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Politics of Identity - 3. page

Originally an article series, this category covers Stuart’s writing about identity and self-making in contemporary capitalism.

Hispanic Baroque II: What the Casta Paintings Can Tell Us About Modern Gender Politics

The Enlightenment, the process that began the Age of Reason, was a global event. Throughout what we might term the “civilized world,” the Baroque episteme, early modernity, the Age of Beauty collapsed under its own weight and gave rise to the episteme, the social order at whose end we are located. Not just in Europe but throughout the world, early modern societies confronted true modernity in the work of the likes of Adam Smith, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This produced a series of crises of social and political order around the world.

The Age of Beauty, which preceded the Age of Reason, like John Keats, conflated beauty, truth and power. Political legitimacy stemmed from a sumptuous and elaborate aesthetic performance in cuisine, music, art and philosophy. Copernicus had not supplanted Ptolemy because a heliocentric universe was more reasonable than a geocentric one but because it was more beautiful to have a universe with a sun at its centre.

A philosophy based on luxurious, sumptuous aesthetics made additional contributions beyond a heliocentric universe. The Great Chain of Being was featured in the British imaginary and elsewhere, an elaborate effort to situate every known thing in the universe in a single hierarchy with God at the top, encompassing all things that existed, both natural and supernatural. The great empire of the early modern world, the Spanish, French, British, Chinese, Mughal, Ottoman, British, Portuguese and Dutch saw themselves as agents of a divine order in which there was a place of everything and everything was in its place.

 

Enlightenment thinkers challenged this hierarchical divine order by suggesting that human beings were equal, that there was no reason one set of laws should govern a peasant and another govern lord, no reason that different laws should apply to you depending on whether you were Indigenous, African or European, no reason women should not enjoy the political and financial rights enjoyed by men, no reason to afford one set of rights to Christians and inferior rights to Jews, Deists or Muslims.

In the Baroque episteme, one did not need to show that this hierarchy of kinds of people was entirely consistent with lived experience, physical evidence or logic. For the Great Chain of Being to be true, it simply had to be shown to be the most beautiful way of depicting the human family. In this way, the Baroque order proved itself right by the logic of… the Baroque order.

But Enlightenment thinkers practiced a different epistemology than Baroque thinkers; to be true, a theory or model had to be both internally consistent and consistent with all evidence gleaned by observing the world. Fundamentally, it had to be descriptive. And there were simply too many free, proud, rich people with African blood in their veins; there were too many politically powerful, independent women, too many theologically sophisticated Indigenous people, too many honest, proud, forthright Jews, too many rich men of low birth and poor men of aristocratic blood, etc.

While the existence of thousands upon thousands of exceptions to the map of the human family did not challenge the Baroque order on its own terms, it did challenge it by the increasingly popular Enlightenment epistemology, that more and more people and, especially wealthy, powerful urban people turned to to understand the world. And so many Enlightenment thinkers called for the old hierarchical order to be torn down.

But not all.

What many people forget is the form that the forces of reaction took during the eighteenth century. In 1714, the Hapsburg monarchy was overthrown in Western Europe during the War of Spanish Succession. The outcome was that the Spanish Empire now came under the control of the Bourbon monarchy of France. Following the brutal war, the Bourbons in both France and Spain began to adopt Enlightenment ideas as a means not of dismantling but of shoring-up the old order. The central problem that they faced was the incongruence between the way they described the world, to give their laws legitimacy, and the way the world appeared to observers. In essence, their problem was a fundamental incongruence, metaphorically, between map and territory.

The question that faced not just Spain but many of the world’s empires was how to make map and territory converge. When it came to race, the economic lifeblood of the Spanish Empire was at stake. The existence of the casta (caste) negro (black) made racial slavery both justified and permissible because it described African people as naturally servile and in need of guidance; and this provided almost all of the labour for the empire’s sugar, tobacco and indigo plantations. The existence of the indio (Indian) casta allowed the Spanish to tie indigenous people to the land like medieval peasants, refuse to educate them in the Spanish language and extract annual tributes of maize from them to fuel their imperial machine.

The problem, Bourbon reformers realized, was that the caste system was insufficiently descriptive. It had to be made accurate, map had to converge with territory. So, they began with a crackdown on the illegal sale of limpieza de sangre certificates that attested to the whiteness of a person who was not entirely white. By eliminating corruption and revoking whiteness in the colonies, territory and map began, once again, to converge. Now, at least people who did not look white were not recognized as white.

Build trust in your partner For more intimacy and intensity in cialis tadalafil online your sexual life, understand and correspond with your partner. Sperm with low quality or motility, quaintly shaped sperms or sperms that are not able to attach themselves to the egg or penetrate through them cause major problems and deter pregnancy. buy cialis If you think you might have a role to play in causing erectile generic tadalafil cipla dysfunction and penile numbness. The product is expensive at about $50 viagra online for a month’s supply. The next measure taken to make map and territory converge was the multiplication of the number of castes and racial categories to reflect the true diversity of the Empire. After centuries of intermarriage, sexual violence and illicit relations, there were all kinds of people who didn’t fit into the original castes because they were some combination of races originally envisaged. The reason that a person of Spanish and Indigenous descent was leading such a disciplined, sophisticated urban life was because they were not a mestizo (half Spanish and half Indigenous) but because they were actually a castizo (three quarters Spanish and one quarter Indigenous).

The Bourbon Reforms, the package of laws that were designed to bring the Spanish Empire into the Enlightenment did not do away with race; instead they made it more descriptive. People who had felt that their prior caste designation did not really describe them were given a more precise, narrower, more specific racial designation. And because genetic testing was not on the table, it was relatively easy to look at people’s appearance and station in life and “correct” their race so that it became more descriptive. By multiplying and intensifying the number of racial categories, the Bourbon Reforms did not just produce new laws; they produced new ways for people to narrate their desires, their inclinations and their identity.

In the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the vast political entity encompassing the Philippines, Guam, Mexico, Central America and what is the southwestern US today, this had an aesthetic expression, the Casta Paintings, a whole artistic movement that used increasingly photo-realistic “objective” artistic styles to depict a typical member of each of the now-double-digit number of castes of which one might be a member. These paintings were not simply a state-commissioned propaganda project; they were a popular enterprise that people used to comprehend and navigate their experience. Distinctions were made between criollos (whites born under the less favourable celestial and humoral influences of the Americas) and peninsulares (European-born Spanish whites) too. Differences of dress, culture, custom, language, appearance and class could now be explained by a more precise and refined set of castes; map and territory could again converge.

Casta Painting from Mexico
Casta Painting from Mexico

 

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see what this all was in aid of: Indigenous servitude, African slavery and the disruption of solidarity through the multiplication and elaboration of difference. And, with that same benefit, we can see where all that ended up: in scientific racism, eugenics and the other pseudo-sciences premised on the fallacy of race.

Today, we face an increasingly stratified, oppressive, hierarchical order in our society. Social mobility is freezing. Human trafficking is increasing. More of us are imprisoned. More of us are in the underclass. These things were happening in the eighteenth century too. An unequal and unjust social order was reaching a crescendo of oppression.

