expansion to create an empire. As the Nazis had victory after victory in war, and the UK and US said nothing, Hitler told his generals to “Germanize” the new regions and no questions would be asked. In Poland, one general used a campaign of horror to break the spirits of Polish slave labor, while another general simply declared 80% of the population to be German. When rival factions complained about each other’s methods, Hitler often did nothing.
This would be remarkably existentialist, if it happily supported transparent self-questioning rather than brutally suppressing all questioning and dissent. Heidegger is strikingly like Trotsky. Both believed that they supported a regime that would lead to a new era of continuous revolution and questioning, but both came to see that even as power is renewed by new ideas and perspectives it learns to silence opposition and stifle transparency like the overthrown regime it replaces. In front of the Denazification Committee in 1945, Heidegger said that he truly believed Hitler would evolve beyond his views and policies, but by 1938 his dream had become a nightmare. Heidegger, like many in Germany, Britain and America, believed that communism was the death of Western civilization and individual thought, and it took him seven years to realize that fascism, like communism, fails to evolve toward freedom.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Social & Political Philosophy: Fascism
Fascism is a word that many say but fewer understand and explain. The word Fascist comes from fasces, a tied bundle of rods or sticks. One stick can be easily broken, but many bound together cannot. The ancient Romans used a bunch of rods and an ax tied together as a symbol of Rome, and rulers would often have such a bundle carried in front of them and symbolically present in halls and during speeches. The Italian fascists identified with and glorified Roman power and empire, and they named themselves after the bundle and put it on their flag. These were the first “fascists”, followed soon by German Nazis under Hitler and Spanish fascists under Franco.
The definition and philosophy of fascism is highly debated. Industrialization is typically identified as a necessary condition for fascism, and as we have seen political philosophy in Europe is profoundly concerned with industry, technology, and capitalism rising along with these two. Right wing authoritarianism and nationalism, with patriotic support of war and empire and conservative taste in culture, tends to be the weak consensus among theorists, but does that make all conservatives or nationalists fascists? The tempting answer from the left is a simple yes, but there were a great variety of philosophies and policies that supported fascism before WWII and still today, and fascists want to transform society even if they often celebrate traditional culture, masculinity, discipline and patriotism. There were left wing and right wing factions among Italian fascists, and fascists were influenced by ideas from both wings.
Consider that Mussolini supported Jewish rights before adopting Hitler’s antisemitism. Consider that the Nazis said many anti-capitalist pronouncements that sound identical to those made by communism, calling themselves national socialists before accepting corporate backing soon after they started to become successful and dropped all anti-capitalist rhetoric and policies long before Hitler gained power (Nazis believed that Jews controlled the world economy and were ruining Europe during the great depression, so they were angry at capitalism as a Jewish device before they allied themselves with corporate interests in Germany, Britain and America). Consider that there were Christian Nazis and anti-Christian Nazis. Consider that there were Neo-Kantians as well as existentialists like Heidegger who joined the Nazi cause on both sides of the dogmatism/skepticism spectrum in philosophy.
We could try the opposite approach, and say what fascism ISN’T by looking at its triadic hate relationship with communism (or international socialism) and anarchism. Fascists do not like anarchist ideas like getting rid of war, the police state, national borders, or free love. They do not like communism because even if communists believe in imposing an authoritarian structure in the name of revolution they argue, in theory, for a dismantling of authoritarianism by process. Anarchists, as we have seen, argue that communism is authoritarianism in the name of anarcho-syndicalism, so an anarchist might say that there is no difference between the two. Fascists would argue that anarchism, communism and libertarian capitalism are all the same, as they lack the strength and discipline of authoritarianism. Like communism, fascists argue that the time of crisis requires authority and order, but unlike communists they do not argue for a more bottom-up democratic future. One could say that Stalin’s “socialism in one country” approaches fascism, but even still evolution is expected.
Italy Under Mussolini
Mussolini was the first fascist dictator, as the Italians coined the term fascism from the Roman symbol. His glorification of violence inspired Hitler, who imitated Mussolini and then surpassed him with the superior power and technology of Germany. World leaders praised both Mussolini and Hitler for standing up and viciously smashing communists, but then when Italy and Germany expanded their empires, Italy first in Africa and then Germany in Eastern Europe, the British, French and Americans amongst others declared war for cutting in on their action (since they themselves wished to maintain control and exploitation of Africa as well as everywhere else). The Pope said that Mussolini was sent by divine providence. Churchill said Mussolini was the Roman genius whose triumphant struggle against communism had rendered a service to the entire world. Italy hoped for an empire in Africa and thus a seat at the table with other powerful European nations, but they banded together to eventually defeat both Italian and German ambitions.
