Book Review: The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman
Reviewed by Thomas Riggins
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, Charles Freeman, Vintage, 2005.
This book is a great introduction to the origins of Christian thought. Today with so many competing versions of Christianity, ranging from traditional Orthodox and Catholic views to liberal socially conscious Protestantism and right wing evangelical fundamentalists, it is helpful to have a guide such as this which explains how the original Christianity of the ancient world came about. Freeman will do a credible job of tracing this history from Roman times to the High Middle Ages.
In his introduction he tells us that he will be dealing with "a significant turning point" in western civilization. The point he has in mind is that time in the 4th and 5th centuries AD "when the tradition of rational thought established by the Greeks was stifled." It would take the West a thousand years to recover.
The Greek rational tradition was firmly established by the 5th century BC-- its two greatest founders were Plato and his student Aristotle. Unfortunately, Freeman confuses modern day empiricism with rationality and thus misapprehends the significance of Plato, following in the footsteps of his master Socrates, in the establishment of the rational method in Greece. Plato’s thought was not "an alternative to rational thought" but one of the most extreme examples of it, subjecting all beliefs to the test of logical argument whenever possible.
Be that as it may, Freeman thinks that the Greek rational tradition, today’s term would be "scientific", was deliberately squashed by the Roman government from the time of Constantine with the aid of the official Church. The wide-open intellectual environment of the Roman Empire, both religiously and philosophically came to end in the 4th century when the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the "official" state religion. The "official" version became the only legal version and thus was the "orthodox" version. "The imposition of orthodoxy," Freeman writes, " went hand in hand with a stifling of any form of independent reasoning." The rule I would formulate here is that the more any belief system deviates from the original intentions of its founders the more intolerant and anti-rational it becomes. I am not sure this holds in all cases.
Christianity was from the outset anti-rational. Freeman says, "It had been the Apostle Paul [actually an interloper, not one of the original 12, who never knew Jesus in the flesh-tr] who declared war on the Greek rational tradition through his attacks on ‘the wisdom of the wise’ and ‘the empty logic of the philosophers’...." When Christianity became the official creed it closed down any contrary thinking thus dooming the West to a thousand years of backwardness.
A good example of this mind closing is given by Freeman when he discusses the dispute between "St." Ambrose and the pagan Roman Senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus. To my way of thinking the pagan Symmachus had an open modern mind while Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan and teacher of "St." Augustine, was a bigot (unfortunately also an all too modern religious mind set.)
In the late 4th century the seat of the Western Empire was at Milan and there were still many pagans (believers in the old traditional religion) who wished to be free to continue their form of religion. The Christian authorities were determined to repress all forms of religion save their own. One of the major symbols of the traditional religion was the Altar of Peace which adorned the Senate in Rome. The Christians had it removed. In 383 AD Symmachus and other senators petitioned the Emperor to have it restored. Ambrose (a major power behind the throne) was opposed and the petition failed. The mind sets of the two sides are clearly expressed in the following written exchange:
Symmachus: "What does it matter by which wisdom each of us arrives at the truth? It is not possible that only one road leads to so sublime a mystery."
Ambrose: "What you are ignorant of, we know from the word of God. And what you try to infer, we have established as truth from the very wisdom of God."
The truth, however, should be able to triumph without the aid of the rack and the stake.
I pointed out above that Paul had no personal knowledge of Jesus in the flesh. Freeman asserted that the intolerance of the Christians (their rejection of logic and science) stems from Paul. What is worse, when, for political reasons, the Roman state adopted the religion and forced it upon everyone its motive was to control the minds of the population for the benefit of the Empire, the actual teachings of Jesus were no more suited to the ends desired by the Romans than they are to those of the Bush administration and its evangelical base.
Paul, according to Freeman, distanced himself from the original 12 disciples (who distrusted his claims) and ended up, as we know, creating a theology that appealed to the Greco-Roman world and was rejected by the Jewish community from which Jesus came. In order to do this the real historical Jesus and his teachings (peace not war, forgiveness not vengeance, love and respect not hated and contempt-- i.e., Martin Luther King not Jerry Falwell or Pat Robinson) had to be replaced with an unreal Christ beyond history. Thus, Freeman writes, "Paul makes a point of stressing that faith in Christ does not involve any kind of identification with Jesus in his life on earth but has validity only in his death and resurrection." Thus the burden of actually having to follow the particular ethical path that Jesus the human trod is removed. (See my article "Who is John Stott" in PA archives).
Since the claims made for Jesus as the Christ are simply impossible to accept from the point of view of reason, reason is dumped and replaced by "faith." Freeman gives the following quote from "the fourth-century ascetic Anthony:" "Faith arises from the disposition of the soul... those who are equipped with the faith have no need of verbal argument." Experience shows that "verbal argument" has no effect on true believers of whatever faith!
It is also interesting to note, as Freeman does, that Anthony is claimed not to have learned "to read or write, the point being made by his biographer that academic achievement was not important for a 'man of God' and could even be despised."
Freeman is incorrect, I think, in holding that the personal commitment Christians made to Christ (becoming "a single body with Christ... achieving a full identification with Christ through his death and then rising with him from the dead") was "something new in antiquity."
This very belief was characteristic of the devotees of the Egyptian god Osiris whose worship in the cult of Isis and Osiris was widespread throughout the Roman Empire and whose popularity may explain why Christianity proved so popular to the Greco-Roman population.
Mary idolatry, still rampant with some forms of Christianity, may have stemmed from this cult connection as well. Freeman points out that Isis was the patron goddess of mariners and her symbol was the rose. Mary replaced her as the patron of sailors and her symbol was also the rose. He also says "representations of Isis with her baby son Horus on her knee seem to provide the iconic background for those of Mary and the baby Jesus."
The Greek rational tradition demanded that people think for themselves and take responsibility for their actions. Christianity introduced a different conception of moral responsibility. It introduced the idea of "don't think, just follow orders." Freeman quotes a long extract from William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience in which a Jesuit explains the value of living the monastic life (every religion has something similar to this, as well as extremist political groups of the left and right).
The Jesuit explains that if you obey the orders of your religious Superior, no matter what they are, you can do no wrong! "The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you to do this or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed what orders you received.... The moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your account...." Nice. Not even God respects the Geneva Conventions, why should Rummy or Bush? We have to agree with Freeman when he declares that, "Here the abdication of the power to think for oneself is complete."
The book clearly demonstrates that religion in the West has been used to deprecate and reject reason (unless the Church can misuse it in its own interests). It also demonstrates that the modern world, the progressive part at any rate, represents a return to the Greek outlook. When Freeman, in reference to the teachings of the Church says, "The ancient Greek tradition that one should be free to speculate without fear and be encouraged to take individual moral responsibility for one's views was rejected," we can today assert that now in the 21st. Century, despite the tragic history of "real existing socialism" in the past century, no genuine Marxist committed to people's democracy would agree with the Church on this matter and would rather identify with the Greeks.
The most important internal reason for the collapse of the socialist block, I think, may have been the lack of real participatory democracy and citizen involvement. Traditional Christianity as well as fundamentalism may likewise now be facing this malaise which is also characteristic of American democracy under the Bush administration.
What Freeman writes about the Church can be extended to these other groups as well. "Intellectual self-confidence and curiosity," he points out, "which lay at the heart of the Greek achievement, were recast as the dreaded sin of pride. Faith and obedience to the institutional authority of the church were more highly rated than the use of reasoned thought. The inevitable result was intellectual stagnation."
Reading Freeman's well written and interesting book will give you a great background and a deep historical understanding of how Christianity came to dominate the Western world for a thousand years, what that has cost in terms of intellectual degradation, and how, if the peoples of the West are to better their condition in the new century they must regain the intellectual confidence so characteristic of Greek civilization.
I maintain that the Marxist tradition, freed from the failed authoritarian models of the last century, is the best contemporary intellectual tool to achieve this end. But it is important to note that the Greeks were not the only people to have a rational outlook. Similar thinkers can be found in the "classical" periods of other cultures, such as Ancient Egypt, China, India and the Islamic culture of the Middle Ages, to name but four, and the hope of a progressive future for all the world's peoples rests on a blending of the best progressive tendencies in all cultures.
--Thomas Riggins is the Book Review Editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
Friday, October 27, 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
UTOPIAN THINKING AND ITS ROLE IN MARXIST THEORY
Political Affairs Magazine print edition
Utopian Thinking and its Role in Marxist Theory
Annals of Ideology
by Thomas Riggins [First appeared on line on the website Selves and Others]
Not in Utopia— subterranean fields—
or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,— the place where, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all.
William Wordsworth,
The Prelude
What is “utopian” thinking and why should we be concerned about it today? The word was coined by Sir Thomas More (from the Greek meaning “no place”) for his 1516 book Utopia, an imaginary island in the South Pacific which had perfect laws and social conditions. To refer to ideas today as “utopian” is to dismiss them as impractical. It has a somewhat negative connotation.
Utopian thinking is not, however, completely without its practical uses. There is a good utopian way to think as well as a bad. That this is so may be illustrated by a quote from the Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo (Nature, Society, Thought XVI:1 [2003]) who says, “Utopianism, on the one hand, inspires the enthusiasm of the masses, which is necessary to break the stubborn resistance of the old regime; on the other hand, it makes the building of the new society more difficult.” More difficult because of unrealistic plans— the “Great Leap Forward Syndrome.”
One of the earliest discussions of utopian thinking is to be found in the section “Critical Utopian Socialism and Communism” in The Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx and Engels state the earliest struggles of the working the class to liberate itself were defeated due to the low development of the productive forces. The literature, in which these early struggles were reflected, was “utopian” because it proposed impractical and impossible to realize solutions for the problems facing the working class.
Marx and Engels said this literature “had a necessarily reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social leveling in its crudest form.” The three greatest early utopians were St. Simon, Fourier, and Owen. These three produced systems, based on the underdeveloped forces of the new capitalist economic formations, which could not properly solve the problems raised by the exploitation of the workers.
Marx and Engels said this is because “the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry” and industry had not developed enough to generate the level of class antagonism to challenge the power of the capitalists in a non-utopian way.
It seems they were mistaken about the “even pace” part, because even today in “the highest stage” of capitalism the level of class antagonism has not kept up with the development of industry. This means utopian ideas are still widespread.
The early utopians replaced historical action by the workers with schemes and plans to reorganize society “specially contrived by these inventors.” These thinkers saw the workers as passive and “reject all political and especially all revolutionary action.”
But all is not negative! Their writings contained “a critical element” insofar as they pointed up the injustices and exploitation inherent in bourgeois society. “Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class.”
This is an interesting analysis from the Manifesto, and it suggests since the level of class conscious antagonism to the capitalist system has, apparently, not been evenly paced to the development of capitalism, that some “utopian” thinking may still be of value with respect to “enlightenment.”
Engels took up these issues again some thirty years later, in his “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, three chapters culled out of his 1878 book Anti-Duhring and published in 1880 as a separate pamphlet.
He begins by stating that modern socialism is the result of the class struggle, the anarchy of production, and , in its theories, “ostensibly” as a continuation of the ideas of the “great French philosophers” of the Enlightenment. He especially mentions Rousseau but we can think of a few others: Condillac, Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, d’Holbach and Condorcet to name a few.
These thinkers readied the consciousness of the French people for the great Revolution that broke out on July 14, 1789. Many were themselves “extreme revolutionists.” They judged everything by Reason and “recognized no external authority.”
However, the “Reason” they spoke of turned out to be, in reality, only the ideals of the bourgeoisie. The self-conscious working class had not yet differentiated itself as an independent class. This class, not yet fully conscious of itself, instituted the Reign of Terror (led by Robespierre and St. Just). The bourgeoisie, realizing that the embryonic new class was a threat, ultimately intrusted the revolution to Napoleon.
According to Engels, this is the historical background to the systems of the three great utopians we discussed from the Manifesto. After the Terror the bourgeoisie lost confidence in Reason. It was up to the utopians to figure out how to solve the social problems presented by the new class and its obvious exploitation in a society that was premised on universal rights and freedom. Since to “crude class conditions corresponded crude theories” the solutions to the problems addressed by the utopians had to await the further advancement of capitalism and the theory which corresponded to this development—i.e., Marxism.
It would seem that, according to this presentation, the highest theoretical development of Marxism should have been found in France, England and Germany towards the end of the nineteenth century. What happened in Russia was an historical anomaly— the socialists coming to power in a crudely developed rather than an advanced capitalist state. The problems associated with what is now understood to be “Stalinism” were the result of a crude and vulgar form of Marxism having developed (with utopian ideals of toughening it out against the whole capitalist world) in an environment with a crudely evolved industrial base. This seems to fit in with Engel’s analysis. [Cf., also Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, esp. Vol II.]
“Maoism” would have been an even cruder form of Marxism— based on the peasantry not the workers at all due to the extremely low level of capitalist development in China. Maoism, just as Stalinism, might be explained as the result of utopian schemes being concocted in societies without the advanced industrial basis to support correct Marxist positions. Pol Pot’s “Marxism” was so primitive it fell off the radar and crash landed into a barbarism which subjected his own people to the same kind of treatment the US regularly doles out to third world peoples. He butchered almost a third the number of people that the US did in Vietnam, for example. [Cf., my review of Phillip Short’s book Pol Pot.]
With the development of Marxism in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, utopianism should have come to an end. Its survival within Marxism can have detrimental effects. But can the effects also be beneficial?
Herbert Marcuse, for example, in his book Soviet Marxism, maintained that even though the Soviet Union was, in some cases, not living up to its ideals, impossible given the hostility of the West and its internal problems, nevertheless it still proclaimed those ideals to its own people and to the world. They may have seemed “utopian”, given the real state of affairs, but they kept those ideals alive.
Lenin also has something to say on this issue. In 1912 he wrote, but did not publish, a brief article entitled “Two Utopias” (CW:18:355-359). He recalls a dictum by Engels: “What formally may be economically incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history.” This dictum was made in reference to utopian socialism. “Engel’s advanced this profound thesis”, Lenin says, “in connection with utopian socialism: that socialism was ‘fallacious’ in the formal economic sense.... But utopian socialism was right from the point of view of world history, for it was a symptom, an expression, a harbinger of the class which, born of capitalism, has by now, in the beginning of the twentieth century, become a mass force which can put an end to capitalism and is irresistibly advancing to this goal.”
In Russia there were two types of utopianism in vogue in Lenin’s day (1912), namely a peasant utopianism demanding democracy and by- passing capitalism towards an equalitarian peasant based society, and a liberal capitalist utopianism demanding a constitutional monarchy and a peaceful transition from the Czarist autocracy to something like the bourgeois democracies of France or Germany.
The utopia of the liberals dampened the revolutionary fervor of the peasants as it was really a ploy to convince the Czarist ruling class to share power with the liberal bourgeoisie at the expense of the peasants.
The peasant utopia was also an impossible dream— but it was neverthe- less progressive because it was “an expression of the aspirations of the toiling millions of the petty bourgeoisie [peasants] to put an end altogether to the old, feudal exploiters....”
Lenin was of course against “utopianism” in principle but realized the difference between “good” and “bad” utopias. He thought Marxists had to discover the “valuable democratic kernel” that was at the core of the “husk” of this peasant utopia. He also thought that a similar type of utopianism was in place in many Asian countries that were set to undergo bourgeois revolutions in the twentieth century. Deconstructing these utopian revolutions is still a task for Marxists in our own time.
Lenin ended his 1912 article by reflecting on the “old Marxist literature of the[eighteen] eighties” and how it had tried to systematically analyze the peasant utopia in Russia. “Some day,” he wrote, “historians will study this effort systematically and trace its connection with what in the first decade of the twentieth century came to be called ‘Bolshevism’.”
Even more, today, in the beginning of the twentieth-first century, we will have to systematically trace the connections of utopian thinking throughout the last century in order to understand where we are today with respect to fallacious versus correct Marxist understandings of current reality.
Another thinker who tried to work out the differences between “good” and “bad” utopian thinking was the German Marxist Ernst Bloch (1885-1977). How can one tell the difference between, on the one hand, the kind of utopianism that ends up in cloud-cuckoo-land (the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s vision of peasant socialism, the nostalgia for the days of Stalin in the USSR and movements (reactionary) to bring them about again are a few of many examples), and on the other hand, that form of utopian thinking which, even if at present it seems totally unrealistic, contributes to laying the ground work for the future emancipation of the working people and the establishment of socialism?
In his book, A Philosophy for the Future (1963), Bloch (echoing Engels), says the early utopians, because of the level of social production, “had to construct the outlines of a brave new world out of their own hearts and heads.” I can agree that this is better than nothing and by holding an ideal future this kind of utopianism can motivate people to action. The bad part is, as in the examples I gave above, when the leadership of a people’s movement irresponsibly tries to skip stages when they find themselves confronted with an immature social reality. When they attempt to construct a social reality that is only possible in the advanced stages of economic development in a society at a lower level then social, political, and human mayhem results
With respect to this kind of situation, Bloch writes: “All the worse then, if a society that will no longer be reconciled in an abstract-utopian manner, but demands the way to the thing itself, errs on the way--- and errs dangerously.” I am thinking here that this is what Bloch might consider forced marches to socialism by an impatient leadership, premature collectivization of agriculture, and in general attempting to “build socialism” when your society is either still basically feudal or only barely beginning to be capitalist.
“All the worse,” he continues, “if the revolutionary capacity is not there to execute ideals which have been represented abstractly, rather than to discredit or even to destroy with catastrophic means ideals which have not appeared in the concrete.” This does not just apply to the third world cases I have used as examples. The daily struggle here in the United States could just as easily have been cited. In the foreseeable future the most important political goals that will objectively further the class struggle is to oust the ultra-right clerico-Republican reactionaries from power. Is it “utopian” to think this can be done by a broad progressive people’s alliance which also includes center and left elements of the Democratic Party? Is this an “abstract utopian ideal?”
Or should we, on the contrary, take a maximalist position to the left of where the majority consciousness is now and try to. as a magnet attracts iron filings, slowly attempt to draw the masses in our direction? Some small parties on the Left have exactly this sort of program. In the long term there may be a dialectical unity in these positions, but at the given moment it seems to me much more “utopian” in the “bad” sense to be on the side lines waiting for magnetic attraction to bring about change than it is to be in the midst of the struggles where the masses of people are actually to be found.