It should not surprise us, then, that those defending the dying social order of neoliberal capitalism are offering us illusory forms of liberty and identity. Instead of recognizing gender as an inherently and materially oppressive category, we are told that the problem with gender is that it is not descriptive enough, that with more categories of gender, more categories of sexuality, more sexual orientations, each carefully labeled and described, that the brutality of the wage gap, gender-based violence, workplace harassment and violence, sexual exploitation of the precariously housed, human trafficking, denial of childcare to all but the richest among us, will somehow become justifiable. Once again, there will be a place for everyone, and everyone in their place.

Today, progressives use the term “radical feminist” as an epithet meaning “bigot.” This should tell us something very important: that the people who have borne the brunt of providing transition housing to victims of violence, who have marched against men’s violence against women, who have called-out gender as an oppressive category that keeps people down are now being portrayed as barbarians and villains.

The same accusations were hurled back in the early nineteenth century, at the cross-racial alliances of former slaves, current slaves, Indigenous peoples and the racialized underclass who marched together and took up arms to demand an end to caste system, an end not just to the laws but to the culture that sowed division and justified hierarchy. Vincente Guerrero, a leader of African, Spanish and Indigenous descent led a multi-racial army that called not for the recognition of their castes as equal to whites but for the abolition of race as a category, a frontal attack on the very idea of racial difference. And his army succeeded in tearing down laws mandating servitude, slavery and caste in New Spain.

It is telling that both the left and right head of the neoliberal hydra are attacking the modern Guerreros, radical feminists who are demanding a cultural revolution that will throw off the yoke of gender. The right head calls these radical feminists a threat to order, to the family and to God himself. The left head, the progressive head, calls them intolerant bigots, ignoramuses, science deniers. No doubt, there are some transphobic people in radical feminist organizations, just as there are anti-Semites in the Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, just as there were Soviet communists in the Screen Actors’ Guild during McCarthyism. The existence of this minority is not a reason to reject radical feminism.

Let us not allow the existence of an intolerant minority in a movement cause us to lose track of its transformative message: the problem with your gender, your sexuality is not that they are not descriptive enough, not precise enough, not uniquely reflective of who you are. The problem is that they are tools of exploitation and oppression; the problem is that they exist at all, that there are gender norms, gender expectations, gendered outfits, gender performances. These are means of creating division and inequality. They are not natural or inevitable responses to differences in biological sex. You are being conned into believing that they are because, for the order oppressing you to succeed in its oppression, map and territory must converge in the modern equivalent of the Casta Painting.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 7: Hustle-fuckery, Narcissistic Injury and the Politics of Liberal Etiquette and Emotion

Seven years ago, I suggested that the Age of Authenticity, as an episteme, causes us to fashion different kinds of selves that, at once, are a logical entailment and consequence of the kinds of selves the Age of Reason asked us to make and are a new kind of self, one “larger and more permeable.” Such selves, even as they grow more common, as the liberal order collapses, are nevertheless pathologized today. In the DSM IV, people who have difficulty constructing “other people” as a category, and who struggle to retain the knowledge that the other creatures walking around who look like them are the same sort of creature are referred to as having “Cluster B” personality disorders. This means that the individual’s personality was defectively built, producing sometimes-charming but never empathetic personalities.

Narcissism and Hustle-fuckery

Clinical narcissism is one of these personality disorders. Narcissists live terrifying lives because they are governed by a profound sense of worthlessness. They believe that they are subhuman creatures whose only relevance or value to others is achieved by tricking people into thinking they are, in fact, superhuman. Narcissists live in constant fear of being found out, of being forced to confront what they see as an irreconcilable, impassible gap between the self the loathsome person they actually are and the universally-adored person they must be perceived as.

Narcissists are often regarded as malevolent or ill-intentioned and certainly, they can do a lot of damage. I have the scars to prove it. But they are often experienced as charming, exciting, fun people to know who do you no harm whatsoever, provided you reinforce the belief that the are the self they aspire to be.

The problem comes when one accidentally or intentionally fucks with a narcissist’s hustle. Hustle-fuckery is always dangerous, regardless. But when one fucks with a narcissist’s hustle, by showing that one genuinely sees past the self they present to the world, it can lock one into a Manichean struggle, because the maintenance of the illusory self is viewed by the narcissist as a necessary condition for their survival, because, rather than seeing their inner self as an ordinary damaged human self, they see it as a thing so loathsome that it could never be accepted or loved.

Fucking with a narcissist’s hustle is dangerous, risky. But it is also necessary. So many of the bullies and monsters who stand in our way or cause us pain, not just in politics but in our work lives, friendships and family lives, are people with Cluster B personality architectures, people whose ego boundaries are profoundly malformed.

So, when one provokes a narcissist into showing some aspect of themselves that they seek to conceal or specifically calls out or identifies that behaviour, the narcissist feels wounded. They experience what is termed “narcissistic injury.” It is an injury both in the sense that the narcissist experiences real pain when this happens and because it does inflict damage on the person’s narcissistic personality architecture. After experiencing narcissistic injury, a person often needs to spend time recovering, refashioning their sense of self, re-narrating events to fit this refashioning, seeking comfort, experiencing real debilitating depression and grief, shedding real tears.

The narcissistic injury, then, is paradoxical. It is a real injury caused by a perceived attack on or damage to a fake thing.

Triggering, Then and Now

In progressive i.e. liberal-influenced putatively left-wing circles, this phenomenon has dangerously coincided with the vulgarization of the term “trigger” and the adoption of a liberal politics of affect (i.e. emotion). From the beginning, demonstrating emotional sensitivity has been central to the liberal concept of selfhood; both the ability to shed tears and the ability to stoically refrain from shedding tears while feeling very deeply are central to the liberal ideal of the self. When liberals idealize self-control, that ideal is possible precisely because, for a sensitive person, self-control is a kind of emotional athleticism, demonstrating extraordinary strength.

Whereas, socialist politics has traditionally styled itself in opposition to liberalism and consequently featured unrestrained expressions of emotion, fist pounding and cries to “smash the state,” progressive politics is all about restraint. Everyone is expected to show the big emotions they have; everyone is supposed to talk about how big their emotions are; and then everyone is expected to demonstrate the liberal virtue of self-control by not matching that with shouting, crying, desk-pounding and fist-pumping but instead show how one is an ideal person because one’s sensitivity is exceeded only by one’s self-control. And when a progressive is exposed to unrestrained emotion, they are often “triggered.”

Triggering was once a psychiatric term that applied only to people who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While PTSD sufferers can sometimes recall the event(s) that traumatized them in a dispassionate and accurate way, this entails a level of repression and detachment from the emotions accompanying the traumatic experience. Triggering is when something that is associated with the traumatic event causes the sufferer to re-experience the event and the extreme emotions associated. Often, it is a piece of sensory input peripheral to the experience. For instance, a friend of mine was a military contractor doing firefighting for the US military in Afghanistan. While he can recall, dispassionately, the event that caused his PTSD, simply recalling and re-narrating that event does not trigger him. He is only triggered when he smells a particular combination of spices being cooked with onions that preceded the attack that traumatized him. Triggering, in its original meaning, referred not just to an unmediated experience of emotion but physical manifestations like rapid drops in body temperature, swelling in the lungs, loss of circulation to extremities and temporary blindness.
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Today, “triggered” means very upset.