With the Great Depression of the 1920s, despair was everywhere and one had to ask how to rebuild and thrive. Communism offered a way forward, and their numbers exploded. In reaction against communism’s anti-religious, anti-elite, anti-authoritarian internationalism, many on the right but some on the left joined the fascist cause. After Russia, and then again after WWII with China, many national leaders were deeply afraid of communism and were willing to give full support to right wing brutality. After WWII, when communism again threatened to take Italy by storm, the OSS (precursor of the CIA) worked with Italian fascists and the Italian mafia to crush the movement, just as America supported right wing dictatorships (some of whom called themselves fascist by name) in Central America to prevent communism there. The upper and middle class feared that their property would be seized, so many celebrated Mussolini and Hitler’s rise to power. Both Mussolini and Hitler had socialist views in their early years, but through intense nationalism at a time of crisis abandoned socialism for capitalism as the strength of their nations was bound up with corporations, industry and technology, particularly military technology.
In Italy in the 1920s, fascists fought against peasant, worker and Catholic unions that rallied under the red flag and set up co-ops. Mussolini’s fascist black shirts, that later inspired Hitler’s brown shirts, set out to destroy the communist threat through open violence often with the full support of the police, the military, the king, and the pope. The fascists, in military style black uniforms, were thus a paramilitary group that had the full support of the authorities without official office.
In both Italy and Germany, first fascists started getting elected to office, then they began gaining seats but remained in the minority, and finally Mussolini and Hitler, who were made the heads of parliament, declared wartime emergency powers and dissolved parliament such that their minority became the totality. The population of both countries accepted the emergency dictatorial decrees in the name of protecting family, faith and nation.
Mussolini was careful to give the king and Pope whatever they wanted. The Catholic Church was given the Vatican as an independent country and it remains so today. The communists and socialists wanted the Church removed from Italian politics, but Mussolini strengthened the Church’s presence. In return, the Church invested heavily in government bonds and continued to do so in wartime.
Those who spoke out in Italy against Mussolini’s dictatorship, either in conversation or in print, were beaten by black shirts, often to death. Schools were ordered to teach fascist conservative values. Little boys were given black shirts and toy wooden rifles. The salute, the raised palm open towards the saluted, became common in greeting (the Nazi salute, with open palm and arm straight and at a sharp angle, is more notorious). The military adopted the Roman salute of raising swords vertically in the air as the leader passed, but for a modern army this meant military issued knives raised instead.
When Libya, in North Africa, revolted against Italian control, Italy under Mussolini viciously pacified it. It is important to consider that fascist brutal and glorified warfare, including the first fascist concentration camps, started in Africa and were influenced not only by economic but also racist tyranny. Italy used torture, camps, chemical weapons, targeting civilians and refugees with bombs, and destroyed mosques. At first, Mussolini ridiculed Hitler’s racial theories while remaining quite racist himself, as he did not believe that Germany was a racially pure nation. Then, when Hitler seized Jewish property and bank accounts and used them to finance the party and warfare, Mussolini followed, arguing that the Italians had to learn to become hard and brutal like the Germans to become masters. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, bombing civilians and using chemical weapons. The wars were popular in Italy, but the British and French began to feel that their hold on much of Africa was threatened. As Franco rose in Spain, Mussolini and Hitler welcomed and supported his fascist regime as they believed Spain would be a powerful ally should war break out. Mussolini seized Albania, Hitler seized Poland, and Britain, France, America and others declared war.
As the Italians and Germans began losing to the allied powers, both Mussolini and Hitler blamed their troops and nation for being weak and not strong enough to overcome the challenge of crisis. Fascism does stand for unity, but it seems that in times of failure they blame each other as much as they blame foreign nations and religions for their problems in times of success. If the rods start breaking, it seems the axe gets angry at the arrangement. In the same way, with repeated failures in the war including a failed invasion of Greece, the Italian king imprisoned Mussolini and changed sides in the war. Hitler invaded Italy, dividing the country, and Mussolini was given puppet control of Northern Italy before Germany eventually lost the war.
Germany Under Hitler
Since everybody likes calling each other Hitler in America today, including the religious and the anti-religious (“Nazi’s were essentially religious” vs. “Nazi’s essentially anti-religious”) and the progressives and conservatives (“Bush is Hitler” vs. “Obama is Hitler”), let us be clear:
Nazi Germany was art and artists, health and doctors, truth and philosophy, science and scientists, religion and religious, technology and engineers, poetry and poets, environment and volunteers, exercise and instructors, order and peacemakers, business and investors, pest control and exterminators, the group and helping your neighbor, life and the living, and, at the same time, death and the killers.