This, by the way, is how I interpret the position of Sam Webb the CPUSA national chairman, which he recently put forth at the Global Left Dialogue in New York City. His topic was “Imaginings of Socialism” (a fruitful ground for some utopian thinking). Webb is quite clear in rejecting a “go it alone” ultra-left stance in the fight to advance socialist values in the US. He puts the working class at the center of the struggle but it is firmly allied with what he calls other “core constituencies” and oppressed segments of the population (women, youth,ethnic and racial minorities, the poor, etc.).
There is nothing “utopian” in this idea of a broad based people’s struggle as a necessity in order to confront the power of capital. He ends his presentation, however, with an example of what I have called “good” utopianism— a vision of what the world, or at least our country, might one day be like where the skies are always blue and “pollution free”, toxic dumps have been rendered into gardens, there is no homelessness, no unemployment, no discrimination (sexual or otherwise), women will getting more of those Nobel prizes in science, there will be empty prisons, and no more war, almost too good to be true. This kind of motivational “utopianism” is in the finest traditions of the socialist movement. Bush may be running the show, or trying to, but the future belongs to the people.
Thomas Riggins is the former book review editor of Political Affairs
Utopian Thinking and its Role in Marxist Theory
Annals of Ideology
by Thomas Riggins [First appeared on line on the website Selves and Others]
Not in Utopia— subterranean fields—
or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,— the place where, in the end,
We find our happiness, or not at all.
William Wordsworth,
The Prelude
What is “utopian” thinking and why should we be concerned about it today? The word was coined by Sir Thomas More (from the Greek meaning “no place”) for his 1516 book Utopia, an imaginary island in the South Pacific which had perfect laws and social conditions. To refer to ideas today as “utopian” is to dismiss them as impractical. It has a somewhat negative connotation.
Utopian thinking is not, however, completely without its practical uses. There is a good utopian way to think as well as a bad. That this is so may be illustrated by a quote from the Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo (Nature, Society, Thought XVI:1 [2003]) who says, “Utopianism, on the one hand, inspires the enthusiasm of the masses, which is necessary to break the stubborn resistance of the old regime; on the other hand, it makes the building of the new society more difficult.” More difficult because of unrealistic plans— the “Great Leap Forward Syndrome.”
One of the earliest discussions of utopian thinking is to be found in the section “Critical Utopian Socialism and Communism” in The Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx and Engels state the earliest struggles of the working the class to liberate itself were defeated due to the low development of the productive forces. The literature, in which these early struggles were reflected, was “utopian” because it proposed impractical and impossible to realize solutions for the problems facing the working class.
Marx and Engels said this literature “had a necessarily reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social leveling in its crudest form.” The three greatest early utopians were St. Simon, Fourier, and Owen. These three produced systems, based on the underdeveloped forces of the new capitalist economic formations, which could not properly solve the problems raised by the exploitation of the workers.
Marx and Engels said this is because “the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry” and industry had not developed enough to generate the level of class antagonism to challenge the power of the capitalists in a non-utopian way.
It seems they were mistaken about the “even pace” part, because even today in “the highest stage” of capitalism the level of class antagonism has not kept up with the development of industry. This means utopian ideas are still widespread.
The early utopians replaced historical action by the workers with schemes and plans to reorganize society “specially contrived by these inventors.” These thinkers saw the workers as passive and “reject all political and especially all revolutionary action.”
But all is not negative! Their writings contained “a critical element” insofar as they pointed up the injustices and exploitation inherent in bourgeois society. “Hence they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class.”
This is an interesting analysis from the Manifesto, and it suggests since the level of class conscious antagonism to the capitalist system has, apparently, not been evenly paced to the development of capitalism, that some “utopian” thinking may still be of value with respect to “enlightenment.”
Engels took up these issues again some thirty years later, in his “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, three chapters culled out of his 1878 book Anti-Duhring and published in 1880 as a separate pamphlet.
He begins by stating that modern socialism is the result of the class struggle, the anarchy of production, and , in its theories, “ostensibly” as a continuation of the ideas of the “great French philosophers” of the Enlightenment. He especially mentions Rousseau but we can think of a few others: Condillac, Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, d’Holbach and Condorcet to name a few.
These thinkers readied the consciousness of the French people for the great Revolution that broke out on July 14, 1789. Many were themselves “extreme revolutionists.” They judged everything by Reason and “recognized no external authority.”
However, the “Reason” they spoke of turned out to be, in reality, only the ideals of the bourgeoisie. The self-conscious working class had not yet differentiated itself as an independent class. This class, not yet fully conscious of itself, instituted the Reign of Terror (led by Robespierre and St. Just). The bourgeoisie, realizing that the embryonic new class was a threat, ultimately intrusted the revolution to Napoleon.
According to Engels, this is the historical background to the systems of the three great utopians we discussed from the Manifesto. After the Terror the bourgeoisie lost confidence in Reason. It was up to the utopians to figure out how to solve the social problems presented by the new class and its obvious exploitation in a society that was premised on universal rights and freedom. Since to “crude class conditions corresponded crude theories” the solutions to the problems addressed by the utopians had to await the further advancement of capitalism and the theory which corresponded to this development—i.e., Marxism.
It would seem that, according to this presentation, the highest theoretical development of Marxism should have been found in France, England and Germany towards the end of the nineteenth century. What happened in Russia was an historical anomaly— the socialists coming to power in a crudely developed rather than an advanced capitalist state. The problems associated with what is now understood to be “Stalinism” were the result of a crude and vulgar form of Marxism having developed (with utopian ideals of toughening it out against the whole capitalist world) in an environment with a crudely evolved industrial base. This seems to fit in with Engel’s analysis. [Cf., also Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, esp. Vol II.]
“Maoism” would have been an even cruder form of Marxism— based on the peasantry not the workers at all due to the extremely low level of capitalist development in China. Maoism, just as Stalinism, might be explained as the result of utopian schemes being concocted in societies without the advanced industrial basis to support correct Marxist positions. Pol Pot’s “Marxism” was so primitive it fell off the radar and crash landed into a barbarism which subjected his own people to the same kind of treatment the US regularly doles out to third world peoples. He butchered almost a third the number of people that the US did in Vietnam, for example. [Cf., my review of Phillip Short’s book Pol Pot.]
With the development of Marxism in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, utopianism should have come to an end. Its survival within Marxism can have detrimental effects. But can the effects also be beneficial?
Herbert Marcuse, for example, in his book Soviet Marxism, maintained that even though the Soviet Union was, in some cases, not living up to its ideals, impossible given the hostility of the West and its internal problems, nevertheless it still proclaimed those ideals to its own people and to the world. They may have seemed “utopian”, given the real state of affairs, but they kept those ideals alive.
Lenin also has something to say on this issue. In 1912 he wrote, but did not publish, a brief article entitled “Two Utopias” (CW:18:355-359). He recalls a dictum by Engels: “What formally may be economically incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history.” This dictum was made in reference to utopian socialism. “Engel’s advanced this profound thesis”, Lenin says, “in connection with utopian socialism: that socialism was ‘fallacious’ in the formal economic sense.... But utopian socialism was right from the point of view of world history, for it was a symptom, an expression, a harbinger of the class which, born of capitalism, has by now, in the beginning of the twentieth century, become a mass force which can put an end to capitalism and is irresistibly advancing to this goal.”
In Russia there were two types of utopianism in vogue in Lenin’s day (1912), namely a peasant utopianism demanding democracy and by- passing capitalism towards an equalitarian peasant based society, and a liberal capitalist utopianism demanding a constitutional monarchy and a peaceful transition from the Czarist autocracy to something like the bourgeois democracies of France or Germany.
The utopia of the liberals dampened the revolutionary fervor of the peasants as it was really a ploy to convince the Czarist ruling class to share power with the liberal bourgeoisie at the expense of the peasants.
The peasant utopia was also an impossible dream— but it was neverthe- less progressive because it was “an expression of the aspirations of the toiling millions of the petty bourgeoisie [peasants] to put an end altogether to the old, feudal exploiters....”
Lenin was of course against “utopianism” in principle but realized the difference between “good” and “bad” utopias. He thought Marxists had to discover the “valuable democratic kernel” that was at the core of the “husk” of this peasant utopia. He also thought that a similar type of utopianism was in place in many Asian countries that were set to undergo bourgeois revolutions in the twentieth century. Deconstructing these utopian revolutions is still a task for Marxists in our own time.
Lenin ended his 1912 article by reflecting on the “old Marxist literature of the[eighteen] eighties” and how it had tried to systematically analyze the peasant utopia in Russia. “Some day,” he wrote, “historians will study this effort systematically and trace its connection with what in the first decade of the twentieth century came to be called ‘Bolshevism’.”
Even more, today, in the beginning of the twentieth-first century, we will have to systematically trace the connections of utopian thinking throughout the last century in order to understand where we are today with respect to fallacious versus correct Marxist understandings of current reality.
Another thinker who tried to work out the differences between “good” and “bad” utopian thinking was the German Marxist Ernst Bloch (1885-1977). How can one tell the difference between, on the one hand, the kind of utopianism that ends up in cloud-cuckoo-land (the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s vision of peasant socialism, the nostalgia for the days of Stalin in the USSR and movements (reactionary) to bring them about again are a few of many examples), and on the other hand, that form of utopian thinking which, even if at present it seems totally unrealistic, contributes to laying the ground work for the future emancipation of the working people and the establishment of socialism?
In his book, A Philosophy for the Future (1963), Bloch (echoing Engels), says the early utopians, because of the level of social production, “had to construct the outlines of a brave new world out of their own hearts and heads.” I can agree that this is better than nothing and by holding an ideal future this kind of utopianism can motivate people to action. The bad part is, as in the examples I gave above, when the leadership of a people’s movement irresponsibly tries to skip stages when they find themselves confronted with an immature social reality. When they attempt to construct a social reality that is only possible in the advanced stages of economic development in a society at a lower level then social, political, and human mayhem results
With respect to this kind of situation, Bloch writes: “All the worse then, if a society that will no longer be reconciled in an abstract-utopian manner, but demands the way to the thing itself, errs on the way--- and errs dangerously.” I am thinking here that this is what Bloch might consider forced marches to socialism by an impatient leadership, premature collectivization of agriculture, and in general attempting to “build socialism” when your society is either still basically feudal or only barely beginning to be capitalist.
“All the worse,” he continues, “if the revolutionary capacity is not there to execute ideals which have been represented abstractly, rather than to discredit or even to destroy with catastrophic means ideals which have not appeared in the concrete.” This does not just apply to the third world cases I have used as examples. The daily struggle here in the United States could just as easily have been cited. In the foreseeable future the most important political goals that will objectively further the class struggle is to oust the ultra-right clerico-Republican reactionaries from power. Is it “utopian” to think this can be done by a broad progressive people’s alliance which also includes center and left elements of the Democratic Party? Is this an “abstract utopian ideal?”
Or should we, on the contrary, take a maximalist position to the left of where the majority consciousness is now and try to. as a magnet attracts iron filings, slowly attempt to draw the masses in our direction? Some small parties on the Left have exactly this sort of program. In the long term there may be a dialectical unity in these positions, but at the given moment it seems to me much more “utopian” in the “bad” sense to be on the side lines waiting for magnetic attraction to bring about change than it is to be in the midst of the struggles where the masses of people are actually to be found.
This, by the way, is how I interpret the position of Sam Webb the CPUSA national chairman, which he recently put forth at the Global Left Dialogue in New York City. His topic was “Imaginings of Socialism” (a fruitful ground for some utopian thinking). Webb is quite clear in rejecting a “go it alone” ultra-left stance in the fight to advance socialist values in the US. He puts the working class at the center of the struggle but it is firmly allied with what he calls other “core constituencies” and oppressed segments of the population (women, youth,ethnic and racial minorities, the poor, etc.).
There is nothing “utopian” in this idea of a broad based people’s struggle as a necessity in order to confront the power of capital. He ends his presentation, however, with an example of what I have called “good” utopianism— a vision of what the world, or at least our country, might one day be like where the skies are always blue and “pollution free”, toxic dumps have been rendered into gardens, there is no homelessness, no unemployment, no discrimination (sexual or otherwise), women will getting more of those Nobel prizes in science, there will be empty prisons, and no more war, almost too good to be true. This kind of motivational “utopianism” is in the finest traditions of the socialist movement. Bush may be running the show, or trying to, but the future belongs to the people.
Thomas Riggins is the former book review editor of Political Affairs
Monday, October 23, 2006
BOOK ROUND UP #15: AMERICAN THEOCRACY, SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3114/1/160/
Book Round Up #15: "American Theocracy" and "The Spanish Civil War"
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
Here is another one of our previews (reviews of reviews) of new and important books of interest to the progessive community. The 14 previous Book Round Up entries are archived on our website. If anyone would like to read one of these books and write a full review (800 words) please contact me at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
AMERICAN THEOCRACY: THE PERIL AND POLITICS OF RADICAL RELIGION AND BORROWED MONEY IN THE 21ST CENTURY by Kevin Phillips, Viking, 462 pp., reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in THE NEW YORK TIMES 3-17-2006.
This is another book from the genre of ex-Republicans who have awakened to the fact that the party they once believed in has become the tool of elite business interests and has nothing to do with real democracy. Kakutani lists three previous books by Phillips--the first one is a famous pro-Republican manifesto. The books are "The Emerging Republican Majority" (1969), and then, some thirty years later, "furious jeremiads" against the Establishment: "Wealth and Democracy" (2002) and "American Dynasty" (2004) in the last one, Kakutani says, the author portrayed the Bush family as practicing, in his own words, "blatant business cronyism" on behalf of oil and other corporate interests and allied with the military-industrial complex.
Phillips, in his new book, ranges through history describing the symptoms of imperial decline (the Romans, Hapsburgs, the British Empire, etc.,) and comes up with five conditions reflecting, in his words, "a power already at its peak and starting to decline." They are 1, "widespread public concern over cultural and economic decay" 2, "growing religious fervor" 3, "a rising commitment to faith as opposed to reason and a corollary downplaying of science" 4, "considerable popular anticipation of a millennial time frame" 5, "hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach." Kakutani writes that Phillips adds a sixth, namely, "high debt, which can become 'crippling in its own right.'"
Bush and the Republicans are spearheading a counter-Enlightenment based on "the 30 to 40 percent of the electorate caught up in Scripture." according to Phillips. Kakutani writes, "As Mr. Phillips sees it, 'the Southernization of American governance and religion' is 'abetting far-reaching ideological change and eroding the separation of powers between church and state.' while moving the Republican party toward ' a new incarnation as an ecumenical religious party, claiming loyalties from hard-shell Baptists and Mormons, as well as Eastern Rite Catholics and Hasidic Jews,' who all define themselves against the common enemy of secular liberalism."
Phillips thinks that the growing influence of religion on the state can have disastrous influences with respect to the state's continuing viability. Kakutani quotes him on the past: "militant Catholicism helped undo the Roman and Spanish empires; the Calvinist fundamentalism of the Dutch Reformed Church helped to block any 18th-century Dutch renewal; and the interplay of imperialism and evangelicalism led pre-1914 Britain into a bloodbath and global decline."
Phillips thinks something similar is happening to the U.S. today. Bush and the Republicans are responsible or egging on "U.S. oil vulnerability, excessive indebtedness and indulgence of radical religion" he writes. Kakutani seems a bit skeptical of some of Phillips arguments and conclusions. It is true that this book does not contain a Marxist analysis but from what Kakutani says about it, and the quotes given from Phillips, one can see that elements of the ruling class are worried about the extremist policies of the Bush administration.
Kakutani ends his review with some remarks about the book's "afterward" wherein the author "suggests that the G.O.P. coalition is 'fatally flawed from a national-interest standpoint' partly because it is dominated 'by an array of outsider religious denominations caught up in biblical morality, distrust of science and a global imperative of political and religious evangelicalism,' but he does not really explain why this development could lead to a Republican downfall." He then cynically concludes, "Perhaps he is saving that for his next book-- when the results of the midterm elections are known." This indicates he thinks Phillips is basically a Monday morning quarterback.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION by Helen Graham, Oxford University Press 2005, 175 pp., reviewed by Peter N. Carroll in The Volunteer: Journal of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, March 2006.
There have been umpteen thousand books written about the Spanish Civil War-- one of the great Left struggles of the pre-WW2 years of the last century. Young progressives of today owe it to themselves to know about this Civil War. Older progressives too, if they have not made a special study of the conflict, should also learn the facts. Fortunately this small book from Oxford fits the bill of providing a short, painless, introduction to this controversial subject matter. Carroll, author of La Odisea de la Brigada Abraham Lincoln, tells us that Graham, in this work, basically condensed to 175 pages her 2002 work The Spanish Republic at War: 1936-1939 (2002) and that her "ideas and insights pop and sizzle on the page."
Progressives will like the fact that the book lays to rest all the ultra-right and down right fascist propaganda about the role of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Spain in the war. Carroll notes that Graham "takes on some recent historical critics who blame the defeat of the Spanish Republic on the policies of the Communist party and who have suggested that Franco's victory was probably good for the Spanish people."
As far as the Soviet Union is concerned, fears of its wanting a "satellite" state, the reviewer quotes the book which calls this a "deeply anachronistic reading of history -- namely that the Soviet Union intervening in Spain in 1936 was already the political and economic superpower of the post-Second World War period."
Carroll also points out that the war in Spain was not just about politics and economics. He maintains that the book makes clear "the Spanish Civil War was truly a battle of ideologies-- not just democracy versus fascism, but free minds challenging a monolithic world of fixed belief." Communists can be proud of the fact that they fought on the side of democracy and the free minds.
Thomas Riggins is the Book Review Editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
Book Round Up #15: "American Theocracy" and "The Spanish Civil War"
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
Here is another one of our previews (reviews of reviews) of new and important books of interest to the progessive community. The 14 previous Book Round Up entries are archived on our website. If anyone would like to read one of these books and write a full review (800 words) please contact me at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
AMERICAN THEOCRACY: THE PERIL AND POLITICS OF RADICAL RELIGION AND BORROWED MONEY IN THE 21ST CENTURY by Kevin Phillips, Viking, 462 pp., reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in THE NEW YORK TIMES 3-17-2006.