Etiquette and Orthodoxy

Of course, affect politics are not the only part of liberalism that progressives practice. They also have adopted liberal practices of etiquette. This goes beyond a simple demand that progressive politics be polite and self-controlled. Etiquette is, by definition, faddish, because it is a means by which those at the top of society can impose a set of occult rules on others that will have changed by the time those outside the elite figure them out. Etiquette, then, is not just a set of rules about how to act, speak and dress; it is the process by which these rules are in constant flux, creating new forms of social transgression. Many working class people follow Donald Trump because his politics are an attack on etiquette—Trump really is attacking “the elite” and “draining the swamp” from a certain cultural perspective. His actions render etiquette less powerful in an increasing number of places.

This does not just produce a sense of cultural liberation but of intellectual liberation because this kind of etiquette breach is necessary to challenge orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are enforced through etiquette. If you dispute a mere ideology or worldview, those holding that worldview understand your statement to be wrong. A modern flat-earther can say “you’re lying; the earth is flat,” the response to which is “you’re wrong; here’s why.” But when Galileo challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s orthodoxy with respect to the heavens, by saying “the earth revolves around the sun in an elliptical orbit in space,” the response was not “you’re wrong” but “you are not permitted to have said that. Therefore we shall behave as though you have not and our vision of the universe has never been challenged.”

Putting It All Together

So let’s put all this together and think about its impact on progressive politics.

As I have stated before, a progressive politics of emotion functions as etiquette not ideology. So when someone expresses themselves in a way that triggers someone (as per the contemporary usage), we must not merely silence the offender; we must act as though the idea they have expressed is beyond the pale and cannot be considered, discussed or even acknowledged as an idea. Because inflicting narcissistic injury is triggering (not just by the contemporary definition but sometimes even by the original medical one), one must never inflict narcissistic injury. Progressive etiquette politics conscripts us into denying or eliding any apparent differences between the self a person wishes to present to the world and the self they reveal themselves to be.

In this way, the progressive scene has come to be dominated by narcissists and gas-lighters by placing any challenge to their narcissism beyond the pale, because such a challenge is impermissible by the orthodoxy. We have thus produced a system of incentives that encourage people to build more narcissistic, porous, oversized selves that contain all kinds of things they shouldn’t, like other people’s thoughts, other people’s bodies, other people’s desires.

And this leads us back to the central issue as we endeavour to think past the liberal identity politics some people mistakenly call “intersectionalism:” do I own who other people think I am or do they? Progressive identitarianism grows increasingly unequivocal on that point—you own other people’s thoughts about who you are and they do not. And that view is batshit fucking insane, a narcissistic delusion.

A real left politics, a real socialist politics must do the opposite. To engage in real debate, real solidarity, real acts of mutual recognition and empathy, real confrontations with evil, left politics must declare open season on narcissism and the affect and etiquette politics that intimidate us into thinking that inflicting narcissistic injury is a bad act. It is by this sleight of hand that the Third Wayers, the Blairites, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans who cry crocodile tears over pipelines they build, treaties they violate, future generations they condemn to misery and death, are able to hold the power over us that they do.

Because they have taken from us the ability to shout “You are not who you say you are!”

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Redefinition of “Punching Down” and the Great Neoliberal Chain of Being

I have come to believe that it is not merely that people on the left have become enveloped by the part of neoliberal discourse that we call “progressive” because of our long-term locked alliance with liberals in popular front movements known as the “third way” like Tony Blair’s New Labour, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and Mike Harcourt’s NDP but because conservatives are actively sabotaging our discourse in order to make us more stupid and divided every day.

The redefinition and decontextualization of the term “punching down,” is a great example of this but just one of many examples of my suspicions. The term was developed, very sensibly, by late twentieth-century satirists who wanted to avoid satire becoming a form of structural violence against already-oppressed people. So, satirists asked themselves whether the individual jokes in their satire engaged with oppressive stereotypes in ways that reinforced them or that challenged them. If they reinforced stereotypes of women being flighty and emotional, black people being lazy and foolish, Jews being greedy and scheming, gay men being cowardly, etc. these jokes were examples of “punching down” and were replaced with jokes that did not reinforce bigotry or oppressive structures.

But in the recent past, this term has been taken up by practitioners of left Identitarianism in ways that are highly problematic. “Punching down” has ceased to refer to a kind of joke and has come to refer to a kind of relationship. In progressive Identitarianism, every person is subject to what we might term an “oppression calculus.” Progresive Identitarians look at the various identity categories to which a person belongs and determine how oppressed the person is by the various kinds of identity they have.

So, if a person is black, they start with a high oppression quotient but if they are female, their quotient goes higher; if they are trans (as opposed to cis), the quotient is higher still. Because whoever is most oppressed in any situation is often used to determine who is morally correct in that situation, this calculus is very important. A black woman is more oppressed and therefore wiser and more correct about what is just than a black man; but if the person we see as a black man is revealed only to have a black male gender performance but has a black female gender identity, then the oppression calculus may have to be re-evaluated.

As with patriarchy, nobody claims to believe that oppression calculus is how moral and now political questions should be solved and nobody claims to use it as an intellectual tool. Nobody claims to believe in patriarchy; nobody claims to believe in oppression calculus, either. It is just that patriarchy structures most people’s decisions and intuitive sense of right and wrong. The same is true of oppression calculus within Identitarian movements on the political left, in large measure because they are the same thing.

Today, when people use the term “punching down” it typically refers to a person of a lower oppression quotient attacking the actions, character or position of a person with a higher oppression quotient. This can then effectively neutralize the substance of what the attacker is saying. While their argument might be empirically correct, progressive etiquette practices render its facticity moot because the attack becomes a thing that should not have been said and whose veracity, therefore, need not be considered.

And because one’s oppression quotient is typically based on forms of self-identity and social identity rather than material oppression, it can, for instance, be argued that a white male minimum wage earner is punching down when going after a racialized lesbian millionaire. Furthermore, not only is the substance of the attack dismissed, irrespective of its contents, the attack itself is recast in Identitarian terms. In this way, a fifty-year-old white man working at a remote gas station in Northern Canada is not only unable to go after his boss personally if she is a woman of colour; his criticism of her labour practices or environmental practices can be recast as racism.

You should definitely read the information, if you have ever lose erections in the bed or the condition is becoming worst. cialis tablets india When steroids are used for over a long period of time then the chances of getting usa generic viagra affected by the condition of erectile dysfunction. It heals the vagina tissues, tones it like this cheapest levitra and increases the blood flow to the part. Kamagra holds the same feature except it fails to treat the patient who are suffering from testicular discomfort or pain. women viagra for sale We see this contradiction every day in our politics, every time a Bernie Sanders surrogate attacks Kamala Harris, they are “punching down” on behalf of a white man when Harris is a racialized woman. The problem is that as much as this discourse stymies those on the left and produces unjust outcomes, the political cost of calling out this problem prevents anyone within the left from doing so. The consequence is that the only people calling it out in the public square are vile, alt-right faux intellectuals like Jordan Peterson.