Doctors opened the gas caps to euthanize the mentally ill to give it scientific legitimacy. Athens, Sparta and Rome, the origin of the supposed West, were Hitler’s Mecca, the source and model of legitimate culture. Hitler wrote that the European and German forefathers were the Greeks, and if the Nazis could create a synthesis of these three cultures that the Nazi German state would never perish. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, Nazis glorified the human body, nature, and warfare through art and literature. Other cultures were diseases, the Jews microbes that had to be eradicated or made servile. The gas Zyclon B was first developed to kill insects and rodents before being used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere. Antisemitism, racism and murder were called hygiene, medical and scientific. The gas chambers were considered a humane alternative to firing squads, more effective and efficient.
Next time, we will consider the thought of Hitler and the Nazi's use of the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
The definition and philosophy of fascism is highly debated. Industrialization is typically identified as a necessary condition for fascism, and as we have seen political philosophy in Europe is profoundly concerned with industry, technology, and capitalism rising along with these two. Right wing authoritarianism and nationalism, with patriotic support of war and empire and conservative taste in culture, tends to be the weak consensus among theorists, but does that make all conservatives or nationalists fascists? The tempting answer from the left is a simple yes, but there were a great variety of philosophies and policies that supported fascism before WWII and still today, and fascists want to transform society even if they often celebrate traditional culture, masculinity, discipline and patriotism. There were left wing and right wing factions among Italian fascists, and fascists were influenced by ideas from both wings.
Consider that Mussolini supported Jewish rights before adopting Hitler’s antisemitism. Consider that the Nazis said many anti-capitalist pronouncements that sound identical to those made by communism, calling themselves national socialists before accepting corporate backing soon after they started to become successful and dropped all anti-capitalist rhetoric and policies long before Hitler gained power (Nazis believed that Jews controlled the world economy and were ruining Europe during the great depression, so they were angry at capitalism as a Jewish device before they allied themselves with corporate interests in Germany, Britain and America). Consider that there were Christian Nazis and anti-Christian Nazis. Consider that there were Neo-Kantians as well as existentialists like Heidegger who joined the Nazi cause on both sides of the dogmatism/skepticism spectrum in philosophy.
We could try the opposite approach, and say what fascism ISN’T by looking at its triadic hate relationship with communism (or international socialism) and anarchism. Fascists do not like anarchist ideas like getting rid of war, the police state, national borders, or free love. They do not like communism because even if communists believe in imposing an authoritarian structure in the name of revolution they argue, in theory, for a dismantling of authoritarianism by process. Anarchists, as we have seen, argue that communism is authoritarianism in the name of anarcho-syndicalism, so an anarchist might say that there is no difference between the two. Fascists would argue that anarchism, communism and libertarian capitalism are all the same, as they lack the strength and discipline of authoritarianism. Like communism, fascists argue that the time of crisis requires authority and order, but unlike communists they do not argue for a more bottom-up democratic future. One could say that Stalin’s “socialism in one country” approaches fascism, but even still evolution is expected.
Italy Under Mussolini
Mussolini was the first fascist dictator, as the Italians coined the term fascism from the Roman symbol. His glorification of violence inspired Hitler, who imitated Mussolini and then surpassed him with the superior power and technology of Germany. World leaders praised both Mussolini and Hitler for standing up and viciously smashing communists, but then when Italy and Germany expanded their empires, Italy first in Africa and then Germany in Eastern Europe, the British, French and Americans amongst others declared war for cutting in on their action (since they themselves wished to maintain control and exploitation of Africa as well as everywhere else). The Pope said that Mussolini was sent by divine providence. Churchill said Mussolini was the Roman genius whose triumphant struggle against communism had rendered a service to the entire world. Italy hoped for an empire in Africa and thus a seat at the table with other powerful European nations, but they banded together to eventually defeat both Italian and German ambitions.
With the Great Depression of the 1920s, despair was everywhere and one had to ask how to rebuild and thrive. Communism offered a way forward, and their numbers exploded. In reaction against communism’s anti-religious, anti-elite, anti-authoritarian internationalism, many on the right but some on the left joined the fascist cause. After Russia, and then again after WWII with China, many national leaders were deeply afraid of communism and were willing to give full support to right wing brutality. After WWII, when communism again threatened to take Italy by storm, the OSS (precursor of the CIA) worked with Italian fascists and the Italian mafia to crush the movement, just as America supported right wing dictatorships (some of whom called themselves fascist by name) in Central America to prevent communism there. The upper and middle class feared that their property would be seized, so many celebrated Mussolini and Hitler’s rise to power. Both Mussolini and Hitler had socialist views in their early years, but through intense nationalism at a time of crisis abandoned socialism for capitalism as the strength of their nations was bound up with corporations, industry and technology, particularly military technology.