This is another book from the genre of ex-Republicans who have awakened to the fact that the party they once believed in has become the tool of elite business interests and has nothing to do with real democracy. Kakutani lists three previous books by Phillips--the first one is a famous pro-Republican manifesto. The books are "The Emerging Republican Majority" (1969), and then, some thirty years later, "furious jeremiads" against the Establishment: "Wealth and Democracy" (2002) and "American Dynasty" (2004) in the last one, Kakutani says, the author portrayed the Bush family as practicing, in his own words, "blatant business cronyism" on behalf of oil and other corporate interests and allied with the military-industrial complex.
Phillips, in his new book, ranges through history describing the symptoms of imperial decline (the Romans, Hapsburgs, the British Empire, etc.,) and comes up with five conditions reflecting, in his words, "a power already at its peak and starting to decline." They are 1, "widespread public concern over cultural and economic decay" 2, "growing religious fervor" 3, "a rising commitment to faith as opposed to reason and a corollary downplaying of science" 4, "considerable popular anticipation of a millennial time frame" 5, "hubris-driven national strategic and military overreach." Kakutani writes that Phillips adds a sixth, namely, "high debt, which can become 'crippling in its own right.'"
Bush and the Republicans are spearheading a counter-Enlightenment based on "the 30 to 40 percent of the electorate caught up in Scripture." according to Phillips. Kakutani writes, "As Mr. Phillips sees it, 'the Southernization of American governance and religion' is 'abetting far-reaching ideological change and eroding the separation of powers between church and state.' while moving the Republican party toward ' a new incarnation as an ecumenical religious party, claiming loyalties from hard-shell Baptists and Mormons, as well as Eastern Rite Catholics and Hasidic Jews,' who all define themselves against the common enemy of secular liberalism."
Phillips thinks that the growing influence of religion on the state can have disastrous influences with respect to the state's continuing viability. Kakutani quotes him on the past: "militant Catholicism helped undo the Roman and Spanish empires; the Calvinist fundamentalism of the Dutch Reformed Church helped to block any 18th-century Dutch renewal; and the interplay of imperialism and evangelicalism led pre-1914 Britain into a bloodbath and global decline."
Phillips thinks something similar is happening to the U.S. today. Bush and the Republicans are responsible or egging on "U.S. oil vulnerability, excessive indebtedness and indulgence of radical religion" he writes. Kakutani seems a bit skeptical of some of Phillips arguments and conclusions. It is true that this book does not contain a Marxist analysis but from what Kakutani says about it, and the quotes given from Phillips, one can see that elements of the ruling class are worried about the extremist policies of the Bush administration.
Kakutani ends his review with some remarks about the book's "afterward" wherein the author "suggests that the G.O.P. coalition is 'fatally flawed from a national-interest standpoint' partly because it is dominated 'by an array of outsider religious denominations caught up in biblical morality, distrust of science and a global imperative of political and religious evangelicalism,' but he does not really explain why this development could lead to a Republican downfall." He then cynically concludes, "Perhaps he is saving that for his next book-- when the results of the midterm elections are known." This indicates he thinks Phillips is basically a Monday morning quarterback.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION by Helen Graham, Oxford University Press 2005, 175 pp., reviewed by Peter N. Carroll in The Volunteer: Journal of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, March 2006.
There have been umpteen thousand books written about the Spanish Civil War-- one of the great Left struggles of the pre-WW2 years of the last century. Young progressives of today owe it to themselves to know about this Civil War. Older progressives too, if they have not made a special study of the conflict, should also learn the facts. Fortunately this small book from Oxford fits the bill of providing a short, painless, introduction to this controversial subject matter. Carroll, author of La Odisea de la Brigada Abraham Lincoln, tells us that Graham, in this work, basically condensed to 175 pages her 2002 work The Spanish Republic at War: 1936-1939 (2002) and that her "ideas and insights pop and sizzle on the page."
Progressives will like the fact that the book lays to rest all the ultra-right and down right fascist propaganda about the role of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Spain in the war. Carroll notes that Graham "takes on some recent historical critics who blame the defeat of the Spanish Republic on the policies of the Communist party and who have suggested that Franco's victory was probably good for the Spanish people."
As far as the Soviet Union is concerned, fears of its wanting a "satellite" state, the reviewer quotes the book which calls this a "deeply anachronistic reading of history -- namely that the Soviet Union intervening in Spain in 1936 was already the political and economic superpower of the post-Second World War period."
Carroll also points out that the war in Spain was not just about politics and economics. He maintains that the book makes clear "the Spanish Civil War was truly a battle of ideologies-- not just democracy versus fascism, but free minds challenging a monolithic world of fixed belief." Communists can be proud of the fact that they fought on the side of democracy and the free minds.
Thomas Riggins is the Book Review Editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
Friday, October 20, 2006
BOOK ROUND UP #14: CLIMATE CHANGE, 9/11 AND THE MEDIA
Book Round Up #14: Climate Change Catastrophe and Media Failures
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
Here is another in our series of book previews (reviews of reviews) on important new works that have recently appeared. If anyone is inspired to write a full review of one these works (800 words) please contact us at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE: MAN, NATURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE by Elizabeth Kolbert, Bloomsbury, 210 pp., reviewed by Mariana Gosnell in The New York Times 3-16-2006.
The reviewer says this is “the latest of a large crop of books” on the subject of climate change. Climate change can be seen all over the world and dire consequences seem to be store for us. Ms. Kolbert is credited with clear, comprehensive and succinct language and Gosnell thinks the “book may make a good handbook” on the subject. Global warming is almost certainly caused by our modern industrial society. She tries to be objective but can get up set. Gosnell says “’Astonishingly’ [Kolbert writes] ‘standing in the way’ of progress [in solving the problem] seems to be President Bush’s goal. Not only did he reject the Kyoto Protocol, she notes, with its mandatory curbs on [carbon] emissions, almost killing the treaty
in the process, but he also continues to block meaningful follow-up changes in it.”
At the end of the book, after interviewing scientists, politicians, and lay people, the author allows herself to express her personal opinion when she writes: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” Actually, society does not make such a “choice.” People in power are making choices to ignore science and to continue to pollute the earth because vast, incredibly vast, sums of money are to be made in so doing. It is the capitalist economic system and its inculcation of greed and profit making at any cost that is responsible. Capitalists are blinded by greed and will take all of us along with them down the road of doom if we don ‘t resist and overthrow this destructive economic system.
FEET TO THE FIRE: THE MEDIA AFTER 9/11 by Kristina Borjesson, Prometheus Books, 2005, reviewed by Frances Cerra Whittelsey in Extra! The Magazine of FAIR -- The Media Watch Group, April 2006.
This is a book that addresses the credibility of the news media. Reporters face all sorts of pressures from the government, corporate America and their own publishers to restrict and censor the news. Ms. Borjesson has gone out and interviewed 21 "of the most respected journalists and editors" to see the extent of the problem. Whittelsey writes, "Her questions include many that progressive Americans have been urgently asking: Where were the media in the run-up to the Iraq War? Why was the coverage so unquestioning? How is it that the Bush administration has been so successful in getting its message out to the public? Why, ultimately, are we at war in Iraq?"
Here are some of the things she found out. There was agreement that TV news had failed to do as good a job of credible reporting as other media outlets. Ted Koppel was one of the few defending the record of TV news. Borjesson quotes Tom Yellen (ex-executive for Peter Jennings at ABC News) to the effect that "some of the people controlling TV aren't comfortable with the role of the press as a watchdog." How did the claim about Iraq's WMDs get taken hook-line-and-sinker by the press, especially TV? Well, it seems that ABC, CBS, and also the AP just took the administration's word for it. Some reporting!
There was good print coverage-- but not in New York or Washington "where elite decision makers tend to reside." Knight-Ridder's coverage was good (in fact the "best") but they haven't papers in NY or DC. She also quotes John MacArthur (publisher of Harper's Magazine) who, according to the review, "blames media owners for the largely unquestioning coverage of the run-up to the war. 'The owners decide what journalism we get,' he says. 'By and large, owners are very conservative, go-along-to-get-along establishment figures,' whose primary responsibility, in the case of public companies, is to their shareholders."
Besides institutional bias, threats and intimidation are also used to control the news. Knight-Ridder's reporters were threatened and "barred from traveling with the vice president." The majority of those interviewed also remarked on the profound ignorance of both our military and political leaders with respect to Iraq and the Middle East in general. The American people are also, I think, fairly ignorant on those subjects. The media is at fault, especially TV which dumbs down the news. Ted Koppel, however, disagrees. He blames the American people directly. According to the reviewer he "accused the American public of not paying attention and staying deliberately ignorant. The information people need, asserted Koppel, is available if they make an effort to find it." But wasn't that Koppel's job? I guess not. Our press has to be improved because as Borjesson concludes, "our continued collective ignorance can only lead to global-scale catastrophe." Don't blame "Political Affairs"!
Thomas Riggins is book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
Here is another in our series of book previews (reviews of reviews) on important new works that have recently appeared. If anyone is inspired to write a full review of one these works (800 words) please contact us at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
FIELD NOTES FROM A CATASTROPHE: MAN, NATURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE by Elizabeth Kolbert, Bloomsbury, 210 pp., reviewed by Mariana Gosnell in The New York Times 3-16-2006.
The reviewer says this is “the latest of a large crop of books” on the subject of climate change. Climate change can be seen all over the world and dire consequences seem to be store for us. Ms. Kolbert is credited with clear, comprehensive and succinct language and Gosnell thinks the “book may make a good handbook” on the subject. Global warming is almost certainly caused by our modern industrial society. She tries to be objective but can get up set. Gosnell says “’Astonishingly’ [Kolbert writes] ‘standing in the way’ of progress [in solving the problem] seems to be President Bush’s goal. Not only did he reject the Kyoto Protocol, she notes, with its mandatory curbs on [carbon] emissions, almost killing the treaty
in the process, but he also continues to block meaningful follow-up changes in it.”
At the end of the book, after interviewing scientists, politicians, and lay people, the author allows herself to express her personal opinion when she writes: It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” Actually, society does not make such a “choice.” People in power are making choices to ignore science and to continue to pollute the earth because vast, incredibly vast, sums of money are to be made in so doing. It is the capitalist economic system and its inculcation of greed and profit making at any cost that is responsible. Capitalists are blinded by greed and will take all of us along with them down the road of doom if we don ‘t resist and overthrow this destructive economic system.
FEET TO THE FIRE: THE MEDIA AFTER 9/11 by Kristina Borjesson, Prometheus Books, 2005, reviewed by Frances Cerra Whittelsey in Extra! The Magazine of FAIR -- The Media Watch Group, April 2006.
This is a book that addresses the credibility of the news media. Reporters face all sorts of pressures from the government, corporate America and their own publishers to restrict and censor the news. Ms. Borjesson has gone out and interviewed 21 "of the most respected journalists and editors" to see the extent of the problem. Whittelsey writes, "Her questions include many that progressive Americans have been urgently asking: Where were the media in the run-up to the Iraq War? Why was the coverage so unquestioning? How is it that the Bush administration has been so successful in getting its message out to the public? Why, ultimately, are we at war in Iraq?"
Here are some of the things she found out. There was agreement that TV news had failed to do as good a job of credible reporting as other media outlets. Ted Koppel was one of the few defending the record of TV news. Borjesson quotes Tom Yellen (ex-executive for Peter Jennings at ABC News) to the effect that "some of the people controlling TV aren't comfortable with the role of the press as a watchdog." How did the claim about Iraq's WMDs get taken hook-line-and-sinker by the press, especially TV? Well, it seems that ABC, CBS, and also the AP just took the administration's word for it. Some reporting!
There was good print coverage-- but not in New York or Washington "where elite decision makers tend to reside." Knight-Ridder's coverage was good (in fact the "best") but they haven't papers in NY or DC. She also quotes John MacArthur (publisher of Harper's Magazine) who, according to the review, "blames media owners for the largely unquestioning coverage of the run-up to the war. 'The owners decide what journalism we get,' he says. 'By and large, owners are very conservative, go-along-to-get-along establishment figures,' whose primary responsibility, in the case of public companies, is to their shareholders."
Besides institutional bias, threats and intimidation are also used to control the news. Knight-Ridder's reporters were threatened and "barred from traveling with the vice president." The majority of those interviewed also remarked on the profound ignorance of both our military and political leaders with respect to Iraq and the Middle East in general. The American people are also, I think, fairly ignorant on those subjects. The media is at fault, especially TV which dumbs down the news. Ted Koppel, however, disagrees. He blames the American people directly. According to the reviewer he "accused the American public of not paying attention and staying deliberately ignorant. The information people need, asserted Koppel, is available if they make an effort to find it." But wasn't that Koppel's job? I guess not. Our press has to be improved because as Borjesson concludes, "our continued collective ignorance can only lead to global-scale catastrophe." Don't blame "Political Affairs"!
Thomas Riggins is book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
FUKUYAMA'S FANASTY
Fukuyama's Fantasy:Comments On Kakutani's Review of "Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy
By Thomas Riggins
DEMOCRACY, POWER AND THE NEOCONSERVATIVE LEGACY by Francis Fukuyama, Yale University Press, 226 pages, reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, 3/14/2006 [PA Archives]
This book could well be subtitled “Right Wing Hegelian Wakes Up.” Fukuyama [hereafter FF] you might recall authored “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992) in which he elaborated his own version of neoconservatism predicting the final victory of U.S. style “liberal democracy.” He is now a critic of at least three neocon theses which he formerly shared with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Allan Bloom, and William Kristol among others according to Kakautani. FF is now questioning “preventive war, benevolent hegemony and unilateral action.” He has written a powerful critique of Bush’s aggressive war in Iraq from a conservative point of view. So, there is dissension in the ranks!
Reflecting on a speech he heard in which the neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer made a fool of himself by asserting Bush’s war policies had made the U.S. safer, FF said, Kakutani reports, he “could not understand why everyone was applauding the speech enthusiastically, given that the United States had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was bogged down in a vicious insurgency, and had almost totally isolated itself from the rest of the world by following the kind of unipolar strategy advocated by Krauthammer.” This was a good reflection by FF. Progressives are aware of these facts too but just chalk up people like Krauthammer and those who applaud him as shallow pates. His new book is FF’s response to the realization that the neocon analysis is gibberish.
Kakutani gives another example of this gibberish. William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote a book (“Present Dangers” 2000) in which they asserted “American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality.” This could only be asserted by those who know zip about US foreign policy (and less about morality) which has led to the deaths of millions of innocent people throughout Central and South America, Africa and Asia all to insure American economic and political hegemony. FF objects to the conception of “benevolent hegemony” not for the reasons I gave but because he thinks “it is not sufficient that Americans believe in their own good intentions; non-Americans must be convinced of them as well.” This is made a bit difficult when the US is engaged in widespread activities of kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, torture, murder and other acts which demonstrate our morality and benevolence.
Kakutani quotes FF as follows: “Before other countries accepted U.S. leadership they would have to be convinced not just that America was good but that it was also wise in its application of power, and, through that wisdom, successful in achieving the ends it set for itself.” The idea that an imperial power such as the U.S. acts out notions of morality and benevolence and is good and wise is childish. At any rate, as a result of the war in Iraq, Kakutani points out that “these assumptions now lie in tatters.” It appears that what upsets FF is not that these assumptions are false, but that the neocons and the Bushites have brought them into disrepute.
FF no longer supports “neoconservatism.” He writes that “one of the consequences of a perceived failure in Iraq will be the discrediting of the entire neoconservative agenda and a restoration of the authority of foreign policy realists.” Kakutani ends his review with the following quote from FF: “Repairing American credibility will not be a matter of better public relations; it will require a new team and new policies.”
We have to ask ourselves if this so-called credibility can ever be restored. Earlier I mentioned that FF was a right wing Hegelian. Hegel saw the advance of civilization as a progressive growth and establishment of human freedom. This is just what the neocons keep claiming motivates them. Its not the oil they are after, rather they want to promote democracy and free societies (by which they mean capitalism). FF is himself sympathetic to this view. He shares the notion, as Kakutani puts it “that democracy is likely to expand universally in the long run....” The trouble with this view, as articulated by conservatives, neoconservatives, and “liberals,” is that their notion of “democracy” is conjoined to their notion of what constitutes “freedom” and for them “freedom” entails the capitalist economic system which is dominated by the United States and its “First World” allies.
The real political power in these countries rests with economic elites who control the international financial institutions and transnational corporations which dominate the process of globalization and prevent the independent development of the non-industrialized areas of the world. This harsh historical reality contradicts the tendency towards the universal growth of democracy (freedom) because their (incorrect) conceptions of democracy and freedom are only possible in advanced capitalist societies.
One example. The hostility of the U. S. towards Venezuela is directed towards a democratically elected and popular government. The hostility exists because of the threat this government is perceived to represent to the vested economic interests of U.S. and allied corporate capital in the area. Because these are the dominate interests all of FF’s theories about the spread of democracy or the possibility of a future credible U.S. foreign policy (i.e., one seen as spreading freedom) will come to grief.
Hegel has left behind left wing descendants as well. They are found in the communist, socialist and worker’s movements around the world who envision freedom in a radically different way than the FF’s of this world. Freedom is envisioned as human solidarity, not “free” market exploitation, as putting people before profits and using the economic resources of the world to benefit all of its people not just a class of elite owners of capital. I agree with FF that the Bushites have to go, but so does he.
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
By Thomas Riggins
DEMOCRACY, POWER AND THE NEOCONSERVATIVE LEGACY by Francis Fukuyama, Yale University Press, 226 pages, reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, 3/14/2006 [PA Archives]
This book could well be subtitled “Right Wing Hegelian Wakes Up.” Fukuyama [hereafter FF] you might recall authored “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992) in which he elaborated his own version of neoconservatism predicting the final victory of U.S. style “liberal democracy.” He is now a critic of at least three neocon theses which he formerly shared with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Allan Bloom, and William Kristol among others according to Kakautani. FF is now questioning “preventive war, benevolent hegemony and unilateral action.” He has written a powerful critique of Bush’s aggressive war in Iraq from a conservative point of view. So, there is dissension in the ranks!
Reflecting on a speech he heard in which the neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer made a fool of himself by asserting Bush’s war policies had made the U.S. safer, FF said, Kakutani reports, he “could not understand why everyone was applauding the speech enthusiastically, given that the United States had found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, was bogged down in a vicious insurgency, and had almost totally isolated itself from the rest of the world by following the kind of unipolar strategy advocated by Krauthammer.” This was a good reflection by FF. Progressives are aware of these facts too but just chalk up people like Krauthammer and those who applaud him as shallow pates. His new book is FF’s response to the realization that the neocon analysis is gibberish.