And this is all fine with the right. Let me count the ways.

First of all, every time a working class person or one with a mainstream gender identity loses an oppression calculus contest, they increasingly identify with the alt-right, the only game in town that presents itself as both anti-elite and opposed to this absurd discourse. So, the right gains new recruits from the working class. So the fascists recruit working class men and the Christian Right recruits more TERFs.

Second, this oppression calculus reinforces capitalism, patriarchy and racism because it represents a hierarchy of races, classes, genders and sexual orientations governed by a complex system of etiquette. In this way, we are creating a neo-baroque Great Chain of Being, which organizes the diversity of human beings into a hierarchy so complex and elaborate that only the most privileged people can successfully negotiate it. Furthermore, it reinforces a key element of liberal elite class politics, noblesse oblige. In the noblesse oblige worldview, it is beneath a person of high rank to interact with a person of lower rank as an equal. If a lower-rank person says something wrong, it is best to pretend they have not said it or to actively misinterpret it as agreeing with you. It’s the least one can do for one’s social inferiors. You can gently remind them of what you knew they meant to say.

In other words, the “punching down” discourse acknowledges a hierarchical order to society with rich, white men at the top who will only deign to enter into true debate or dialogue with other rich, white men. And like all such hierarchical theories of etiquette, it casts this profound elitism as a favour one is doing the lower orders in society. There is a place for everyone and everyone is in their place, not permitted to enter into vigorous debate or discourse with anyone other than a person of commensurate social rank.

Third, it motivates people on the left to defend themselves by incorporating more features into their public identity in order to survive oppression calculus face-offs. I know I have wriggled out of a few confrontations by mentioning that my mother was black or I was taking anti-depressants or that my grandma grew up on an Indian Reserve—but never that I was on welfare or EI or precariously housed. In other words, we are encouraged to describe our identities increasingly not in terms that generate solidarity but terms that show difference; we are encouraged to describe our identities in ways that show us to be pathological or sick rather than resilient. And millionaires like Elizabeth Warren rush off to get genetic tests so as to reinforce these narratives, resurrecting eugenics that we thought we buried with the war dead.

Fourth, “punching down” allows the right to sow disunity among those on the left, presenting one’s place in the debate as either endorsing bigotry or denying the material nature of oppression. It creates false splits and division, all while building a system of etiquette that reduces to the smallest possible number the people with whom one can think critically aloud without fear of condemnation for an etiquette breach. And that is what the right really wants to do. We used to be the smart side but now, we are the dumb side because the right has convinced us that thinking aloud together, through vigorous debate is, in and of itself, an act of oppression.

Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 6: Trump and the Democratization of Intelligence

The Anglo American right are mirror-punchers, first and foremost, gay men seeking to imprison people for what they masturbate to, crybabies who hate “snowflakes,” stupid people who hate the mentally challenged, draft avoider chickenhawks, an endless queue of people demanding a participation ribbon for denouncing the Special Olympics etc.

But let us stop, for a moment, on the special hatred of the Special Olympics. Why is it that America’s conservative elite so despise participation ribbons? TARP: the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The 2007-08 financial crisis was a turning point in the discourse of the American right. As I have stated previously, this is the moment when Americans inverted their ideas about the relationship between wealth and risk. Whereas previously, wealth concentration was justified because the wealthy person had taken a risk to become so, this inverted to the idea that only poor people should be subject to risk and that wealth entitled one to riskless accumulation.

In this way, the truth that Wall Street was the Special Olympics for the rich, in which everyone got a ribbon, no matter how stupid their actions, changed from a reality that everyone denied to a putative good that was now universally recognized. But because of the mirror-punching character of the right, the Special Olympics then became a symbol of all the was wrong in the world, precisely because America’s elite saw in them a funhouse reflection of themselves and the order they represented.

Within Anglo America, this phenomenon has been felt with a special intensity in Canada. Doug Ford, the Trump clone who became premier of Canada’s Rust Belt province of Ontario through an extended and mediocre impression of Trump, first rose to national prominence as a city councillor by identifying autistic children as his personal enemies and launching a multi-year vendetta against them. This personal and specific vendetta against disabled kids has now been adopted by the People’s Party of Canada, the rising neofascist party of former Conservative MP Maxime Bernier, who has placed Greta Thunberg’s autism diagnosis at the centre of his climate change denial argument.

In this way, deserving recipients of affirmative action efforts have been foregrounded as the enemy by a plutocratic elite of economic Special Olympians who can hear the hollowness of their own self-justifying propaganda.

It is in this context that we need to think about Donald Trump’s identity politics of intelligence. For Trump, the most important way in which he uses the bully pulpit of the presidency is to declare his intelligence and mental fitness, in contradiction to what evidence would seem to suggest. And, as I suggested in my last piece, he is surprisingly successful. In fact, if we accept that what we are is purely an intersubjective judgement, he actually is the smartest man on earth because he has mobilized a whole social movement of over a hundred million people who shout this claim from the rooftops.

And we need to examine why he is successful at this. Fundamentally, it is because his project of declaring himself to be a genius is a democratic one. It includes and aggrandizes those who participate in the project of Trump’s greatness. As he declared at a pivotal moment in his primary bid, “I love the poorly educated.”

Many mistook this as Trump insulting his own base but, in fact, it was the opposite. He argued, as many have before him, that education pollutes and confuses our native intelligence, that the unschooled are the Kaspar Haeussers of politics, that their lack of information and education by a corrupt system enables them to think with greater clarity than others.

And in addition to making a claim of intelligence, not just on behalf of himself but on behalf of his movement, Trump’s normalization of troll discourse provides his base with the tools to demonstrate their intelligence.
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Trolling is the ultimate “heads I win, tails you lose” conversational game. A troll makes a dubious claim and then defends it. In the course of defending it, the troll either, through a combination of falsehood and emotional abuse, gets those disagreeing to quit the field, at which point he can declare victory both for himself and for the outrageous claim he has made. But if his interlocutors remain continent and disciplined and box him into a corner through evidence and argument, he can then declare that he never understood his claim to be true and that his true objective was to waste the time and emotional resources of those with whom he disagrees.

Trolls, then, play a rigged game that, no matter the outcome, allows them to declare themselves to be the smarter person and winner of the argument. Either they won the argument OR they “fooled” their interlocutor into believing they were dumb enough to believe the claim they had made. Either way, they showed themselves to be the smartest guy in the room.

In this way, whenever a member of the Trump movement arrives at a family gathering or appears in social media parroting a demented claim by the president, they have already won. Either they have fooled people into the belief that they are not smart when, in fact they are, or they have won the argument outright, albeit by brute force, again showing them to be the smartest. In this way, the smarter you appear to be, the smarter you are and the stupider you appear to be, the smarter you are.