In Italy in the 1920s, fascists fought against peasant, worker and Catholic unions that rallied under the red flag and set up co-ops. Mussolini’s fascist black shirts, that later inspired Hitler’s brown shirts, set out to destroy the communist threat through open violence often with the full support of the police, the military, the king, and the pope. The fascists, in military style black uniforms, were thus a paramilitary group that had the full support of the authorities without official office.
In both Italy and Germany, first fascists started getting elected to office, then they began gaining seats but remained in the minority, and finally Mussolini and Hitler, who were made the heads of parliament, declared wartime emergency powers and dissolved parliament such that their minority became the totality. The population of both countries accepted the emergency dictatorial decrees in the name of protecting family, faith and nation.
Mussolini was careful to give the king and Pope whatever they wanted. The Catholic Church was given the Vatican as an independent country and it remains so today. The communists and socialists wanted the Church removed from Italian politics, but Mussolini strengthened the Church’s presence. In return, the Church invested heavily in government bonds and continued to do so in wartime.
Those who spoke out in Italy against Mussolini’s dictatorship, either in conversation or in print, were beaten by black shirts, often to death. Schools were ordered to teach fascist conservative values. Little boys were given black shirts and toy wooden rifles. The salute, the raised palm open towards the saluted, became common in greeting (the Nazi salute, with open palm and arm straight and at a sharp angle, is more notorious). The military adopted the Roman salute of raising swords vertically in the air as the leader passed, but for a modern army this meant military issued knives raised instead.
When Libya, in North Africa, revolted against Italian control, Italy under Mussolini viciously pacified it. It is important to consider that fascist brutal and glorified warfare, including the first fascist concentration camps, started in Africa and were influenced not only by economic but also racist tyranny. Italy used torture, camps, chemical weapons, targeting civilians and refugees with bombs, and destroyed mosques. At first, Mussolini ridiculed Hitler’s racial theories while remaining quite racist himself, as he did not believe that Germany was a racially pure nation. Then, when Hitler seized Jewish property and bank accounts and used them to finance the party and warfare, Mussolini followed, arguing that the Italians had to learn to become hard and brutal like the Germans to become masters. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, bombing civilians and using chemical weapons. The wars were popular in Italy, but the British and French began to feel that their hold on much of Africa was threatened. As Franco rose in Spain, Mussolini and Hitler welcomed and supported his fascist regime as they believed Spain would be a powerful ally should war break out. Mussolini seized Albania, Hitler seized Poland, and Britain, France, America and others declared war.
As the Italians and Germans began losing to the allied powers, both Mussolini and Hitler blamed their troops and nation for being weak and not strong enough to overcome the challenge of crisis. Fascism does stand for unity, but it seems that in times of failure they blame each other as much as they blame foreign nations and religions for their problems in times of success. If the rods start breaking, it seems the axe gets angry at the arrangement. In the same way, with repeated failures in the war including a failed invasion of Greece, the Italian king imprisoned Mussolini and changed sides in the war. Hitler invaded Italy, dividing the country, and Mussolini was given puppet control of Northern Italy before Germany eventually lost the war.
Germany Under Hitler
Since everybody likes calling each other Hitler in America today, including the religious and the anti-religious (“Nazi’s were essentially religious” vs. “Nazi’s essentially anti-religious”) and the progressives and conservatives (“Bush is Hitler” vs. “Obama is Hitler”), let us be clear:
Nazi Germany was art and artists, health and doctors, truth and philosophy, science and scientists, religion and religious, technology and engineers, poetry and poets, environment and volunteers, exercise and instructors, order and peacemakers, business and investors, pest control and exterminators, the group and helping your neighbor, life and the living, and, at the same time, death and the killers.
Doctors opened the gas caps to euthanize the mentally ill to give it scientific legitimacy. Athens, Sparta and Rome, the origin of the supposed West, were Hitler’s Mecca, the source and model of legitimate culture. Hitler wrote that the European and German forefathers were the Greeks, and if the Nazis could create a synthesis of these three cultures that the Nazi German state would never perish. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, Nazis glorified the human body, nature, and warfare through art and literature. Other cultures were diseases, the Jews microbes that had to be eradicated or made servile. The gas Zyclon B was first developed to kill insects and rodents before being used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere. Antisemitism, racism and murder were called hygiene, medical and scientific. The gas chambers were considered a humane alternative to firing squads, more effective and efficient.
Next time, we will consider the thought of Hitler and the Nazi's use of the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
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.
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.
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