Kakutani gives another example of this gibberish. William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote a book (“Present Dangers” 2000) in which they asserted “American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality.” This could only be asserted by those who know zip about US foreign policy (and less about morality) which has led to the deaths of millions of innocent people throughout Central and South America, Africa and Asia all to insure American economic and political hegemony. FF objects to the conception of “benevolent hegemony” not for the reasons I gave but because he thinks “it is not sufficient that Americans believe in their own good intentions; non-Americans must be convinced of them as well.” This is made a bit difficult when the US is engaged in widespread activities of kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, torture, murder and other acts which demonstrate our morality and benevolence.
Kakutani quotes FF as follows: “Before other countries accepted U.S. leadership they would have to be convinced not just that America was good but that it was also wise in its application of power, and, through that wisdom, successful in achieving the ends it set for itself.” The idea that an imperial power such as the U.S. acts out notions of morality and benevolence and is good and wise is childish. At any rate, as a result of the war in Iraq, Kakutani points out that “these assumptions now lie in tatters.” It appears that what upsets FF is not that these assumptions are false, but that the neocons and the Bushites have brought them into disrepute.
FF no longer supports “neoconservatism.” He writes that “one of the consequences of a perceived failure in Iraq will be the discrediting of the entire neoconservative agenda and a restoration of the authority of foreign policy realists.” Kakutani ends his review with the following quote from FF: “Repairing American credibility will not be a matter of better public relations; it will require a new team and new policies.”
We have to ask ourselves if this so-called credibility can ever be restored. Earlier I mentioned that FF was a right wing Hegelian. Hegel saw the advance of civilization as a progressive growth and establishment of human freedom. This is just what the neocons keep claiming motivates them. Its not the oil they are after, rather they want to promote democracy and free societies (by which they mean capitalism). FF is himself sympathetic to this view. He shares the notion, as Kakutani puts it “that democracy is likely to expand universally in the long run....” The trouble with this view, as articulated by conservatives, neoconservatives, and “liberals,” is that their notion of “democracy” is conjoined to their notion of what constitutes “freedom” and for them “freedom” entails the capitalist economic system which is dominated by the United States and its “First World” allies.
The real political power in these countries rests with economic elites who control the international financial institutions and transnational corporations which dominate the process of globalization and prevent the independent development of the non-industrialized areas of the world. This harsh historical reality contradicts the tendency towards the universal growth of democracy (freedom) because their (incorrect) conceptions of democracy and freedom are only possible in advanced capitalist societies.
One example. The hostility of the U. S. towards Venezuela is directed towards a democratically elected and popular government. The hostility exists because of the threat this government is perceived to represent to the vested economic interests of U.S. and allied corporate capital in the area. Because these are the dominate interests all of FF’s theories about the spread of democracy or the possibility of a future credible U.S. foreign policy (i.e., one seen as spreading freedom) will come to grief.
Hegel has left behind left wing descendants as well. They are found in the communist, socialist and worker’s movements around the world who envision freedom in a radically different way than the FF’s of this world. Freedom is envisioned as human solidarity, not “free” market exploitation, as putting people before profits and using the economic resources of the world to benefit all of its people not just a class of elite owners of capital. I agree with FF that the Bushites have to go, but so does he.
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
Monday, October 16, 2006
BOOK ROUND UP #13: RED ARMY, THE SENATE, NORTH KOREA & NUKES
Book Roundup # 13: The Red Army, History Of The US Senate And North Korea And Nukes
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
Here is number 13 in our series of Book Roundups--- which are essentially reviews of reviews of the current literature. The 12 previous roundups are archived on our website. Anyone who wants to do a full review of any of these books, please contact us at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
IVAN’S WAR: LIFE AND DEATH IN THE RED ARMY, 1939-1945 by Catherine Merridale, Metropolitan Books, pp. 462, reviewed by William Grimes, New York Times 2-15-06.
I’m sure it was no fun being in the Red Army during W.W.II. Grimes’ review is very positive about this book which paints a very negative picture of the Soviet Army-- one almost forgets that they were fighting 80% of the German army and basically saved Europe from the Nazis. To paint her picture the author relies not only on “historical reconstruction” but also “sympathetic projection.” Her only problem seems to be that when she interviews the actual Soviet veterans of W.W.II her reconstructions and projections are rejected by them. Grimes says that “Ms. Merridale is understanding about why that might be.” But it doesn’t occur to him, or it seems to her, that it might be because her book is more cold war fiction than it is actual historical fact.
THE MOST EXCLUSIVE CLUB: A HISTORY OF THE MODERN UNITED STATES SENATE by Lewis L. Gould, Basic Books, 416 pages, reviewed by Sam Rosenfeld in The American Prospect, December 2005.
This review will lead you to really think about the role of the Senate. It begins by remarking on the Senate minority leader Harry Reid’s defense of the filibuster as a weapon against the Republicans. We should remember that the filibuster was traditionally condemned by progressives as anti-democratic because a determined minority could disrupt the will of the majority. It was infamously used by segregationist senators to prevent civil rights legislation from being passed. O tempora, O mores!
When Gould began his book he thought he was going to find out what a noble and good institution the Senate was. Instead, he writes, it has “genuinely impede[d] the nation’s vitality and evolution.” The reviewer points out that this is a history covering the time from Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush’s re-election (that should be “re-election” since he was not really elected to his first term). The author’s theme is the Senate “as a graveyard of progressive reform.” Gould points out that “the filibuster has stood in the way of necessary reform.” The times the Senate has had a chance to do something progressive have been few and far between and this is primarily due to the filibuster. It would seem that it should go. The Senate itself should go too for it is inherently ant-democratic and anti-working class.
When New York has the same representation as Montana or South Dakota there is not even an illusion of democratic equality of representation. Going beyond Gould, the reviewer points out that “the Senate will almost invariably be whiter and wealthier than the House.” Rosenfeld concludes that “liberalism stands to gain the most” in the long run if the Republicans get rid of the filibuster and other undemocratic procedures in an effort to stifle Democratic attempts to foil their plans. They would inadvertently “effect a lasting transformation of the Congress into a more parliamentary-style institution.”
NUCLEAR SHOWDOWN: NORTH KOREA TAKES ON THE WORLD by Gordon C. Chang, Random House, 327 pages, reviewed by David Sanger in The New York Times 1-19-06.
After reading this review it is difficult to tell which of the two, the author or the reviewer, is more ignorant ( a polite word). The title itself is stupid. North Korea doesn’t want to “take on” anyone, let alone the world. Chang seems to think if you don’t bow down to the US that is “taking on the world.” North Korea’s having the bomb bugs the US but it is ok for Israel to have it. Israel, of course, is not “taking on the world”-- despite its record of ignoring UN resolutions.
Sanger opines that the DPRK wants the bomb “figuring that Saddam Hussein’s mistake was taking on the the United States without getting his nukes in order.” It is really idiotic to suggest that Iraq wanted to “take on” the United States. The reviewer also writes that the DPKR “is a tiny country that should have collapsed years ago in a radioactive heap.” Is this a suggestion that it should have been nuked by the US a long time ago? When the Times lets such BS decorate it’s pages one can only wonder why it is promoting such ill considered propaganda under the guise of “journalism.”
Chang himself, who is sometimes referred to as Mr. Gordon by the reviewer, shows his own level of intellectual deficiency when he thinks himself clever by referring to the DPRK as “Kim’s [i.e., Kim Jong Il] Ku Klux Korea.” This is enough of a hint that this book is just a pile of pro-imperialist trash trying to pass itself off as a serious work. Sanger is just as bad as Chang. He tells us we have to fear an al Qaeda terrorist or an Iranian mulla “tired of waiting for his scientists to cook their own uranium” turning to North Korea for bomb fuel. I didn’t know that there was a viable job market for scientists in the mulla/terrorist community. I wonder how this review would have been received if besides “an Iranian mulla” Sanger had also included “ a West Bank Rabbi” from illegally occupied Palestinian land. The up shot of all this is that neither the book nor the review is worth while reading, and neither will be The New York Times if it keeps on putting this type of junk in its pages.
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
Here is number 13 in our series of Book Roundups--- which are essentially reviews of reviews of the current literature. The 12 previous roundups are archived on our website. Anyone who wants to do a full review of any of these books, please contact us at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
IVAN’S WAR: LIFE AND DEATH IN THE RED ARMY, 1939-1945 by Catherine Merridale, Metropolitan Books, pp. 462, reviewed by William Grimes, New York Times 2-15-06.
I’m sure it was no fun being in the Red Army during W.W.II. Grimes’ review is very positive about this book which paints a very negative picture of the Soviet Army-- one almost forgets that they were fighting 80% of the German army and basically saved Europe from the Nazis. To paint her picture the author relies not only on “historical reconstruction” but also “sympathetic projection.” Her only problem seems to be that when she interviews the actual Soviet veterans of W.W.II her reconstructions and projections are rejected by them. Grimes says that “Ms. Merridale is understanding about why that might be.” But it doesn’t occur to him, or it seems to her, that it might be because her book is more cold war fiction than it is actual historical fact.
THE MOST EXCLUSIVE CLUB: A HISTORY OF THE MODERN UNITED STATES SENATE by Lewis L. Gould, Basic Books, 416 pages, reviewed by Sam Rosenfeld in The American Prospect, December 2005.
This review will lead you to really think about the role of the Senate. It begins by remarking on the Senate minority leader Harry Reid’s defense of the filibuster as a weapon against the Republicans. We should remember that the filibuster was traditionally condemned by progressives as anti-democratic because a determined minority could disrupt the will of the majority. It was infamously used by segregationist senators to prevent civil rights legislation from being passed. O tempora, O mores!
When Gould began his book he thought he was going to find out what a noble and good institution the Senate was. Instead, he writes, it has “genuinely impede[d] the nation’s vitality and evolution.” The reviewer points out that this is a history covering the time from Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush’s re-election (that should be “re-election” since he was not really elected to his first term). The author’s theme is the Senate “as a graveyard of progressive reform.” Gould points out that “the filibuster has stood in the way of necessary reform.” The times the Senate has had a chance to do something progressive have been few and far between and this is primarily due to the filibuster. It would seem that it should go. The Senate itself should go too for it is inherently ant-democratic and anti-working class.
When New York has the same representation as Montana or South Dakota there is not even an illusion of democratic equality of representation. Going beyond Gould, the reviewer points out that “the Senate will almost invariably be whiter and wealthier than the House.” Rosenfeld concludes that “liberalism stands to gain the most” in the long run if the Republicans get rid of the filibuster and other undemocratic procedures in an effort to stifle Democratic attempts to foil their plans. They would inadvertently “effect a lasting transformation of the Congress into a more parliamentary-style institution.”
NUCLEAR SHOWDOWN: NORTH KOREA TAKES ON THE WORLD by Gordon C. Chang, Random House, 327 pages, reviewed by David Sanger in The New York Times 1-19-06.
After reading this review it is difficult to tell which of the two, the author or the reviewer, is more ignorant ( a polite word). The title itself is stupid. North Korea doesn’t want to “take on” anyone, let alone the world. Chang seems to think if you don’t bow down to the US that is “taking on the world.” North Korea’s having the bomb bugs the US but it is ok for Israel to have it. Israel, of course, is not “taking on the world”-- despite its record of ignoring UN resolutions.
Sanger opines that the DPRK wants the bomb “figuring that Saddam Hussein’s mistake was taking on the the United States without getting his nukes in order.” It is really idiotic to suggest that Iraq wanted to “take on” the United States. The reviewer also writes that the DPKR “is a tiny country that should have collapsed years ago in a radioactive heap.” Is this a suggestion that it should have been nuked by the US a long time ago? When the Times lets such BS decorate it’s pages one can only wonder why it is promoting such ill considered propaganda under the guise of “journalism.”
Chang himself, who is sometimes referred to as Mr. Gordon by the reviewer, shows his own level of intellectual deficiency when he thinks himself clever by referring to the DPRK as “Kim’s [i.e., Kim Jong Il] Ku Klux Korea.” This is enough of a hint that this book is just a pile of pro-imperialist trash trying to pass itself off as a serious work. Sanger is just as bad as Chang. He tells us we have to fear an al Qaeda terrorist or an Iranian mulla “tired of waiting for his scientists to cook their own uranium” turning to North Korea for bomb fuel. I didn’t know that there was a viable job market for scientists in the mulla/terrorist community. I wonder how this review would have been received if besides “an Iranian mulla” Sanger had also included “ a West Bank Rabbi” from illegally occupied Palestinian land. The up shot of all this is that neither the book nor the review is worth while reading, and neither will be The New York Times if it keeps on putting this type of junk in its pages.
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
Friday, October 13, 2006
CAPITALISM KILLS #4 CASE STUDIES IN AN IMMORAL SYSTEM
Capitalism Kills #4:Case Studies in an Immoral system- Household Pollutants,Cancer Drugs, Mudslides
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
The free enterprise system, AKA the free market, AKA capitalism, is an economic system, as we all know, that is dedicated to maximizing profits at any cost. Neither ethics, morality, honor, environmental concerns, nor human life itself will be spared by this system and its quest to put profits before people (and everything else). Here are some case studies of the system at work. The previous seven case studies are archived on our website.
CASE 8 Here is a fine example of how the capitalist system uses our own government to kill us to make a buck. The New York Times 2-15-06: “State Sues E.P.A. for Files On Household Pollutants: Seeking Data Guarded as Trade Secrets” by Danny Hakim. The Clean Air Act requires NY and other states to make our air more breathable. Common products such as varnishes and paints have pollution causing compounds in them. The companies that make these products don’t want you to know how much. The Environmental Protection Agency, run by the Bushites is siding with the corporations. The pollution causing compounds foul our air and contribute to disease and death. What is more important-- people or profits? You guessed it: profits. One of the biggest polluters is Sherwin-Williams. The people of Ohio, especially Cleveland, can thank their very own Republican Senator George V. Voinovich for using his pull to get the E.P.A. to to aid Sherwin-Williams. This company and others “have been battling in court to prevent state attempts to regulate their products.” The Free (to kill you) Enterprise System objects to rules requiring clean air if it will lower profits. Where does Voinovich get his air from anyway? Thanks to Congress if the polluters put more gunk in the air than the law allows they can just pay a fine. Sherwin-Williams paid $5,045,784 in fees for this in 2003. We have to breath this stuff! Who does Congress represent? Other polluters: Valspar, Lenmar, Dayton Superior, Tenmec, United Gilsonite Labs, Hillyard Industries, Zea, Sierra and G.E. Plastics (these are just the top ten).
Sherwin-Williams says that we the people really want to be polluted in the first place. “Our customer base {that's us} indicates they would prefer the performance of these noncomplying products” the company said. A spokesman for state and local regulators said “What E.P.A. is doing is allowing the industry to buy their way out of federal regulations.” So what else is new?
CASE 9 The same issue of the Times has this great story as well: “A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, At a Price That Many Can’t Pay” by Alex Berenson. A colon cancer drug Avastin, made by Genentech (majority owner, Roche), can also be used for lung and breast cancer. Genentech has decided to charge about $100,000 a year for it- Yikes! This despite the fact that “the actual cost of producing Avastin is a fraction of what Genentech charges for it.” So how is the price set? A new factor (subjective) is being used in addition to cost of production plus reasonable rate of profit. It is “the inherent value of life sustaining therapies.” That means since you want to live pay through the nose. It doesn’t matter what this pill really costs, what its economic value is let us say, what matters is without it you die, so that will be $100,000 per year thank you. Don’t have it-- too bad. And don’t get any ideas about government price controls either-- socialism is dead remember.
CASE 10 Capitalism and the Philippine Mudslides. On Friday 2-17-06 the Capitalist System claimed a thousand lives in the Philippine village of Guinsaugon. The evidence is contained in the following article by Carlos H. Conde: “Danger of Philippine Landslides Often Ignored, Critics Say”- New York Times 2-21-06.
The bottom line is that this horrific event was not a natural disaster. Illegal logging, spurred on by our old friend the profit motive, had denuded the hills around this village of their natural forest cover thus allowing the mudslide that killed so many. What is more the government and capitalists were well aware of the likely consequences of the illegal logging but did it anyway because the so-called Free Enterprise System (AKA Capitalism) by it very nature values making a buck above anything so worthless (to it) as mere human life. Conde reports that official records reveal that as long as nine months ago Philippine authorities knew the village “was in grave danger.” We should also note that hundreds of thousands of other people are living in similar circumstances. How many will have to die before the Philippine state cracks down on the capitalists who are illegally deforesting the country and who by corruption and the failure of law enforcement are able to act with impunity? After interviewing a Greenpeace spokesman Conde wrote, “And politically. whoever sits in the presidential palace must reckon with the nation’s political dynasties, several of which earned their wealth and power through logging” according to the spokesman. The hypocrisy of the Philippine government is outrageous. Here is the politically correct statement of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, made after the mudslide: “We should all join hands in the preservation of our environment and protect what is left behind for the sake of generations to come.” And here is the political reality as reported in the Times: “In late 2005...the environment department allowed the resumption of logging by a company owned by a senator who is an ally of the president, over the objections of residents and religious leaders. The logging concession was within a national forest reserve.” So much for preserving the environment! It seems to me that as long as the capitalist system rules in the Philippines we are going to continue to periodically read about these sorts of disasters.
--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
The free enterprise system, AKA the free market, AKA capitalism, is an economic system, as we all know, that is dedicated to maximizing profits at any cost. Neither ethics, morality, honor, environmental concerns, nor human life itself will be spared by this system and its quest to put profits before people (and everything else). Here are some case studies of the system at work. The previous seven case studies are archived on our website.
CASE 8 Here is a fine example of how the capitalist system uses our own government to kill us to make a buck. The New York Times 2-15-06: “State Sues E.P.A. for Files On Household Pollutants: Seeking Data Guarded as Trade Secrets” by Danny Hakim. The Clean Air Act requires NY and other states to make our air more breathable. Common products such as varnishes and paints have pollution causing compounds in them. The companies that make these products don’t want you to know how much. The Environmental Protection Agency, run by the Bushites is siding with the corporations. The pollution causing compounds foul our air and contribute to disease and death. What is more important-- people or profits? You guessed it: profits. One of the biggest polluters is Sherwin-Williams. The people of Ohio, especially Cleveland, can thank their very own Republican Senator George V. Voinovich for using his pull to get the E.P.A. to to aid Sherwin-Williams. This company and others “have been battling in court to prevent state attempts to regulate their products.” The Free (to kill you) Enterprise System objects to rules requiring clean air if it will lower profits. Where does Voinovich get his air from anyway? Thanks to Congress if the polluters put more gunk in the air than the law allows they can just pay a fine. Sherwin-Williams paid $5,045,784 in fees for this in 2003. We have to breath this stuff! Who does Congress represent? Other polluters: Valspar, Lenmar, Dayton Superior, Tenmec, United Gilsonite Labs, Hillyard Industries, Zea, Sierra and G.E. Plastics (these are just the top ten).