In this way, the Trump movement is an identitarian one, but one built around the identity of “smart person” or “very stable genius.” In this way, the Trump movement is a true movement because it entails not just an allegiance but a praxis that shapes both action and thought, like the Ghost Dancers or the Iron Shirt Qi Gong masters of the Boxer Rebellion. The Enlightenment episteme was not governed by intelligence more than any other but it was one governed by claims of intelligence. During the Age of Reason, true or false, claims to have the right to govern one’s fellow citizens and, to an increasing extent, claims about one’s own personhood inhered in intelligence. We were an intelligence-worshipping society, if not an intelligent one, discourses about animal rights, abortion, racial equality were governed by claims of intelligence.

And, when we found ourselves still admiring things like charm, strength or toughness, we redescribed these attributes as “the seven intelligences.” One was not longer agile or strong; one was “kinesthetically intelligent.” But we still understood that this framing was, itself, a claim for the supremacy of that special quality that lets one do crosswords or sudokus at a certain speed. In this way, intelligence became a hegemonic power that oppressed those who had consistently been evaluated as not intelligent.

When Trump rails against “elites,” he does not mean other rich men like himself. He means professors, writers, artists and, most importantly, technocrats, people who use their identity as “intelligent” to exercise social power over others. Anti-intellectual movements have been a common phenomenon in the United States but Trump’s possesses an audacity, ambition and reward that no other has accomplished. Rather than fighting through the dungeon to the gigantic treasure chest full of intelligence that others have been guarding, one gets to the final battle, defeat the dragon and then opens the treasure chest and, instead of destroying it, distributing it to everyone who has been denied their fair share.

In this way, the Trump movement, like the Germanic peoples who beset fourth- and fifth-century Rome, they have unintentionally upended an order that they merely came to plunder.

It is at this moment that we must confront the most unpleasant and problematic element of identity. While one’s identity is primarily intersubjective i.e. governed by the opinion of the crowd, some part of it remains objective, inherent in a judgement by the physical world, rather than the self or the crowd. Otherwise Donald Trump is the smartest man on earth.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 5: Donald Trump Identifies as Intelligent

Thank you to all my supporters for tolerating this lengthy hiatus in the writing of my blog. It has been an emotionally challenging little while as I have left my college and university employment, moved to a small city at the fifty-fourth parallel and started a new radio program there. I have also had some serious writers’ block, not to mention some genuine fear that I would phrase this piece too imprecisely and cause needless hurt.

Let us, for a moment, imagine Donald Trump as a tragic figure. How might we tell his story?

Trump is the culmination of a multi-generation project by a lineage of bourgeois Rhineland Germans to enter the American elite. Frederick Trump came to America in 1885 during the First Gilded Age to make his fortune. He soon found that the East Coast had its own establishment, descended from English and Dutch immigrants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who already enjoyed their own high society scene complete with local customs and manners. Recognizing that he could not easily break into this elite with the modest fortune he had, he decided instead to head West to the periphery of the American Empire during the Closing of the Frontier.

There, he established not-entirely-respectable businesses, running hospitality, drug and sex work businesses that functioned parasitically on the various booms and rushes of the North American Northwest through the early twentieth century. But by 1905, he was ready. Full of Klondike Gold Rush and sex-trafficking loot, he returned triumphantly to New York City to finally incorporate the Trump family into the most prestigious regional elite in the US, the New York elite, who had finally eclipsed the old pseudo-aristocratic planters of the Virginia and the Carolinas and the Puritan-descended Congregationalist nabobs of New England.

Even so, let us be clear that Frederick Trump did not die a millionaire, even. He had taken tremendous risks to create a small real estate empire that he could bequeath to his son to carry out the multigenerational project of entering the New York elite. At this point, it might be helpful to recall to concept of the “base unit” as explained in previous blog posts. For the Trumps, the base unit is not the individual, the person. The base unit is the lineage, as Donald Trump, himself, has stated on many occasions. The patriarch of the lineage is simply the part of the collective body that speaks for it, that represents it and its multigenerational objectives to the world.

Frederick Trump Jr. built a true real estate empire in New York from his father’s half-dozen properties. But this work was work that was begun with his hands. It was not primarily speculation that made the original increases to the Trump fortune but work in the building trades. Frederick Jr. was a carpenter, plumber, mason and electrician. Unlike a true member of the ruling class, he used his body, its energy, its strength, its dexterity, to build the Trump real estate empire.

Let us imagine that as coarse and rough as the hands of Frederick Sr. had been, the hands of Frederick Jr., were tougher, more leathery, more calloused, more scarred. The thing about class, before the 1990s was that it was like karma. There was no “instant class” in America any more than “instant karma” was the animating principle of the Vedic worldview. The wealth one attained in life did not determine one’s own class but one’s children’s.

By all accounts, Frederick Jr. was a truly bright man, a fast learner, someone who could have obtained a merit-based degree and would have, had it changed his own personal class. But the point was to truly change class, to change the class of the lineage not merely its current head.

The person who was to be a true, soft-handed, degree-educated, refined member of the haute bourgeoisie, the first Trump of the ruling class was a boy named Donald, who was born in 1943, the anointed future head of the Trump empire.

The problem is that there was something wrong with the boy, something obvious from the beginning, the restlessness, the lack of restraint, the self-pity, the narcissism, the oversensitivity, the negligible attention span. As great believers in eugenics, the Trumps found their lineage plans stymied by the fact that the boy could not sit still, was oversensitive and, by all accounts, was not too sharp – by half!

While he might look the part, with a tall body and the blonde hair and blue eyes, the brain was a disappointment. It was not to say that the boy was entirely stupid—his strange affect made it hard to tell if he was lying or telling the truth; he lacked any sense of morality and a conventional sense of shame; and these things combined to make it hard for him to discern truth from falsity. But he was not the ubermensch who had been expected. Frederick Jr. did his best to season the boy. Private school was not enough so it was off to military school. There was the brutal verbal scolding and domination, the violence and threats thereof. A terrified Donald could follow orders; but it was not the sort of creature who knew when it was its turn to speak, which fork to use or how many lines or shots was too many.

Donald was likely rescued from military service in Vietnam because of his father’s fear of how he might demonstrate cowardice or indiscipline rather than any real fear for the young man’s safety.

Nevertheless, it was too late to put off the anointing of the Trump lineage’s kwisatz haderach. Donald was to be the first Trump to enter the New York elite. The problem was that, upon his graduation from the least prestigious of the Ivy League institutions, the University of Pennsylvania, complete with a sealed transcript of dubious grades, he failed to do so. It is not that Donald did not work as a CEO of a major real estate businessman, so anointed by his terrifying mobbed-up dad with the calloused hands. It is not that he was not fabulously rich. It was not that he was not famous.

Or rather, maybe it was because he was famous. Donald attempted to join the New York elite beginning in 1968, at the age of twenty-five. Back then, this meant a performance of etiquette with precision, dignity and a certain subtlety. During the Cold War, Anglo masculinity, especially in the New York and international scenes was still governed by a single master attribute: restraint. The ability to not speak, to not gesture, to feign disinterest, to feign not noticing, to master others by exhibiting the most self-control, this was the masculinity in which the Nelson Rockefellers of the world traded; this was the age of the Kennedys, when one showed measured politeness on a cocktail of intravenous meth and quaaludes and a quart of single malt. Donald was a loudmouth, a boor, a man not invited to parties when men far less wealthy and less white, but more restrained were. Or worse yet, he was invited to parties as a conversation piece, a curiosity, the person about whom everyone was laughing behind his back.

Less production of lipid layer viagra australia online also causes such problems. So, viagra samples canada take a proper diet for achieving goal. Revisit the module whenever you want, refurbish the learnt and keep on cialis tab re-doing it till the time you understand it completely. You can regularly consume Kamdeepak capsules twice for two to three months to boost male sex the cost of viagra drive, vitality and vigor. Instead of being a respected member of the bourgeoisie, he was a mascot, a prop, a figure of fun, a man who would, he knew they said behind his back, “never really be one of us.” Still, there were many compensations. Trump was rich enough and famous enough to have sex with his daughter, put on cocaine-fueled orgies with girls provided by Jeffrey Epstein, be a regular guest on Howard Stern, a reality show host and professional wrestler. In these activities, Donald found solace. He could act with judicial impunity like a true member of the New York elite, dodge debt and bankruptcy like the Gordon Geckos and Mitt Romneys of the world and get on TV and radio whenever he wanted. He was rich, powerful and, he realized, believed to be a member of the elite by the middle American rubes he swindled through Trump University, Trump Steaks and the Trump Taj Mahal.

But then the cultural moment shifted and Donald’s luck began to turn. Yale graduate George W Bush Jr. affected a fake Texan accent to win a gubernatorial election and suddenly the world of the American elite began to change. No longer were restraint, self-control, subtlety and superficial respect for women conservative values; they were now liberal values. Restraint, politeness, subtlety were not the way a member of the elite won a Republican nomination; they were how people entered the liberal elite that was seizing control of the Democratic Party.

Al and Tipper Gore, the jumped-up Tennessee cracker vice-president were abstemious, respectable people. Hillary Clinton, the scorned wife with the frozen blonde hair was the embodiment of restraint, refinement and education. Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s culture had turned to the archetype of the cowboy, the ultimate twenty-first century gender play drag act, in which refined, bourgeois, fragile men costume themselves as coarse working men whose hands are not soft.

But the problem with the project of a lineage is that it is not directed by the current patriarch. It is directed by the old man buried in the basement. Frederick Sr. and Frederick Jr. are dead; they cannot imagine the America of the present, in which the elite has become so plutocratic and ossified that it just bails itself out and gives itself awards for bad judgement as it drinks its own bathwater. They still yearn for an elite that demanded a mastery of etiquette, a control of the body, perfect diction and spelling, not “hamberders” and “covfefe.”

And so poor Donald is conflicted. He figured that by becoming the most powerful man on earth, who can destroy all creation with the simple touch of a button, that he could push his way into the New York elite. Somehow, Barack Obama, the negro who could hold his coke in a way Trump never could, was able to engage with this elite. Somehow Hillary Clinton, the scorned wife from Scranton could get behind the velvet rope and he could not, even after beating them and their party in a US presidential election. People whose parentage, gender and race should have placed them far below Trump in the great American chain of being were included and he was not.

When Donald looks at Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the other late additions to the New York elite he despises and envies, he sees intelligence, education and self-control, the very things that would allow him to fulfill his lineage’s mission. And in their place, he has only power and popularity. So, he uses the presidency’s power to assert this: “I am a very stable genius.”

He can do this on Twitter because, contrary to a lot of nonsense floating around, it is conservatives who are the true masters of identity politics. For Donald, it is enough to assert it himself. It is unclear whether he even understands that other people are, in fact people. He may live in a solipsistic micro-universe. For him, it is enough to proclaim that he is a “very stable genius” to make it so, in the cultural moment in which we currently exist.

And the thing is that he is succeeding.

This is true, first of all, because late capitalist ideas of identity are subjective, not intersubjective. By this I mean that the self one imagines being in a masturbatory or other fetishistic fantasy is the self that one truly is. This is not just played-out on liberal Tumblr among whatever they call the kids younger than Millennials. This is the self of the visioning board, the self one who converts to The Secret believe in. The true self, in the late capitalist formulation, is the photo one posts on the aspirational visioning board. (Visioning boards are a craft item the author of The Secret encourages people to fashion, depicting images of the things to which one aspires, which will be brought into being through a meditative practice.)

So, in Trump’s mind, he is sophisticated, brilliant, self-controlled, thin, larger-handed, etc. And that, in and of itself, is sufficient. If he identifies as intelligent, who are we to tell him he is not? Unlike transracial white black Tumblr bloggers, Trump has no use for prefixes. He is not a trans-genius. He is a genius. Full stop.

But let us suppose that we think about identity not in the way late capitalism tells us it operates but the way human beings continue to operate it. One’s identity remains, despite the best efforts of the neoliberal order, intersubjective: one’s identity is an agreement between the self and the crowd about who one is. And the crowd has all kinds of demands. No one understands the scale of these demands better than transgender people. The crowd demands lots of surgery to change the shape of bodies, a pharmaceutical regime to increase or reduce the coarseness of one’s hair, the adoption of often-exaggerated mannerisms associated with stereotypical gender norms and, of course, a complete overhaul of one’s wardrobe. Even then, such agreements are tough to negotiate and many people with trans identities, despite their most diligent efforts, cannot achieve crowd buy-in, irrespective of their internal feelings or massive investments in social persuasion.

But when we imagine the reshaping of identity to be a shared late capitalist project containing both liberalizing forces and supposed forces of reaction, we see something extraordinary with Trump’s trans-genius identity: he appears to pass the intersubjectivity test. The fact is that more people believe he is a genius than believe almost anyone else is. His base, a solid one third of the American people, over a hundred million souls believe that he is a genius, likely the smartest person ever to hold the office of US president.

Except that he does not. Trump can go a lot of places where he really is a very stable genius, just not the ones he wants. He still cannot be a very stable genius at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He cannot be one on Martha’s Vineyard or in the Hamptons. While an epistemologically-divided America can permit Trump to be a genius; the very nature of its division makes it impossible for him to be one in the only places that matter to the Trump lineage.

Yet within that tragedy is a story of generosity and emancipation. Trump may not have achieved geniushood. But he has made it possible for millions of others to do that very thing. More on that in my next post.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

Neo-Ottoman America and the Need for Bernie Sanders

[Today, I am opening a Patreon page to support this blog because you will be getting five articles per month henceforth. Please consider supporting my work and the distinctive historical analysis I bring to my writing here – S.P]

In the Mike Leigh movie High Hopes (1988), Rupert, a character representing nostalgic, as opposed to Thatcherite, Toryism explains the greatness of the British Empire that he hopes to see restored: there was “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” This is an effective characterization of the Second British Empire that emerged following the recognition of the American republic in 1784 and entered into terminal decline following the outbreak of the First World War, two hundred and thirty years later.

Unlike the First British Empire (1536-1783), in which great expense and brutality were undertaken to convert Irishmen into Protestant Englishmen, in which legal differences between the English and Scots were systematically worn down, in which a million colonists on the Atlantic Seaboard originally rose up over their inequality with the Englishmen of the Eastern Hemisphere, the Second British Empire rejected assimilation as a doctrine. The reason America had risen up was because its residents had come to understand themselves to be entitled to the same rights as those of Great Britain.