Sherwin-Williams says that we the people really want to be polluted in the first place. “Our customer base {that's us} indicates they would prefer the performance of these noncomplying products” the company said. A spokesman for state and local regulators said “What E.P.A. is doing is allowing the industry to buy their way out of federal regulations.” So what else is new?
CASE 9 The same issue of the Times has this great story as well: “A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, At a Price That Many Can’t Pay” by Alex Berenson. A colon cancer drug Avastin, made by Genentech (majority owner, Roche), can also be used for lung and breast cancer. Genentech has decided to charge about $100,000 a year for it- Yikes! This despite the fact that “the actual cost of producing Avastin is a fraction of what Genentech charges for it.” So how is the price set? A new factor (subjective) is being used in addition to cost of production plus reasonable rate of profit. It is “the inherent value of life sustaining therapies.” That means since you want to live pay through the nose. It doesn’t matter what this pill really costs, what its economic value is let us say, what matters is without it you die, so that will be $100,000 per year thank you. Don’t have it-- too bad. And don’t get any ideas about government price controls either-- socialism is dead remember.
CASE 10 Capitalism and the Philippine Mudslides. On Friday 2-17-06 the Capitalist System claimed a thousand lives in the Philippine village of Guinsaugon. The evidence is contained in the following article by Carlos H. Conde: “Danger of Philippine Landslides Often Ignored, Critics Say”- New York Times 2-21-06.
The bottom line is that this horrific event was not a natural disaster. Illegal logging, spurred on by our old friend the profit motive, had denuded the hills around this village of their natural forest cover thus allowing the mudslide that killed so many. What is more the government and capitalists were well aware of the likely consequences of the illegal logging but did it anyway because the so-called Free Enterprise System (AKA Capitalism) by it very nature values making a buck above anything so worthless (to it) as mere human life. Conde reports that official records reveal that as long as nine months ago Philippine authorities knew the village “was in grave danger.” We should also note that hundreds of thousands of other people are living in similar circumstances. How many will have to die before the Philippine state cracks down on the capitalists who are illegally deforesting the country and who by corruption and the failure of law enforcement are able to act with impunity? After interviewing a Greenpeace spokesman Conde wrote, “And politically. whoever sits in the presidential palace must reckon with the nation’s political dynasties, several of which earned their wealth and power through logging” according to the spokesman. The hypocrisy of the Philippine government is outrageous. Here is the politically correct statement of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, made after the mudslide: “We should all join hands in the preservation of our environment and protect what is left behind for the sake of generations to come.” And here is the political reality as reported in the Times: “In late 2005...the environment department allowed the resumption of logging by a company owned by a senator who is an ally of the president, over the objections of residents and religious leaders. The logging concession was within a national forest reserve.” So much for preserving the environment! It seems to me that as long as the capitalist system rules in the Philippines we are going to continue to periodically read about these sorts of disasters.
--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
STATE OF DENIAL
Online at: http://politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/4222/1/215/
Book Review: State Of Denial, by Bob Woodward
By Thomas Riggins
State Of Denial
Bob Woodward,
Simon & Schuster, 2006
The last sentence in Woodward’s new book is, "With all Bush’s upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become."
Why this is the case and how it had become so Woodward attempts to explain in the forty-five chapters leading up to this conclusion. The focus is on individuals, their personalities and foibles, arrogance and ignorance and how they led the nation into a military and political fiasco in the Middle East. The unanswered question is did Bush not tell the truth consciously or unconsciously. Did he lie or is just blind to the reality all around him, and if so is that blindness due to his intellectual shortcomings or because his immediate subordinates, such as Rumsfeld and Cheney have consistently misled him. If the latter is the case then have they done so consciously or unconsciously?
The answers to these questions can be found in the book, but you will have to dig them out for yourself. Woodward does not delve much below the surface of individual personalities in conflict. The surface reveals that we are losing the war in Iraq because we learned nothing from Vietnam, were arrogant and over confident, ignorant of any other culture except our own, racist, and assumed we could not possibly be defeated by the Arabs in Iraq. Lyndon Johnson’s "raggedy ass peasants" and Winston Churchill’s "naked fakir" still lie at the basis of the American ruling class’s conception of Third World people.
The stage is set for this tragedy with an opening line from Bush as he decides to run for President. "I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy." Someone or some group will have to lift that fog. Unfortunately for Bush and the world they lifted the fog of ignorance only to allow the fog of war to roll in.
Bush's ignorance, and lack of interest, in foreign affairs is only one of several deadly factors that will come into conjunction and spawn the Iraqi debacle Equally causative was the fateful choice of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of war A man with a mission "to change the entire U.S. military, transform it into a leaner, more efficient, more agile, more lethal fighting machine." We find that he followed this course regardless of any advice he was given by his staff, civilian or military, in the Pentagon. He also held Congress in contempt. A bad sign for democracy. It is Rumsfeld's basic incompetence, and Bush's inability to see it, that is a major factor in the American failure as portrayed in the book. In reality, however, the basic project was flawed from the start. The whole neocon philosophy of war in Asia against Iraq was born of profound ignorance of the peoples and cultures of the region. A competent Secretary of Defense would have been one who vetoed the idea in the first place.
It was Clemenceau who said that war was too important to be left to the generals But Rumsfeld is no Cleamenseau. Woodward quotes one of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying, "Military advice is compromised by the political leadership. It doesn't emerge."
The book recounts how the Bush administration brushed off intelligence warnings of an impending terrorist attack and how after 9/11 Bush decided to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan since they had allied themselves with Al-Queda, the group claiming credit for the attack. Woodward also says that it was 71 days after 9/11 that Bush set in motion the plans to attack Iraq (which the U.S. did 16 months later). But he does not provide much background analysis. The impression is that Bush thought Iraq had WMD and could use them against the US and its allies. There is no indication that the intelligence was "cooked" to justify the war and the suggestion is that Bush was acting in good faith but uninformed.
Rumsfeld decided to use the Iraq war as his test model for the new lean, mean fighting machine. The "Powell Doctrine" of using overwhelming force to ensure victory, devised by Colin Powell when he was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was abandoned and replaced by what can only be called the "Rumsfeld Doctrine" of the use of underwhelming force blitzkrieg style. The assumption here being we would be welcomed as "liberators" and not seen as imperialist "occupiers." The sad reality is that this is just how the leadership in the Bush administration saw itself.
Totally blind to how the people of the Middle East saw the US-- as the enabler of Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians, as the supporter of dictatorships that repressed their own people (Saddam had been an American ally for years) just as long as "American" [read "Corporate"] interests were benefited, and as basically hypocritical and anti-democratic--
the Bushites embarked on a military adventure that no sensible person, knowledgeable about the Middle East would have recommended. The depth of the ignorance, including the highest reaches of the academic world and the government is incredible.
Bush, who had no knowledge of foreign affairs by his own admission, suddenly saw himself as leading a Crusade for Freedom throughout the world-- starting with Afganistan and Iraq and intending to follow up with the "Axis of Evil"-- Syria, Iran and North Korea, and also adding Cuba to the list.
Where did his ideas come from? "You are what you read," Churchill said. And, if you don't read all that much you are what you listen to. Who had the President's ear?
Woodward tells us that during the bombing campaign of Afghanistan, the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, decided to put together a clandestine "think tank" to draw up a philosophical program for the government to follow in response to 9/11 and the brave new world in which the administration believed we needed to live.
Wolfowitz turned to the American Enterprise Institute to use as the basis for his think tank. The AEI is an ultra-right intellectual adjunct of corporate America. According to People for the American Way, most of its board are CEOs from big business: ExxonMobil, Motorola, American Express, Enron (the late Ken Lay), Dow Chemical, etc., and it has such outstanding "scholars", fellows, and champions of democracy as Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork, Charles Murray [author of "The Bell Curve" -- there are IQ differences between the races] and Ben Wattenburg [PBS blowhard].
A dozen denizens of this foul tank were dredged up to concoct the foreign policy potion for Bush to quaff. They included Bernard Lewis, Fareed Zakaria (of Newsweek), talking head Fouad Ajami, and a Rumsfeld consultant (Steve Herbits). This secret cabal of the ultra-right came up with "a seven-page, single-spaced document, called 'Delta of Terrorism' [as in river delta]'." Woodward was not allowed to see it but the head of AEI "was surprised at the consensus among" the group." The fact that he picked a group of virtual ultra-right clones did not give him a clue about the reason for this consensus, which boiled down to "We're facing a two-generation war. And start with Iraq."
And so, this complete fabrication of the right-wing brain set was "hand-delivered to the war cabinet members." Woodward reports that "it had a strong impact on President Bush, causing him to focus on the 'malignancy' of the Middle East." What Woodward doesn't say is that Wolfowitz and other neocons had the invasion of Iraq on their agenda for years, way before Bush even thought of running for President. It was not an idea that popped up after 9/11.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you apply to reality an artificial philosophical system, in this case the neoconservative interpretation of history, that reality will blow up in your face. This is what has happened in Iraq and, as the book reveals, the Bush Administration and Bush himself are so driven by ideological commitments that it is impossible for them to understand what is going on.
They have been defeated. They have failed to establish "democracy" (how could they have established it, they don't believe in it themselves as their actions in Haiti and towards Venezuela show as well as Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004), failed to lessen the threat of terrorism in the world, and failed to make America "safer" as their own intelligence reports indicate. Yet faced with this obvious reality they speak of "turning the corner," "victory is in sight," etc.
But what can you expect from a White House that announced right before the war that, with respect to WMD in Iraq, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there." There were not any weapons and many other "facts" that have been put forth are equally bogus.
The book goes into great detail about how L. Paul Bremer messed up the occupation while he was proconsul or viceroy in Iraq by applying ideologically driven notions to the real conditions on the ground in Iraq-- notions that did not match the facts and made the situation worse for both the Americans and the Iraqis. The two greatest blunders were disbanding the entire Iraqi army and purging anyone who had been a member of the Ba'ath party. These two actions practically guaranteed a large and potent insurgency against both the foreign occupation and the imposition of a government dominated by returning exiles.
There is a lot more damaging information in the book. One shocker is that the war criminal Henry Kissinger is still going to the White House and giving Bush his opinions. Bush is said to be greatly influenced by them. They turn out to be the same old rotten ideas he peddled to Nixon about what should have been done in Vietnam. He wants Bush to "stay the course." They will stay the course right up until we see on TV the last American helicopter flying our ambassador out of the Green Zone while the Iraqi insurgents finally occupy it.
It is also distressing to learn that General Pace, the current head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff still thinks Iraq had something to do with 9/11! Here is how he backed the war, speaking to Woodward: "I do not have doubt about what we have done. We did not do this. When we were sitting home minding our own business, we got attacked on 9/11." The man who heads the world's largest military machine, with troops stationed all over the world, a force that imposes blockades and no fly zones and threatens to intervene in other countries, describes all this as sitting home and minding our own business. That is ludicrous. As is using 9/11 still to justify the political and. military blunder of the Iraqi war. I feel sorry for any soldiers that serve under him.
This is Woodward's third book on the Bush administration. It is also the most critical. The scales have finally fallen from his eyes and now maybe they will fall from the 40% or so of Americans who still, truly blindly, support Bush and share his State of Denial.
--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor for Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
Book Review: State Of Denial, by Bob Woodward
By Thomas Riggins
State Of Denial
Bob Woodward,
Simon & Schuster, 2006
The last sentence in Woodward’s new book is, "With all Bush’s upbeat talk and optimism, he had not told the American public the truth about what Iraq had become."
Why this is the case and how it had become so Woodward attempts to explain in the forty-five chapters leading up to this conclusion. The focus is on individuals, their personalities and foibles, arrogance and ignorance and how they led the nation into a military and political fiasco in the Middle East. The unanswered question is did Bush not tell the truth consciously or unconsciously. Did he lie or is just blind to the reality all around him, and if so is that blindness due to his intellectual shortcomings or because his immediate subordinates, such as Rumsfeld and Cheney have consistently misled him. If the latter is the case then have they done so consciously or unconsciously?
The answers to these questions can be found in the book, but you will have to dig them out for yourself. Woodward does not delve much below the surface of individual personalities in conflict. The surface reveals that we are losing the war in Iraq because we learned nothing from Vietnam, were arrogant and over confident, ignorant of any other culture except our own, racist, and assumed we could not possibly be defeated by the Arabs in Iraq. Lyndon Johnson’s "raggedy ass peasants" and Winston Churchill’s "naked fakir" still lie at the basis of the American ruling class’s conception of Third World people.
The stage is set for this tragedy with an opening line from Bush as he decides to run for President. "I don't have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy." Someone or some group will have to lift that fog. Unfortunately for Bush and the world they lifted the fog of ignorance only to allow the fog of war to roll in.
Bush's ignorance, and lack of interest, in foreign affairs is only one of several deadly factors that will come into conjunction and spawn the Iraqi debacle Equally causative was the fateful choice of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of war A man with a mission "to change the entire U.S. military, transform it into a leaner, more efficient, more agile, more lethal fighting machine." We find that he followed this course regardless of any advice he was given by his staff, civilian or military, in the Pentagon. He also held Congress in contempt. A bad sign for democracy. It is Rumsfeld's basic incompetence, and Bush's inability to see it, that is a major factor in the American failure as portrayed in the book. In reality, however, the basic project was flawed from the start. The whole neocon philosophy of war in Asia against Iraq was born of profound ignorance of the peoples and cultures of the region. A competent Secretary of Defense would have been one who vetoed the idea in the first place.
It was Clemenceau who said that war was too important to be left to the generals But Rumsfeld is no Cleamenseau. Woodward quotes one of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying, "Military advice is compromised by the political leadership. It doesn't emerge."
The book recounts how the Bush administration brushed off intelligence warnings of an impending terrorist attack and how after 9/11 Bush decided to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan since they had allied themselves with Al-Queda, the group claiming credit for the attack. Woodward also says that it was 71 days after 9/11 that Bush set in motion the plans to attack Iraq (which the U.S. did 16 months later). But he does not provide much background analysis. The impression is that Bush thought Iraq had WMD and could use them against the US and its allies. There is no indication that the intelligence was "cooked" to justify the war and the suggestion is that Bush was acting in good faith but uninformed.
Rumsfeld decided to use the Iraq war as his test model for the new lean, mean fighting machine. The "Powell Doctrine" of using overwhelming force to ensure victory, devised by Colin Powell when he was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was abandoned and replaced by what can only be called the "Rumsfeld Doctrine" of the use of underwhelming force blitzkrieg style. The assumption here being we would be welcomed as "liberators" and not seen as imperialist "occupiers." The sad reality is that this is just how the leadership in the Bush administration saw itself.
Totally blind to how the people of the Middle East saw the US-- as the enabler of Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians, as the supporter of dictatorships that repressed their own people (Saddam had been an American ally for years) just as long as "American" [read "Corporate"] interests were benefited, and as basically hypocritical and anti-democratic--
the Bushites embarked on a military adventure that no sensible person, knowledgeable about the Middle East would have recommended. The depth of the ignorance, including the highest reaches of the academic world and the government is incredible.
Bush, who had no knowledge of foreign affairs by his own admission, suddenly saw himself as leading a Crusade for Freedom throughout the world-- starting with Afganistan and Iraq and intending to follow up with the "Axis of Evil"-- Syria, Iran and North Korea, and also adding Cuba to the list.
Where did his ideas come from? "You are what you read," Churchill said. And, if you don't read all that much you are what you listen to. Who had the President's ear?
Woodward tells us that during the bombing campaign of Afghanistan, the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, decided to put together a clandestine "think tank" to draw up a philosophical program for the government to follow in response to 9/11 and the brave new world in which the administration believed we needed to live.
Wolfowitz turned to the American Enterprise Institute to use as the basis for his think tank. The AEI is an ultra-right intellectual adjunct of corporate America. According to People for the American Way, most of its board are CEOs from big business: ExxonMobil, Motorola, American Express, Enron (the late Ken Lay), Dow Chemical, etc., and it has such outstanding "scholars", fellows, and champions of democracy as Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork, Charles Murray [author of "The Bell Curve" -- there are IQ differences between the races] and Ben Wattenburg [PBS blowhard].
A dozen denizens of this foul tank were dredged up to concoct the foreign policy potion for Bush to quaff. They included Bernard Lewis, Fareed Zakaria (of Newsweek), talking head Fouad Ajami, and a Rumsfeld consultant (Steve Herbits). This secret cabal of the ultra-right came up with "a seven-page, single-spaced document, called 'Delta of Terrorism' [as in river delta]'." Woodward was not allowed to see it but the head of AEI "was surprised at the consensus among" the group." The fact that he picked a group of virtual ultra-right clones did not give him a clue about the reason for this consensus, which boiled down to "We're facing a two-generation war. And start with Iraq."
And so, this complete fabrication of the right-wing brain set was "hand-delivered to the war cabinet members." Woodward reports that "it had a strong impact on President Bush, causing him to focus on the 'malignancy' of the Middle East." What Woodward doesn't say is that Wolfowitz and other neocons had the invasion of Iraq on their agenda for years, way before Bush even thought of running for President. It was not an idea that popped up after 9/11.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you apply to reality an artificial philosophical system, in this case the neoconservative interpretation of history, that reality will blow up in your face. This is what has happened in Iraq and, as the book reveals, the Bush Administration and Bush himself are so driven by ideological commitments that it is impossible for them to understand what is going on.
They have been defeated. They have failed to establish "democracy" (how could they have established it, they don't believe in it themselves as their actions in Haiti and towards Venezuela show as well as Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004), failed to lessen the threat of terrorism in the world, and failed to make America "safer" as their own intelligence reports indicate. Yet faced with this obvious reality they speak of "turning the corner," "victory is in sight," etc.
But what can you expect from a White House that announced right before the war that, with respect to WMD in Iraq, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there." There were not any weapons and many other "facts" that have been put forth are equally bogus.