So, the Second British Empire became all about difference. Welsh, Scots and Indians were to be understood as colonized peoples and, at the same time, colonizers on behalf of the British: distinct, inferior, yet powerful colonized peoples. The Welsh were massively over-represented in the colonial administration of India, the Scots in British North America and the Indians in the administration of Africa. One colonized people managed another at the level of the imperial state.

But below them were hierarchies of the colonized, recognized and supported by the imperial state. In this way, the British abandoned the project of Protestantizing Québec and instead empowered local bishops to sit at the top of a theocracy that ran Lower Canada until 1960. In India, dozens of principalities and emirates dominated or snuffed-out by the Mughal Empire regained a nominal independence under the British East India Company and, later, the British Raj, each with its own prince, courtiers and set of laws. The “trucial states” of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai and less-remembered names were monarchies selected by the British to rule their populations independently but backed by the power of the Royal Navy.

The Second British Empire was based on the understanding that hegemonic power arises from recognizing as many kinds of people and as many kinds of peoples as possible and, wherever possible, making their elites not competitors but collaborators in a vast and elaborate system, one offering “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.”

These ideas did not come to the British Empire out of nowhere. They came from the systems of government developed by the Ottoman Empire, the first modern state more committed to systematizing than erasing the traditions and hierarchies of the past. The Ottoman Empire had succeeded in claiming the title both of Caliphate and Roman Empire during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries by modernizing and systematizing the things that had made medieval Islamic civilization the juggernaut that it had been: religious diversity, cosmopolitanism and hierarchy.

The Ottomans were the one modern state that sought to reinvigorate a legal principle of the Ancient World: personality of law. From Spain to France to England to Japan, the other ascendant states of the early modern world were interested in processes of assimilation, homogenization and the tying of law and culture to geography. These states assailed minority languages and religious difference in an effort to forge the first true national identities.

But the Ottomans took the opposite approach, instead reinvigorating institutions and practices that had atrophied in the Middle Ages. Self-government rights for linguistic minorities were restored. The milet system, whereby religious minorities governed themselves, was established throughout the Empire, granting Nestorians, Chalcedonians, Orthodox and Catholic Christians different governments. The court of the Caliph drew Egyptian Copts and Albanian Muslims, with powerful government positions carefully doled-out to those who sat atop various hierarchies representing ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. There were different streams for civil service and mercantile jobs based on region, language and religion. In the Levant, Orthodox Greeks were preferred for civil service posts, Sunni Arabs for mercantile monopolies and oligopolies, but the same did not hold true in Egypt or Albania. The Ottomans, more than any empire before or since, nailed the “politics of representation.”

Underpinning this was the principle of “personality of law,” the idea that the laws that applied to a person were not the derived from the polygon in which one was standing, etched onto the surface of the planet (the way the law works today) but rather from what sort of person one was, a Christian or a Muslim, a Turk or an Greek, a speaker of Arabic or Serbo-Croatian. This proved a highly effective means of social control. Because every group in the empire was “represented,” there was an elite to which every Ottoman could aspire, and there was an elite willing to defend the Ottoman state in order to safeguard its privileges, its representation.

The goal of physical therapy for whiplash patients is to help female cialis online people feel healthier, look healthier, and live longer as stated by the Vida International team. It takes about three months to witness fully fledged results. sildenafil generic uk The cause of the obesity is overeating, intake of more heat than the heat consumption, cheapest viagra uk the rest into fat accumulation in the body. The look these up buy cheap tadalafil drug comprises of active ingredients similar to that of the original medication. Like so many things today, the “politics of representation” we see as “progressive” is actually a deeply conservative practice of social control practiced, to varying degrees, by successful empires going back to the Persia of Darius and Xerxes, where Jews were given special seats in the proto-Zoroastrian court.

Before resuming the history lesson, let me be clear about what the politics of representation is not; it is not affirmative action. Affirmative action programs are necessarily part of larger state-led efforts to make sure that all participants in the workforce are treated fairly and that all parts of the workforce are representative of the population as a whole. The politics of representation does the opposite. By creating token elites from every group, it seeks to quiet the voices of non-elites by co-opting them into identifying with “their” elites in their putative competition for influence with “other” elites. Will the next vizier be a Copt or a Greek? And when the former succeeds, this politics sells this as a victory for the million Coptic fellahin toiling in cotton fields throughout the Nile Delta. That is why affirmative action works against any job being viewed as the province or specialty of one particular religion, gender or ethnicity but instead tries to create the most representative, mixed group possible in all jobs at all levels.

What once was the politics of affirmative action in the 1970s has, just like the rest of America’s welfare state in the ensuing forty years, been slowly turned into its opposite, cosmetically similar and yet for opposing purposes, with opposite functions. The Third Wayers who remade the Democratic Party and its trade, welfare and criminal justice policies under the Clinton Administration were also key agents in the transformation of affirmative action from a legal practice focused on working people to a symbolic discourse focused on elites.

The vision of diversity espoused by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is the modern politics of representation: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. In this politics, America’s first black president could preside over a net annual transfer of wealth from black America to white America, with black Americans poorer relative to whites and more segregated relative to whites than at any point in the preceding forty years. That is why America is hitting a forty-five year nadir in reproductive freedom following the first major party candidacy for the presidency by a woman and her victory in the popular vote. It is because when you conflate justice for groups with symbolic and elite representation of their elites, those groups don’t just fail to benefit. They lose.

The idea that the composition and conduct of a royal court determines what happens in the world below is a myth with long legs: Oberon and Titania’s court in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arthur and Guinevere’s in the grail stories, the Jade Emperor’s in Chinese myth, etc. We love those old myths and have been seeking to shoe-horn them into reality since Procopius blamed Justinian and Theodora for the Darkening of the Sun. But it’s just sympathetic magic: a theory of cause and effect that seems aesthetically intuitive but is actually bullshit.

Many things can cause an elite to be demographically representative of the population it purports to represent; one is a successful program of affirmative action and economic equality. Whatever legitimate criticisms we make of Fidel Castro’s Cuba when it comes to democratic rights and freedom of speech, by 1991, Cuba’s Communist Party had come to reflect the population below it in terms of racial representation because this diversity arrived from below. Black Cubans achieved parity as hotel managers before they achieved it in the Party. But although this representation has been maintained at the party level, that representation was no safeguard of equity below. Two generations of Cuban leaders have had to sacrifice economic equality for success in the tourism economy and have exiled black Cubans to the back of shop after shop. In this way we can see that diversifying those in authority has no causal relationship to diversity or fairness below. But diversifying below almost always is expressed in diversity above.

Of course, the transparency, the hollowness, the cynicism of the Ottoman politics of representation wears people down and angers those who see that it does nothing materially for the lives of ordinary people. In the nineteenth century, a Turkish nationalist movement emerged in the Ottoman state, demanding that, as creators of the Empire, Turks- all Turks- should enjoy superior political and economic authority. The Turkish nationalists focused their sense of injustice on the minority groups that they believed enjoyed greater power and opportunity than ethnic Turks. Because every group in the Empire was headed by corrupt elites, examples of Arabs, Greeks, Copts and Albanians screwing good, honest Turkish people out of their birthright abounded. Of course, this new Turkish nationalism led to Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and others seeking better deals outside the Empire, which in turn provoked the pogroms of the 1910s and 20s for which the term “genocide” was invented.