The book goes into great detail about how L. Paul Bremer messed up the occupation while he was proconsul or viceroy in Iraq by applying ideologically driven notions to the real conditions on the ground in Iraq-- notions that did not match the facts and made the situation worse for both the Americans and the Iraqis. The two greatest blunders were disbanding the entire Iraqi army and purging anyone who had been a member of the Ba'ath party. These two actions practically guaranteed a large and potent insurgency against both the foreign occupation and the imposition of a government dominated by returning exiles.
There is a lot more damaging information in the book. One shocker is that the war criminal Henry Kissinger is still going to the White House and giving Bush his opinions. Bush is said to be greatly influenced by them. They turn out to be the same old rotten ideas he peddled to Nixon about what should have been done in Vietnam. He wants Bush to "stay the course." They will stay the course right up until we see on TV the last American helicopter flying our ambassador out of the Green Zone while the Iraqi insurgents finally occupy it.
It is also distressing to learn that General Pace, the current head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff still thinks Iraq had something to do with 9/11! Here is how he backed the war, speaking to Woodward: "I do not have doubt about what we have done. We did not do this. When we were sitting home minding our own business, we got attacked on 9/11." The man who heads the world's largest military machine, with troops stationed all over the world, a force that imposes blockades and no fly zones and threatens to intervene in other countries, describes all this as sitting home and minding our own business. That is ludicrous. As is using 9/11 still to justify the political and. military blunder of the Iraqi war. I feel sorry for any soldiers that serve under him.
This is Woodward's third book on the Bush administration. It is also the most critical. The scales have finally fallen from his eyes and now maybe they will fall from the 40% or so of Americans who still, truly blindly, support Bush and share his State of Denial.
--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor for Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
Monday, October 09, 2006
PHILOSOPHY AND FASCISM
Philosophy and Fascism: Reflections on Richard Wolin's "Heidegger Made Kosher"
By Thomas Riggins
This year is the centenary of the Lithuanian born French thinker Emmanuel Levinas who died in 1995. Perhaps motivated to celebrate the occasion, Richard Wolin has reviewed two new books on Levinas for “The Nation” (2-20-2006) in an essay he calls “Heidegger Made Kosher” (Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 and Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics).
Wohin’s essay is worthy of being reviewed in its own right. Anyone who says that “Philosophy advances by the critical discussion and examination of truth claims” can be trusted as a guide to the works of those for whom this conception seems alien.
Wolin opens by remarking that 2005 was the “Sartre Year” in France (Sartre was born in 1905) but that Sartre’s brand of political engagement has gone out of fashion. It became the fad to be anti-Marxist and to rest contentedly in anti “totalitarian” liberalism (i.e., bourgeois conservatism). Wolin says French intellectuals have only themselves to blame if they are now upset with the current world order.
Sartre and Levinas have this in common: they both studied with Heidegger. The difference is that Sartre completely broke with Heidegger on the question of “humanism” but Levinas did not. Wolin says, “Levinas’s entire philosophical endeavor” was “directed against Sartrean existential humanism.”
Levinas was also a late bloomer-- being 55 when his magnum opus appeared (Totality and Infinity, 1961). But why is he important? Wolin maintains that Sartre’s reputation was so great that he towered above all the other French intellectuals. New movements developed that claimed to make Sartre’s existentialism outmoded-- such as structuralism, post-structuralism and even postmodernism-- associated with such names as Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida among others.
The structuralists were the first to take on Sartre but their problem was they “lacked an ethical dimension” to their thought. This might not seem like a problem since Sartre had also failed to produce an “existentialist ethics” but it was. Sartre had a human centered philosophy of the self. One of his most famous works was a little essay “Existentialism as a Humanism” and his philosophy was seen as being in the tradition of Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”-- i.e., as having the subjective self and its problems at the center. Sartre was seen as a philosopher of “freedom” and individual rights.
Levinas developed an ethical alternative to humanism by basing his philosophy not on the self-- i.e.., the “ego” or what Sartre called the For-itself (pour-soi) but rather on the “Other.” This was radically anti-Sartrean as the “Other” for Sartre was an obstruction to the self but is central for Levinas. Let us see how this was done.
Wolin points out that both the structuralists and their heirs, he specifically mentions both Foucault and Derrida, “wagered everything on a withering critique of ‘humanism’”-- meaning any philosophy that put human beings at the center of its concerns. Wolin says that “Foucault famously prophesied that ‘man’ would soon be effaced like a drawing in the sand at the edge of the sea.” Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism would have to go as well.
The French anti-humanists soon found themselves in a quandary. As “socialism” began to unravel in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a result of an unrelenting Cold War waged by the West (taking full advantage of the unripened social conditions that were also undermining the socialist project), many French intellectuals wanted to jump on the band wagon of “human rights” being touted by the anti-socialist “dissident” elements in the East. How could they simultaneously decry “humanism” and focus on “human rights”?
The French anti-Sartrean anti-humanists had based their post existentialist systems on the work of the German thinker Martin Heidegger, “For it was Heidegger’s radical assault on Sartrean humanism,” Wolin writes, “that had set the tone and provided the ammunition for the subsequent structuralist attacks.”
Heidegger was interested in what he called “being” and he had written that “The history of Being is neither the history of man and of humanity, nor the history of the human relation to beings and to Being.” Being in and of itself was the only thing important to study to learn the history of Being. The study of humanity was a waste of time. Starting in the 1960s Heidegger began to really catch on with many European thinkers. In France the post-Sartreans, confusing the thought of Karl Marx with that of Leonid Brezhnev, began to shun Marx and court Heidegger. They became anti- workingclass as well. Wolin says, “They dismissed Marx’s theory of the proletariat as another failed variant [as was Sartre’s philosophy-tr] of Western humanism.”
Following Heidegger along the path in search of the mystery of Being, these French anti-humanists thought that it was Being that determined the meaning of the world and that human beings counted for naught in the great scheme of things. They abandoned the “project of human emancipation to the dustbin.”
Heidegger also attacked “Reason” as a product of humanism. Reason, he said “is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.” Sartre saw what was happening and realized that the flight from reason and the subjection of human fate to the Mystery of Being was itself an opening to totalitarianism and the subjection of humanity. Wolin quotes his response that the subordination of “the human to what is Other than man...has hatred of man as both its basis and its consequences....Either man is primarily himself, or he is primarily Other than himself. Choosing the second doctrine simply makes one a victim and accomplice of real alienation.”
Enter Levinas. He will provide the “philosophical” prop by which the French Heideggerians will reconcile their contradiction between anti-humanism and human rights. He will provide a new ethics not based on humanistic values. After studying with Heiddeger in the 1920s he became enamored of the older man’’s philosophy. In the 1930s he wrote the following, as quoted by Wolin: “No one who has ever done philosophy can keep himself from declaring, before the Heideggerian corpus, that the originality and power of his effort, born of genius, have allied themselves with a conscientious, meticulous, and solid elaboration.”
Heidegger's genius led him into the Nazi Party in 1933 and he became an ardent supporter of Hitler. Here is what the great man recommended to German youth, and to all those who thought that philosophy might help one think for one’s self: “Do not let doctrines and ideas be the rules of your Being. The Fuhrer himself and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law.”
Well that should have been that. Time to dust off Marx or Hegel or at least Kant, anything to distance oneself from a “philosophy” that leads to Auschwitz. But no. Levinas still thinks that there are good things to be found in “the Heideggerian corpus.” But, being Jewish, he at least concedes that Heidegger himself, “the empirical individual” as Wohin puts it, has gone over the top. Levinas must now work out a philosophy that will keep what he thinks are the worthwhile insights of his mentor (an attack on reason) and at the same time reject, he hopes, those elements that lead to the Third Reich. The next part of Wohin’s essay discusses how Levinas developed his “mature” philosophy. I want to show why this attempt failed and why, ultimately, the only real alternative to fascism is Marxism.
Wolin turns his attention to Levinas’s 1934 “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” where he rejects Nazi thinking as a threat to the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. But is this true? Just as a question of history the two major representatives of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition in Germany-- namely the Catholic Church and Lutheranism --saw no threat and in fact embraced Hitler and his movement. One must also ask, given the intense anti-Semitism of Christianity throughout the ages, what sense does it make to talk of a “Judeo-Christian” as opposed to just “Christian” tradition in the first place. Tri-theistic Trinitarians are ultimately not in the “same” tradition with monotheists.
Nazism, for Levinas, shows the “impotence” of Western thought. “Why was it,” Wolin writes, “he inquired, that Western philosophy, despite its manifest sublimity and grandeur, could do nothing to prevent the genocidal mania of the Nazis?” Neither Wolin nor Levinas answer this question. The answer is that Western philosophy has always supported reason and rationalism and follows in the tradition of the Enlightenment. The number of philosophers is very small compared to the number of regular citizens who in the main are under the influence of religion and religion bases itself not on reason but irrationality and authority. The Nazi movement was also based on irrationalism and authority and this is one of the reasons for its popularity. Heidegger’s philosophy was an attack on the Western philosophical tradition and an abandonment of the Enlightenment’s view of Reason. Marxism, even in its Stalinist deviations, preserved more of the Enlightenment traditions with respect to anything like a mass movement, than anything going on in Germany except for the labor movement which the Nazis destroyed. Ultimately it was the Western philosophical tradition, in its Marxist guise, that defeated the irrationality of Nazism. Even today the surest guarantee against fascism (on the philosophical front at least) is Marxism.
This, however is not seen by Levinas who will try to overcome Heidegger’s irrationalism with more irrationalism. The West’s concern with “theoretical reason” must be replaced with a greater emphasis on morality. Wolin thus says, the “watchword of Levinas’s mature philosophy” becomes “ethics as first philosophy.” When the choice has to be made between Athens and Jerusalem, Levinas prefers Jerusalem. He thinks philosophy is wrong to turn its back on the Biblical tradition. But philosophy would not be philosophy if it preferred revelation to reason
Levinas bases his ethics on an analysis of “the Other.” He holds that the Other has an infinite moral claim on us. Wolin says Levinas considers this claim to be “anterior to all theoretical or intellectual judgments.” Where does it come from then? Since I am an ”Other” for other egos why don't I have an infinite claim on them as well? Why don’t these claims cancel each other out? We must give Wolin credit for seeing the weaknesses of Levinas’s position. Wolin remarks that “The radical critique of reason that both Levinas and Heidegger advocate risks rendering social criticism impotent.” You also risk becoming a Nazi!
Wolin further points out that that “it is next to impossible to derive a meaningful politics from his [Levinas’s] ethical doctrines.” This would seem to indicate that Levinas’s philosophy is pretty much useless for the world we live in. Wolin also quotes from Samuel Moyn’s book the suggestion that Levinas is really doing a form of theology not philosophy at all. Levinas’s “Other” may be a relic of Yahweh. Moyn says, “Levinas may never have given up the habit--- the hankering for God’s command that he merely internalized to the human realm-- of theology.” Heidegger too may have been hankering after a god when he swooned over his “Fuhrer.”
Wolin also finds fault with Levinas’s style. Rather than promote open critical discussion (as philosophy should) it “encourages an attitude of submissive adulation.” I hope my little review here has stimulated your interest and that you pick up a copy of the Nation, or go on line to get Wolin's article (google the title). The upshot of all this is that the irrational and mystical “philosophy” of Levinas doesn’t seem worth the effort. Stick with Sartre if French philosophy appeals to you, but even better is the Marxist world outlook.
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
By Thomas Riggins
This year is the centenary of the Lithuanian born French thinker Emmanuel Levinas who died in 1995. Perhaps motivated to celebrate the occasion, Richard Wolin has reviewed two new books on Levinas for “The Nation” (2-20-2006) in an essay he calls “Heidegger Made Kosher” (Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 and Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics).
Wohin’s essay is worthy of being reviewed in its own right. Anyone who says that “Philosophy advances by the critical discussion and examination of truth claims” can be trusted as a guide to the works of those for whom this conception seems alien.
Wolin opens by remarking that 2005 was the “Sartre Year” in France (Sartre was born in 1905) but that Sartre’s brand of political engagement has gone out of fashion. It became the fad to be anti-Marxist and to rest contentedly in anti “totalitarian” liberalism (i.e., bourgeois conservatism). Wolin says French intellectuals have only themselves to blame if they are now upset with the current world order.
Sartre and Levinas have this in common: they both studied with Heidegger. The difference is that Sartre completely broke with Heidegger on the question of “humanism” but Levinas did not. Wolin says, “Levinas’s entire philosophical endeavor” was “directed against Sartrean existential humanism.”
Levinas was also a late bloomer-- being 55 when his magnum opus appeared (Totality and Infinity, 1961). But why is he important? Wolin maintains that Sartre’s reputation was so great that he towered above all the other French intellectuals. New movements developed that claimed to make Sartre’s existentialism outmoded-- such as structuralism, post-structuralism and even postmodernism-- associated with such names as Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida among others.
The structuralists were the first to take on Sartre but their problem was they “lacked an ethical dimension” to their thought. This might not seem like a problem since Sartre had also failed to produce an “existentialist ethics” but it was. Sartre had a human centered philosophy of the self. One of his most famous works was a little essay “Existentialism as a Humanism” and his philosophy was seen as being in the tradition of Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”-- i.e., as having the subjective self and its problems at the center. Sartre was seen as a philosopher of “freedom” and individual rights.
Levinas developed an ethical alternative to humanism by basing his philosophy not on the self-- i.e.., the “ego” or what Sartre called the For-itself (pour-soi) but rather on the “Other.” This was radically anti-Sartrean as the “Other” for Sartre was an obstruction to the self but is central for Levinas. Let us see how this was done.
Wolin points out that both the structuralists and their heirs, he specifically mentions both Foucault and Derrida, “wagered everything on a withering critique of ‘humanism’”-- meaning any philosophy that put human beings at the center of its concerns. Wolin says that “Foucault famously prophesied that ‘man’ would soon be effaced like a drawing in the sand at the edge of the sea.” Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism would have to go as well.
The French anti-humanists soon found themselves in a quandary. As “socialism” began to unravel in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a result of an unrelenting Cold War waged by the West (taking full advantage of the unripened social conditions that were also undermining the socialist project), many French intellectuals wanted to jump on the band wagon of “human rights” being touted by the anti-socialist “dissident” elements in the East. How could they simultaneously decry “humanism” and focus on “human rights”?
The French anti-Sartrean anti-humanists had based their post existentialist systems on the work of the German thinker Martin Heidegger, “For it was Heidegger’s radical assault on Sartrean humanism,” Wolin writes, “that had set the tone and provided the ammunition for the subsequent structuralist attacks.”
Heidegger was interested in what he called “being” and he had written that “The history of Being is neither the history of man and of humanity, nor the history of the human relation to beings and to Being.” Being in and of itself was the only thing important to study to learn the history of Being. The study of humanity was a waste of time. Starting in the 1960s Heidegger began to really catch on with many European thinkers. In France the post-Sartreans, confusing the thought of Karl Marx with that of Leonid Brezhnev, began to shun Marx and court Heidegger. They became anti- workingclass as well. Wolin says, “They dismissed Marx’s theory of the proletariat as another failed variant [as was Sartre’s philosophy-tr] of Western humanism.”
Following Heidegger along the path in search of the mystery of Being, these French anti-humanists thought that it was Being that determined the meaning of the world and that human beings counted for naught in the great scheme of things. They abandoned the “project of human emancipation to the dustbin.”
Heidegger also attacked “Reason” as a product of humanism. Reason, he said “is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.” Sartre saw what was happening and realized that the flight from reason and the subjection of human fate to the Mystery of Being was itself an opening to totalitarianism and the subjection of humanity. Wolin quotes his response that the subordination of “the human to what is Other than man...has hatred of man as both its basis and its consequences....Either man is primarily himself, or he is primarily Other than himself. Choosing the second doctrine simply makes one a victim and accomplice of real alienation.”
Enter Levinas. He will provide the “philosophical” prop by which the French Heideggerians will reconcile their contradiction between anti-humanism and human rights. He will provide a new ethics not based on humanistic values. After studying with Heiddeger in the 1920s he became enamored of the older man’’s philosophy. In the 1930s he wrote the following, as quoted by Wolin: “No one who has ever done philosophy can keep himself from declaring, before the Heideggerian corpus, that the originality and power of his effort, born of genius, have allied themselves with a conscientious, meticulous, and solid elaboration.”
Heidegger's genius led him into the Nazi Party in 1933 and he became an ardent supporter of Hitler. Here is what the great man recommended to German youth, and to all those who thought that philosophy might help one think for one’s self: “Do not let doctrines and ideas be the rules of your Being. The Fuhrer himself and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law.”
Well that should have been that. Time to dust off Marx or Hegel or at least Kant, anything to distance oneself from a “philosophy” that leads to Auschwitz. But no. Levinas still thinks that there are good things to be found in “the Heideggerian corpus.” But, being Jewish, he at least concedes that Heidegger himself, “the empirical individual” as Wohin puts it, has gone over the top. Levinas must now work out a philosophy that will keep what he thinks are the worthwhile insights of his mentor (an attack on reason) and at the same time reject, he hopes, those elements that lead to the Third Reich. The next part of Wohin’s essay discusses how Levinas developed his “mature” philosophy. I want to show why this attempt failed and why, ultimately, the only real alternative to fascism is Marxism.
Wolin turns his attention to Levinas’s 1934 “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” where he rejects Nazi thinking as a threat to the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. But is this true? Just as a question of history the two major representatives of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition in Germany-- namely the Catholic Church and Lutheranism --saw no threat and in fact embraced Hitler and his movement. One must also ask, given the intense anti-Semitism of Christianity throughout the ages, what sense does it make to talk of a “Judeo-Christian” as opposed to just “Christian” tradition in the first place. Tri-theistic Trinitarians are ultimately not in the “same” tradition with monotheists.
Nazism, for Levinas, shows the “impotence” of Western thought. “Why was it,” Wolin writes, “he inquired, that Western philosophy, despite its manifest sublimity and grandeur, could do nothing to prevent the genocidal mania of the Nazis?” Neither Wolin nor Levinas answer this question. The answer is that Western philosophy has always supported reason and rationalism and follows in the tradition of the Enlightenment. The number of philosophers is very small compared to the number of regular citizens who in the main are under the influence of religion and religion bases itself not on reason but irrationality and authority. The Nazi movement was also based on irrationalism and authority and this is one of the reasons for its popularity. Heidegger’s philosophy was an attack on the Western philosophical tradition and an abandonment of the Enlightenment’s view of Reason. Marxism, even in its Stalinist deviations, preserved more of the Enlightenment traditions with respect to anything like a mass movement, than anything going on in Germany except for the labor movement which the Nazis destroyed. Ultimately it was the Western philosophical tradition, in its Marxist guise, that defeated the irrationality of Nazism. Even today the surest guarantee against fascism (on the philosophical front at least) is Marxism.
This, however is not seen by Levinas who will try to overcome Heidegger’s irrationalism with more irrationalism. The West’s concern with “theoretical reason” must be replaced with a greater emphasis on morality. Wolin thus says, the “watchword of Levinas’s mature philosophy” becomes “ethics as first philosophy.” When the choice has to be made between Athens and Jerusalem, Levinas prefers Jerusalem. He thinks philosophy is wrong to turn its back on the Biblical tradition. But philosophy would not be philosophy if it preferred revelation to reason
Levinas bases his ethics on an analysis of “the Other.” He holds that the Other has an infinite moral claim on us. Wolin says Levinas considers this claim to be “anterior to all theoretical or intellectual judgments.” Where does it come from then? Since I am an ”Other” for other egos why don't I have an infinite claim on them as well? Why don’t these claims cancel each other out? We must give Wolin credit for seeing the weaknesses of Levinas’s position. Wolin remarks that “The radical critique of reason that both Levinas and Heidegger advocate risks rendering social criticism impotent.” You also risk becoming a Nazi!
Wolin further points out that that “it is next to impossible to derive a meaningful politics from his [Levinas’s] ethical doctrines.” This would seem to indicate that Levinas’s philosophy is pretty much useless for the world we live in. Wolin also quotes from Samuel Moyn’s book the suggestion that Levinas is really doing a form of theology not philosophy at all. Levinas’s “Other” may be a relic of Yahweh. Moyn says, “Levinas may never have given up the habit--- the hankering for God’s command that he merely internalized to the human realm-- of theology.” Heidegger too may have been hankering after a god when he swooned over his “Fuhrer.”
Wolin also finds fault with Levinas’s style. Rather than promote open critical discussion (as philosophy should) it “encourages an attitude of submissive adulation.” I hope my little review here has stimulated your interest and that you pick up a copy of the Nation, or go on line to get Wolin's article (google the title). The upshot of all this is that the irrational and mystical “philosophy” of Levinas doesn’t seem worth the effort. Stick with Sartre if French philosophy appeals to you, but even better is the Marxist world outlook.
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
Friday, October 06, 2006
MICHAEL SHERMER ON DENNETT'S "BREAKING THE SPELL"
Michael Shermer On Dennett's “Breaking The Spell”
By Thomas Riggins
BREAKING THE SPELL: RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON by Daniel C. Dennett, Viking, New York, 2006, 464pp.,
reviewed by Michael Shermer in SCIENCE 27 January 2006.
Dennett claims that his book is a “forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.” He also claims that such a study will not void “the life-enriching enchantment of religion itself.” Since Shermer tells us the author is an atheist, this seems like a case of wanting to have your Eucharist and eat it too. When we find out that God-belief turns out to be a boo-boo in thinking how do we keep the feeling of “enchantment”?
Dennett thinks the general public, being 90% religious, will resent a scientific approach (if indeed that is what his approach really is) and so he spends the first 55 pages of his book, according to Shermer, talking down to them (Shermer doesn’t quite say this but the implication is there). He thinks “believers” have a “repugnance for science” and so he has taken upon himself the “daunting task” of enlightening them (l’homme moyen sensual.)
Shermer says the book is actually written for “scientists and scholars” who have not given much thought to religion as a “natural phenomenon.” This must be a very small audience, especially since Shermer doesn’t tell us what is meant by “natural.” At any rate, the reviewer tells us that Dennett begins with something called “rational choice theory” as it has been applied to religion by the sociologist Rodney Stark (“Religion, Deviance, and Social Control” 1997, et al.). This is a theory also used by many bourgeois economists. It assumes that people make rational choices based on their perceived interests. The fact that they don’t often actually do this (think of Kansas) has not dampened enthusiasm for the theory.
Shermer explains Stark’s application of the theory thusly (I have boiled it down to get rid of jargon): religion acts as an exchange mechanism between the people and the gods--i.e., people do rituals, etc., for the gods and the gods give the people things they need-- rain, good hunting, victory in war, etc. This theory, by the way, is as old as the hills. It is better put forth by Spinoza.
Dennett takes this theory but “looks for a deeper causal vector.” This, since Dennett is an evolutionist, turns out to be reproductive fitness [as with Catholic priests and Hindu and Buddhist celibate monks perhaps-tr]. Dennett says, quoted in the review: “Any such regular expenditure of time and energy [as is done in religion-tr] has to be balanced by something of ‘value’ obtained, and the ultimate measure of evolutionary ‘value’ is fitness: the capacity to replicate more successfully than the competition.” Since there are more Chinese than any other population group, does this mean Marxism is a religion? Why doesn’t the Kama Sutra outsell the Koran or the Bible?
Shermer now asks how is evolutionary fitness enhanced by religion. From this point on I think the discussion becomes confused due to a category mistake. I mean that terms and ideas developed in the biological sciences are transferred mechanically to the social and cultural sciences. What we get is a modern day version of the type of social Darwinism created by Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century.
In answer to his question Shermer lists four “values” that religion provides that promote “evolutionary fitness.” These are 1. “mythmaking to explain apparently inexplicable phenomena in the world.” Why should this make us more fit? How could anything like this be tested? There are many evolutionarily fit systems that have developed without recourse to myths. Some mythical systems are independent of religion (such as the race theories or the current fad of meme theory.) 2. “redemption (forgiveness in this life) and resurrection (immortality in the next life “-- this is too specifically Christian a formulation to be put forth in a general theory about religion since redemption and resurrection are not universal features of religion. 3. “morality (reinforcement of pro-social behavior and punishment of anti-social behavior)”-- again it appears that this value can exist independently of religion and while associated with some religions (though not all) some type of morality seems to be a universal feature of social life even predating conscious formulation of religious ideas. Finally, 4. “sociality (encouragement of within-group amity and between-group enmity”-- this is also a universal features of social grouping with or without religion.
Shermer says Dennett admits we don’t know if religion can be explained by these values, and on the face of it it doesn’t look like it can. While an argument could be made for evolutionary (reproductive) fitness being a benefit of 3 and 4, 1 and 2 don’t seem all that relevant. Regardless of this admission, Shermer maintains the book “presents a plausible explanation” that they do. Shermer presents Dennett’s theory as follows.
As humans attained self-consciousness the mind developed (or brain) a “hyperactive agent detection device” (HADD). This HADD alerted us to real dangers in the world-- scorpions, snakes, etc., but “also generates false positives” and attributes minds and powers to “rocks and trees,” etc. Dennett is quoted: “The memorable nymphs and fairies and goblins and demons that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens us.”
This is of course, as Shermer points out, “animism” which eventually leads to belief in one God, but “God is a false positive generated by our HADD.” Then Shermer says, “our ancestors created folk religions, which, between the Neolithic revolution and the rise of cities, evolved into the organized religions we recognize today.” I hope this is not part of Dennett’s theory. If you were to go back to the end of the Neolithic and the rise of cities, i.e., the commencement of the Bronze Age around 3000 BC or so you would not find any traces that “the organized religions we recognize today” had “evolved.” Buddhism is 2500 years in the future, Christianity won’t appear until the Roman Imperial period ( what is now called “Judaism” was concocted around this time as well). Islam will not appear until the Middle Ages and India is still basically in the grips of a folk religion.
We are told the “God” of today is a “meme” that resulted” from a contest of “countless God memes” in the past. “Meme” theory, which postulates little “mental” entities (analogous to biological genes) which compete to control our “mental DNA” as it were, are themselves the latest example of a HADD which has led to a modern form of animism. Once we enter “memeland” we have left the world of natural phenomena for the world of idealist philosophy and metaphysical speculations and so we take our leave of Shermer’s review at this point.
Read this book if it you want to, but 464 pages is a major investment of reading time for many people and it doesn’t look like there is much to it. I should also mentioned that the book is marred by McCarthy like anti-communist comments. If you really want to learn something about the origin of religion read Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, Hegel’s early writings on the positivity of the Christian religion and Engel’s “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.”
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
By Thomas Riggins
BREAKING THE SPELL: RELIGION AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON by Daniel C. Dennett, Viking, New York, 2006, 464pp.,
reviewed by Michael Shermer in SCIENCE 27 January 2006.
Dennett claims that his book is a “forthright, scientific, no-holds-barred investigation of religion as one natural phenomenon among many.” He also claims that such a study will not void “the life-enriching enchantment of religion itself.” Since Shermer tells us the author is an atheist, this seems like a case of wanting to have your Eucharist and eat it too. When we find out that God-belief turns out to be a boo-boo in thinking how do we keep the feeling of “enchantment”?
Dennett thinks the general public, being 90% religious, will resent a scientific approach (if indeed that is what his approach really is) and so he spends the first 55 pages of his book, according to Shermer, talking down to them (Shermer doesn’t quite say this but the implication is there). He thinks “believers” have a “repugnance for science” and so he has taken upon himself the “daunting task” of enlightening them (l’homme moyen sensual.)
Shermer says the book is actually written for “scientists and scholars” who have not given much thought to religion as a “natural phenomenon.” This must be a very small audience, especially since Shermer doesn’t tell us what is meant by “natural.” At any rate, the reviewer tells us that Dennett begins with something called “rational choice theory” as it has been applied to religion by the sociologist Rodney Stark (“Religion, Deviance, and Social Control” 1997, et al.). This is a theory also used by many bourgeois economists. It assumes that people make rational choices based on their perceived interests. The fact that they don’t often actually do this (think of Kansas) has not dampened enthusiasm for the theory.
Shermer explains Stark’s application of the theory thusly (I have boiled it down to get rid of jargon): religion acts as an exchange mechanism between the people and the gods--i.e., people do rituals, etc., for the gods and the gods give the people things they need-- rain, good hunting, victory in war, etc. This theory, by the way, is as old as the hills. It is better put forth by Spinoza.
Dennett takes this theory but “looks for a deeper causal vector.” This, since Dennett is an evolutionist, turns out to be reproductive fitness [as with Catholic priests and Hindu and Buddhist celibate monks perhaps-tr]. Dennett says, quoted in the review: “Any such regular expenditure of time and energy [as is done in religion-tr] has to be balanced by something of ‘value’ obtained, and the ultimate measure of evolutionary ‘value’ is fitness: the capacity to replicate more successfully than the competition.” Since there are more Chinese than any other population group, does this mean Marxism is a religion? Why doesn’t the Kama Sutra outsell the Koran or the Bible?
Shermer now asks how is evolutionary fitness enhanced by religion. From this point on I think the discussion becomes confused due to a category mistake. I mean that terms and ideas developed in the biological sciences are transferred mechanically to the social and cultural sciences. What we get is a modern day version of the type of social Darwinism created by Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century.
In answer to his question Shermer lists four “values” that religion provides that promote “evolutionary fitness.” These are 1. “mythmaking to explain apparently inexplicable phenomena in the world.” Why should this make us more fit? How could anything like this be tested? There are many evolutionarily fit systems that have developed without recourse to myths. Some mythical systems are independent of religion (such as the race theories or the current fad of meme theory.) 2. “redemption (forgiveness in this life) and resurrection (immortality in the next life “-- this is too specifically Christian a formulation to be put forth in a general theory about religion since redemption and resurrection are not universal features of religion. 3. “morality (reinforcement of pro-social behavior and punishment of anti-social behavior)”-- again it appears that this value can exist independently of religion and while associated with some religions (though not all) some type of morality seems to be a universal feature of social life even predating conscious formulation of religious ideas. Finally, 4. “sociality (encouragement of within-group amity and between-group enmity”-- this is also a universal features of social grouping with or without religion.
Shermer says Dennett admits we don’t know if religion can be explained by these values, and on the face of it it doesn’t look like it can. While an argument could be made for evolutionary (reproductive) fitness being a benefit of 3 and 4, 1 and 2 don’t seem all that relevant. Regardless of this admission, Shermer maintains the book “presents a plausible explanation” that they do. Shermer presents Dennett’s theory as follows.
As humans attained self-consciousness the mind developed (or brain) a “hyperactive agent detection device” (HADD). This HADD alerted us to real dangers in the world-- scorpions, snakes, etc., but “also generates false positives” and attributes minds and powers to “rocks and trees,” etc. Dennett is quoted: “The memorable nymphs and fairies and goblins and demons that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens us.”
This is of course, as Shermer points out, “animism” which eventually leads to belief in one God, but “God is a false positive generated by our HADD.” Then Shermer says, “our ancestors created folk religions, which, between the Neolithic revolution and the rise of cities, evolved into the organized religions we recognize today.” I hope this is not part of Dennett’s theory. If you were to go back to the end of the Neolithic and the rise of cities, i.e., the commencement of the Bronze Age around 3000 BC or so you would not find any traces that “the organized religions we recognize today” had “evolved.” Buddhism is 2500 years in the future, Christianity won’t appear until the Roman Imperial period ( what is now called “Judaism” was concocted around this time as well). Islam will not appear until the Middle Ages and India is still basically in the grips of a folk religion.
We are told the “God” of today is a “meme” that resulted” from a contest of “countless God memes” in the past. “Meme” theory, which postulates little “mental” entities (analogous to biological genes) which compete to control our “mental DNA” as it were, are themselves the latest example of a HADD which has led to a modern form of animism. Once we enter “memeland” we have left the world of natural phenomena for the world of idealist philosophy and metaphysical speculations and so we take our leave of Shermer’s review at this point.
Read this book if it you want to, but 464 pages is a major investment of reading time for many people and it doesn’t look like there is much to it. I should also mentioned that the book is marred by McCarthy like anti-communist comments. If you really want to learn something about the origin of religion read Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, Hegel’s early writings on the positivity of the Christian religion and Engel’s “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.”
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
US ECONOMICS; A PSEUDO-SCIENCE IN THE MAKING
US Economics: A Pseudo-science in the Making
By Thomas Riggins
True science, a dispassionate search for the truth, can only thrive in environments conducive to free inquiry and intellectual honesty. When the search for the truth can cost you your life or freedom, as in the Middle Ages or at the time of Galileo – or anywhere where religion or superstition has state-sanctioned authority, it is unlikely to be vigorously sought. Today in the U.S. the pursuit of truth may not be life threatening (yet), but it is definitely income threatening. When a person's income and job are on the line and jeopardized, if telling the truth conflicts with powerful vested interests, you can be sure that the majority of people will conform to what is expected of them rather than ruin their careers or chances for future employment by standing up for an honest accounting of the facts.
An example of this can be seen in the state of the "science" of (bourgeois) economics as it is taught today in every major university in the country. I refer to an article in The New York Times of 1-27-06: "Students Are Leaving the Politics Out of Economics: Shunning Advocacy to Focus on Science" by Louis Uchitelle. What this article really shows is that what the students (and their professors) are leaving out is not "politics" but science itself.
Let’s see what Uchitelle has to report: Referring to the new book by Steven D. Levitt, "Freakonomics," we are told that graduate students in economics are following Levitt's model of "focusing on small insights about the economy" and abandoning "broad theories" about how the economic system we live under (capitalism) actually works. They are, Uchitelle says withdrawing in effect from political debate." The "freakonomists" think this makes them more scientific, when in reality they are trying to avoid asking how the economic system actually works, because they are afraid of the answer.
Uchitelle reports that the present generation (in the main) of young economists prefers to "shun prescriptions that seek to cure the economy's ills." What they claim to do is "to cast economics as a scientific inquiry" by using mathematical models, "without becoming advocates for one solution or another." Imagine a medical scientist who shunned any interest in curing sick people but was only interested in finding out what caused them to become sick, and with no desire to advocate a solution.
Here is another example of how the type of "science" utilized in freakonomics could be misused: Global warming is causing all sorts of environmental, social and health problems. The scientists tell us that greenhouse gases are responsible, so we ask them "How do we get rid of these gases? What is the best solution to this problem?" If a scientist replied that he or she had no interest in that sort of question and that our question was unscientific because science doesn't put forth solutions to problems or make judgments about them, we would rightly think that the person we were talking to had little understanding of either the function or the history of science. Was Einstein being unscientific when he advocated the banning of nuclear weapons as the solution to the threat of atomic war?
The article points out that mathematical modeling is today predominant in graduate economic training. Models based on "assumptions" about such things as unemployment, inflation, etc., are programmed into a computer and then the computer spits out its responses. This is of course a matter of garbage in, garbage out, since the assumptions most frequently used are contained in the dominant capitalist model in the first place. The graduate students, however, are seeking a more "empirical" approach, such as that found in Levitt's "Freakonomics"-- i.e., an approach "which relies on statistical evidence." Many graduate students, as well as their professors, may consider such an approach "scientific," but it has all the markings of bourgeois mystification, resorted to in order to avoid the damaging (for capitalism) results of a genuine scientific approach. Thus, pseudoscience is preferred because there are few university and no corporate jobs for those who call into doubt the rationality of the capitalist system.
Here is an example of Levitt's scientific approach. He says he "finds a strong correlation between legalized abortion and the decline in crime." Now that Roe v. Wade has been around for three decades crime has gone down because the number of "unwanted, crime-prone young Americans " has declined. Thus, these potentially evil fetuses have had their future criminal careers aborted. Therefore, our reporter wants to know if Levitt is pro-choice or anti-choice. The "scientific" answer is this, in Levitt's own words: "As an economist, I am better than the typical person at figuring out whether abortion reduces crime, but I am no better than anyone else at figuring out whether abortion is murder or whether a woman has an intrinsic right to control over her body."
There are several problems with Levitt’s answer, especially coming from someone supposedly educated in science and logic (assuming bourgeois economics to be a science and logical). First "murder" is defined by the criminal law of the state-- it is not something an individual decides for him or herself. Under the laws of the United States abortion, presently at any rate, is not only not murder, but is a constitutionally protected right. Second, in our system all citizens have equal rights and protections under the law (in theory) so that if any persons (men for example) have intrinsic rights to their bodies, then all persons have. It is up to anyone who denies such rights to women to come up with a scientific or logical reason for their position-- i.e., they bear the burden of proof.
It is legitimate to ask if Levitt actually is better then the "typical person" at telling whether abortion reduces crime. The claim is based on a "statistical correlation," and Levitt seems to assume that this is the same as a "causal relation" (he says abortions "reduce" the crime rate)-- a very unscientific position! Let me give a concrete example of such pseudo-causality. The February 6, 2006 issue of Time magazine contains the following statistical correlation: "The NFL title game's outcome typically forecasts stock-market performance for the rest of the year. Eighty percent of the time, a win by an old-NFL team [but not an old AFL team --TR] has meant a bullish market." It would be a freak economist indeed who set out to understand the workings of the stock market by studying football statistics.
Uchitelle also reports that undergraduate students are taught economics completely differently than graduate students (who presumably will become professional economists working in a capitalist framework). He quotes Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw: "My undergraduate students are tremendously interested in public policy, and I teach it to them in Principles of Economics." The "principles" he teaches extol the benefits of "free trade" and he does this because "I am teaching the next generation of voters. In graduate school, however, we are training the students to use the tools of economic research."
Mankiw, Uchitelle reminds us, was formerly chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors and will be remembered (if at all) for maintaining that it was good for the US to outsource jobs overseas. Good for the big multinational corporations, of course, but not for small businesses and not for working people.
Students in graduate school, we are informed, are "rarely offered courses in the history of economic thought." It also seems that the number of future economic professionals now in graduate school who have read the "works of the giants in their field" is less than it was 20 years ago. Uchitelle lists these "giants"-- they are Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, and John Maynard Keynes. Needless to say, Karl Marx doesn't make the cut. He seems to be read only in places such as Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, China (for nostalgic reasons), and now perhaps Bolivia.
So a new generation of economic charlatans is being born that under the guise of "science" will peddle their bourgeois nostrums to corporate power in the hope of getting good jobs and big bucks. However, they will help us understand nothing of the real economic forces that are driving the world as we know it ineluctably towards destruction.
--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor for Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
By Thomas Riggins
True science, a dispassionate search for the truth, can only thrive in environments conducive to free inquiry and intellectual honesty. When the search for the truth can cost you your life or freedom, as in the Middle Ages or at the time of Galileo – or anywhere where religion or superstition has state-sanctioned authority, it is unlikely to be vigorously sought. Today in the U.S. the pursuit of truth may not be life threatening (yet), but it is definitely income threatening. When a person's income and job are on the line and jeopardized, if telling the truth conflicts with powerful vested interests, you can be sure that the majority of people will conform to what is expected of them rather than ruin their careers or chances for future employment by standing up for an honest accounting of the facts.
An example of this can be seen in the state of the "science" of (bourgeois) economics as it is taught today in every major university in the country. I refer to an article in The New York Times of 1-27-06: "Students Are Leaving the Politics Out of Economics: Shunning Advocacy to Focus on Science" by Louis Uchitelle. What this article really shows is that what the students (and their professors) are leaving out is not "politics" but science itself.
Let’s see what Uchitelle has to report: Referring to the new book by Steven D. Levitt, "Freakonomics," we are told that graduate students in economics are following Levitt's model of "focusing on small insights about the economy" and abandoning "broad theories" about how the economic system we live under (capitalism) actually works. They are, Uchitelle says withdrawing in effect from political debate." The "freakonomists" think this makes them more scientific, when in reality they are trying to avoid asking how the economic system actually works, because they are afraid of the answer.
Uchitelle reports that the present generation (in the main) of young economists prefers to "shun prescriptions that seek to cure the economy's ills." What they claim to do is "to cast economics as a scientific inquiry" by using mathematical models, "without becoming advocates for one solution or another." Imagine a medical scientist who shunned any interest in curing sick people but was only interested in finding out what caused them to become sick, and with no desire to advocate a solution.
Here is another example of how the type of "science" utilized in freakonomics could be misused: Global warming is causing all sorts of environmental, social and health problems. The scientists tell us that greenhouse gases are responsible, so we ask them "How do we get rid of these gases? What is the best solution to this problem?" If a scientist replied that he or she had no interest in that sort of question and that our question was unscientific because science doesn't put forth solutions to problems or make judgments about them, we would rightly think that the person we were talking to had little understanding of either the function or the history of science. Was Einstein being unscientific when he advocated the banning of nuclear weapons as the solution to the threat of atomic war?
The article points out that mathematical modeling is today predominant in graduate economic training. Models based on "assumptions" about such things as unemployment, inflation, etc., are programmed into a computer and then the computer spits out its responses. This is of course a matter of garbage in, garbage out, since the assumptions most frequently used are contained in the dominant capitalist model in the first place. The graduate students, however, are seeking a more "empirical" approach, such as that found in Levitt's "Freakonomics"-- i.e., an approach "which relies on statistical evidence." Many graduate students, as well as their professors, may consider such an approach "scientific," but it has all the markings of bourgeois mystification, resorted to in order to avoid the damaging (for capitalism) results of a genuine scientific approach. Thus, pseudoscience is preferred because there are few university and no corporate jobs for those who call into doubt the rationality of the capitalist system.
Here is an example of Levitt's scientific approach. He says he "finds a strong correlation between legalized abortion and the decline in crime." Now that Roe v. Wade has been around for three decades crime has gone down because the number of "unwanted, crime-prone young Americans " has declined. Thus, these potentially evil fetuses have had their future criminal careers aborted. Therefore, our reporter wants to know if Levitt is pro-choice or anti-choice. The "scientific" answer is this, in Levitt's own words: "As an economist, I am better than the typical person at figuring out whether abortion reduces crime, but I am no better than anyone else at figuring out whether abortion is murder or whether a woman has an intrinsic right to control over her body."
There are several problems with Levitt’s answer, especially coming from someone supposedly educated in science and logic (assuming bourgeois economics to be a science and logical). First "murder" is defined by the criminal law of the state-- it is not something an individual decides for him or herself. Under the laws of the United States abortion, presently at any rate, is not only not murder, but is a constitutionally protected right. Second, in our system all citizens have equal rights and protections under the law (in theory) so that if any persons (men for example) have intrinsic rights to their bodies, then all persons have. It is up to anyone who denies such rights to women to come up with a scientific or logical reason for their position-- i.e., they bear the burden of proof.
It is legitimate to ask if Levitt actually is better then the "typical person" at telling whether abortion reduces crime. The claim is based on a "statistical correlation," and Levitt seems to assume that this is the same as a "causal relation" (he says abortions "reduce" the crime rate)-- a very unscientific position! Let me give a concrete example of such pseudo-causality. The February 6, 2006 issue of Time magazine contains the following statistical correlation: "The NFL title game's outcome typically forecasts stock-market performance for the rest of the year. Eighty percent of the time, a win by an old-NFL team [but not an old AFL team --TR] has meant a bullish market." It would be a freak economist indeed who set out to understand the workings of the stock market by studying football statistics.
Uchitelle also reports that undergraduate students are taught economics completely differently than graduate students (who presumably will become professional economists working in a capitalist framework). He quotes Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw: "My undergraduate students are tremendously interested in public policy, and I teach it to them in Principles of Economics." The "principles" he teaches extol the benefits of "free trade" and he does this because "I am teaching the next generation of voters. In graduate school, however, we are training the students to use the tools of economic research."
Mankiw, Uchitelle reminds us, was formerly chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors and will be remembered (if at all) for maintaining that it was good for the US to outsource jobs overseas. Good for the big multinational corporations, of course, but not for small businesses and not for working people.
Students in graduate school, we are informed, are "rarely offered courses in the history of economic thought." It also seems that the number of future economic professionals now in graduate school who have read the "works of the giants in their field" is less than it was 20 years ago. Uchitelle lists these "giants"-- they are Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, and John Maynard Keynes. Needless to say, Karl Marx doesn't make the cut. He seems to be read only in places such as Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, China (for nostalgic reasons), and now perhaps Bolivia.
So a new generation of economic charlatans is being born that under the guise of "science" will peddle their bourgeois nostrums to corporate power in the hope of getting good jobs and big bucks. However, they will help us understand nothing of the real economic forces that are driving the world as we know it ineluctably towards destruction.
--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor for Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
Monday, October 02, 2006
BOOK ROUND UP #12 PAUL BREMER & BARRY LYNN
BOOK ROUNDUP #12: PAUL BREMER’S YEAR IN IRAQ & BARRY LYNN’S BOOK ON GLOBALIZATION
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
Here is number 12 in our series of Book Roundups—which are essentially reviews of reviews of the current literature. Anyone who wants to do a full review on any of these books, please contact us at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
MY YEAR IN IRAQ: THE STRUGGLE TO BUILD A FUTURE OF HOPE by L. Paul Bremer III (Simon & Schuster, 2006, 417pp.) reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times January 12, 2006.
The very opening of this review points out the trouble with the US aggression against the Iraqi people. Kakutani points out that Bush sent Bremer to Iraq as a proconsul (viceroy would be a better term) but that “he knew little about Iraq.” It seems to be a penchant of the Bush administration to appoint people to highly responsible positions who are ill equipped and under educated for the job. Perhaps this simply reflects Bush’s own qualifications.
The reviewer draws attention to the fact that after Bremer left office (he had a 14 month tenure)—the insurgency was not only in full swing, it was increasing. Bremer also prevented former Baath party members from resuming their positions in government jobs—“thereby depriving the occupation of experienced Iraqi administrators.” In other words he left a big mess behind—no doubt as result of the fact that “he knew little about Iraq.” Kakutani says that Bremer’s book is “an amalgam of spin and sincerity.”
At least Bremer began to realize what was going on. He told Cheney that there were not enough troops to get the job done—i.e., to give security and put down the insurgency. As he put it there was no real “military strategy for victory.” He also told Rice that the US was “the worse of all things—an ineffective occupier.” It certainly looks as if he was right on both counts. If so this shows that the Bush administration is both morally bankrupt (for starting an unnecessary war in the first place) and functionally incompetent (for not knowing how to fight one.)
Bremer holds that the Bushites dream that they could “quickly turn full authority over to a group of selected Iraqi exiles” (the likes of Ahmad Chalabi and others) was unrealistic, as Kakutani writes. Bremer thought those exiles had no “credibility” with the Iraqis. The idea that Iraqi oil would pay for “reconstruction” was also off the mark due to sabotage and the run down state of the oil facilities.
Even more deplorable is Bremer’s admission that in 2003 he saw an Iraqi document that called for “organized resistance to be put into effect’’ if the US invaded and toppled the regime. So we knew what was coming and didn’t have the sense to effectively prevent it. Not that we could have prevented it. The history of unjustified aggression that should have been learned, especially after Vietnam, is that people will resist aggression and that there is no peace for aggressors (outside of small countries such as Granada and Panama which are the limit of what the US military is capable of successfully attacking.)
Bremer’s disbanding of the Iraqi army only fueled this resistance. The reviewer concludes that after reading this book we will have “a sobering sense of the staggering difficulties of the situation in Iraq.” To be sure. Perhaps we will also appreciate that unjust aggressive wars, now basically mounted against civilian populations by people “who know little,” have no chance of success.
END OF THE LINE: THE RISE AND COMING FALL OF THE GLOBAL CORPORATION by Barry C. Lynn, Doubleday, 2005, 312pp., reviewed by Mark Levinson in The American Prospect, February 2006.
This sounds like an interesting book. It is about the negative results of globalization with respect to the “outsourcing of operations to the far corners of the world.” The reviewer mentions specifically Wal-Mart, Dell, Cisco, GE and GM. Levinson says that while most (bourgeois) economists and reporters think globalization is not only inevitable but a good thing as well, Lynn “sees the making of a disaster."
The reviewer stresses that Lynn does not base his critique on the virtual enslavement of third world workers and their lack of rights, fair wages, healthy environments, etc., [why bother, that is just S.O.P. for the capitalist system left to itself] but bases his critique on the systems “own terms”. Levinson points out that the argument hones in on “the Achilles heel of the global economy” which turns out to be the “most successful” corporations [in terms of profitable planet wide looting].
What has developed is “a single global industrialized system marked by extreme specialization.” In other words, no one makes any finished products—they just coordinate many subcontractors and assembly plants etc. to put together their products.
For example, you can find ads for Dell computers in the Sunday papers and in magazines all over the place. But Dell does not make computers. It just coordinates the supply chains from all the different companies that specialize in this or that part. The Dell executives are not even aware of all the trains of production involved in putting together one of “their” computers.
Dell is mentioned because it had to close down its plants in California due to an earthquake in Taiwan. Dell was unaware that a key component was only made by one plant in Taiwan and since it was temporarily unavailable a domino effect started throughout this supply system. Multiply this by thousands of examples and you can see how a serious disaster or political upheaval could result in the entire world economic order collapsing like a house of cards.
Levin quotes Lynn “We now live in a world in which a conflict on the Korean peninsula or between India and Pakistan would create great havoc in the heart of the American economy.” Lynn proposes some remedies which he thinks the US can put into effect to protect itself but they seem to be of the kind that would require capitalists to give up their own advantages to help the common good—an impossible expectation under current circumstances.
Lynn also points out that it was the Democratic president Bill Clinton who turned the “corporations loose on the world”, but Levinson says the blame extends “across the two major parties.” So, while the reviewer writes that the book “is not without its problems” you should read it “to understand how the dominant business model of our time contains the seeds of future crises.” Read Marx first, however, if you really want to get a handle on things.
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
By Thomas Riggins [PA Archives]
Here is number 12 in our series of Book Roundups—which are essentially reviews of reviews of the current literature. Anyone who wants to do a full review on any of these books, please contact us at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net.
MY YEAR IN IRAQ: THE STRUGGLE TO BUILD A FUTURE OF HOPE by L. Paul Bremer III (Simon & Schuster, 2006, 417pp.) reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times January 12, 2006.
The very opening of this review points out the trouble with the US aggression against the Iraqi people. Kakutani points out that Bush sent Bremer to Iraq as a proconsul (viceroy would be a better term) but that “he knew little about Iraq.” It seems to be a penchant of the Bush administration to appoint people to highly responsible positions who are ill equipped and under educated for the job. Perhaps this simply reflects Bush’s own qualifications.
The reviewer draws attention to the fact that after Bremer left office (he had a 14 month tenure)—the insurgency was not only in full swing, it was increasing. Bremer also prevented former Baath party members from resuming their positions in government jobs—“thereby depriving the occupation of experienced Iraqi administrators.” In other words he left a big mess behind—no doubt as result of the fact that “he knew little about Iraq.” Kakutani says that Bremer’s book is “an amalgam of spin and sincerity.”
At least Bremer began to realize what was going on. He told Cheney that there were not enough troops to get the job done—i.e., to give security and put down the insurgency. As he put it there was no real “military strategy for victory.” He also told Rice that the US was “the worse of all things—an ineffective occupier.” It certainly looks as if he was right on both counts. If so this shows that the Bush administration is both morally bankrupt (for starting an unnecessary war in the first place) and functionally incompetent (for not knowing how to fight one.)
Bremer holds that the Bushites dream that they could “quickly turn full authority over to a group of selected Iraqi exiles” (the likes of Ahmad Chalabi and others) was unrealistic, as Kakutani writes. Bremer thought those exiles had no “credibility” with the Iraqis. The idea that Iraqi oil would pay for “reconstruction” was also off the mark due to sabotage and the run down state of the oil facilities.
Even more deplorable is Bremer’s admission that in 2003 he saw an Iraqi document that called for “organized resistance to be put into effect’’ if the US invaded and toppled the regime. So we knew what was coming and didn’t have the sense to effectively prevent it. Not that we could have prevented it. The history of unjustified aggression that should have been learned, especially after Vietnam, is that people will resist aggression and that there is no peace for aggressors (outside of small countries such as Granada and Panama which are the limit of what the US military is capable of successfully attacking.)
Bremer’s disbanding of the Iraqi army only fueled this resistance. The reviewer concludes that after reading this book we will have “a sobering sense of the staggering difficulties of the situation in Iraq.” To be sure. Perhaps we will also appreciate that unjust aggressive wars, now basically mounted against civilian populations by people “who know little,” have no chance of success.
END OF THE LINE: THE RISE AND COMING FALL OF THE GLOBAL CORPORATION by Barry C. Lynn, Doubleday, 2005, 312pp., reviewed by Mark Levinson in The American Prospect, February 2006.
This sounds like an interesting book. It is about the negative results of globalization with respect to the “outsourcing of operations to the far corners of the world.” The reviewer mentions specifically Wal-Mart, Dell, Cisco, GE and GM. Levinson says that while most (bourgeois) economists and reporters think globalization is not only inevitable but a good thing as well, Lynn “sees the making of a disaster."
The reviewer stresses that Lynn does not base his critique on the virtual enslavement of third world workers and their lack of rights, fair wages, healthy environments, etc., [why bother, that is just S.O.P. for the capitalist system left to itself] but bases his critique on the systems “own terms”. Levinson points out that the argument hones in on “the Achilles heel of the global economy” which turns out to be the “most successful” corporations [in terms of profitable planet wide looting].
What has developed is “a single global industrialized system marked by extreme specialization.” In other words, no one makes any finished products—they just coordinate many subcontractors and assembly plants etc. to put together their products.
For example, you can find ads for Dell computers in the Sunday papers and in magazines all over the place. But Dell does not make computers. It just coordinates the supply chains from all the different companies that specialize in this or that part. The Dell executives are not even aware of all the trains of production involved in putting together one of “their” computers.
Dell is mentioned because it had to close down its plants in California due to an earthquake in Taiwan. Dell was unaware that a key component was only made by one plant in Taiwan and since it was temporarily unavailable a domino effect started throughout this supply system. Multiply this by thousands of examples and you can see how a serious disaster or political upheaval could result in the entire world economic order collapsing like a house of cards.
Levin quotes Lynn “We now live in a world in which a conflict on the Korean peninsula or between India and Pakistan would create great havoc in the heart of the American economy.” Lynn proposes some remedies which he thinks the US can put into effect to protect itself but they seem to be of the kind that would require capitalists to give up their own advantages to help the common good—an impossible expectation under current circumstances.
Lynn also points out that it was the Democratic president Bill Clinton who turned the “corporations loose on the world”, but Levinson says the blame extends “across the two major parties.” So, while the reviewer writes that the book “is not without its problems” you should read it “to understand how the dominant business model of our time contains the seeds of future crises.” Read Marx first, however, if you really want to get a handle on things.
Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.net
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