Today, America stands somewhere similar. Donald Trump’s agenda is that of the Turkish nationalists of the nineteenth century: to cleanse the elite of minorities and restore them to their proper place either at the bottom of society or outside of it altogether, behind walls or prison bars. The Democratic Party’s decision to respond with the politics of representation sealed its fate and caused it to lose in 2016. Whatever movement triumphs over Trumpism, it will not be the defenders of a corrupt and broken status quo, but one that offers a more compelling and inclusive idea of universality: one pulling a thread through Americans, as workers, as citizens.

Within the US Democratic Party, there is only one candidate who stands for that. And my American friends, you should back him. He is here to smash capitalism, not fix it. And that is what all Americans need. What keeps Hispanic communities from being raided and terrorized is not a Hispanic Secretary of Labour—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people safe from police violence and wrongful imprisonment is not a black Attorney-General—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people from being segregated into inferior housing is not a black Secretary of Housing—America has one right now under Donald Trump. What keeps women’s reproductive rights safe is not a female Secretary of Health—American had one under Obama. The only force capable of fighting racism, authoritarianism and misogyny is socialism—and not the elite espousal of socialism, but its socialist enactment, the mobilization of millions of people across differences of sexuality, race, religion and gender.

What matters and must matter is that Donald Trump is opposed by a politics of equity and equality, not the broken and corrupt neo-Ottomanism of a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 4: The Politics of Privatizing Reputation

It has been a while since I have written about the public discourse around sexual and gender-based violence and abuse. That’s because most of the points I would have wished to make have been made by more prominent, respected, articulate people than me, which is good. The point of these series on my blog is to fill gaps in leftist public discourse, not to serve as a microcosm thereof. Naturally, then, it is disappointing to feel the need to write anything about this. It suggests if not a total absence, a considerable lacuna in leftist thought on a matter. In this case, the absence pertains to embarrassing comeback attempts, something that, as the Gary Coleman of BC politics, I feel I have a special affinity for and might, then, offer a clearer and more precise contribution to.

In September 2018, Jian Ghomeshi wrote an article for the New York Review of Books; true to form, it was narcissistic, self-congratulatory and deceptive. In it, Ghomeshi asked rhetorically asked how long he should continue to be punished for his acts by being excluded from the public square as a public intellectual and broadcaster, given that he had not been criminally convicted of the assaults of which he had been accused. This viewpoint was echoed by trolls disguised as newspaper columnists.

There was context for this. Fans of Louis CK, who had admitted to using his financial power over several women to get them to let him masturbate in front of them and had offered a tepid apology for the affair, substituting “admiration” for “financial power” in his statement. People wanted to know: just how long before we “let” Louis CK get back to his career as a celebrity stand-up comic.

As typically takes place when questions of gender-based abuse and violence find their way into the public square, people quickly adopted a wholly inappropriate metaphorical vocabulary: that of the criminal justice system. Somehow, not getting paid to be on stage, on the radio or on TV constitutes some form of punishment or “sentence” that badly-behaving male celebrities are serving out when their shows get canceled after they do something inappropriate. And when the sentence is completed, it follows that they get to go back to being paid millions of dollars to be on screen.

This optic is, of course, an insane one to apply to highly coveted jobs that very few people ever get to do. People have a right to move about freely; only through a grave transgression of the law are they temporarily stripped of that right. But nobody has the right to be on stage; nobody has the right to be popular; nobody has the right to have their own TV show. And, central to the Louis CK case, nobody has a right to force anyone to watch them.

And yet, this metaphor of the “life sentence” has been used repeatedly to talk about male celebrities who crossed an important ethical or legal line in their treatment of women. The same metaphor is used, the same kinds of questions are asked about Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and a host of others. And yet, when one considers Polanski and Allen, the framing seems even more absurd: Allen and Polanski continue to be famous directors in whose movies major Hollywood and European stars appear; they continue to receive flattering interviews and other media attention; they even continue receiving major international awards for their work.

What punishment, then, were they actually suffering? What, exactly, was being described as a “sentence”? The answer is this: a lot of people have kept thinking they are creeps and some of those people have stopped watching their movies. And, at the end of the day, what this is really about is that there is a shockingly large number of people who believe that not being thought-of as a creep is a right that all men enjoy, that can only be revoked temporarily and only under the most extreme circumstances.

The Incel movement shares with the mainstream of North American society the belief that men own other people’s thoughts about them, that when someone thinks “that guy’s greasy,” that thought does not belong to the person thinking it but rather to the person to whom it pertains. This is the most extraordinary breach of individual selfhood and the liberal theory of the base unit and yet, such a view epitomizes the changes in social contract we associate with late capitalism and has been, from the beginning, embedded in the project of capitalist modernity.

One of the most underestimated thinkers in adumbrating the roots of the modern capitalist state is Irene Silverblatt, a holocaust survivor writing in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Silverblatt argues that many of the seeds of an incipient capitalist modernity are to be found not in early modern Europe’s core but in its periphery, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. It is here that modern ideas of race-thinking first played out and here that modern understandings of bureaucracy – with the technocrat as transactor of knowledge – appeared at their most thoroughly elaborated.

The Spanish society that arrived in the New World was already accustomed to the highest levels of cosmopolitanism and diversity in Europe; it contained Basques, Catalans and many other ethnicities whose languages would eventually be subsumed within Castilian Spain. It contained Christians, Jews and Muslims who had been enmeshed in a seven-century religious war known as the Reconquista. Spaniards descended from Roman colonists, some from Carthaginians, some from Goths, some from Franks, Vandals, Berbers and Arabs. Medieval Spain had been a hierarchical place in which people were treated differently depending on honor or calidad; sometimes that honor was created by present-day behaviour, sometimes inherited from one’s macro-lineage group, one’s raza (the origin of the term and idea of race). Like the rest of Europe it was a world of knights, lords, kings, peasants, urban labourers and the beginnings of a bourgeoisie. Some of the labouring worked in high-status clean jobs like millers while others worked in “unclean” jobs like tanners (the clean-unclean distinction pervaded the whole civilized world and, in India, had resulted in the creation of the dalit or “untouchable” caste).

The society the Spanish discovered in the Andes was every bit as complex as their own, organized into macro-lineage groups called allyus, headed by a dead ancestor, the most powerful of whom were mummified and periodically consulted by the living allyu head. When the Spanish arrived they had to both dominate Andean culture and integrate it with their own, subordinate noble families and marry into them, perceive enough of Andean society to surveil and dominate it and yet radically simplify it legally, administratively and conceptually. Furthermore, the African slaves conquistadors brought with them had to have a place in this new world too.

One of the first consequences of this project was something known as a limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) certificate. This certificate acted upon one’s casta (caste). The Spanish crown had created six major castes in its New World colonies: Español (white), indio (indigenous), negro (black), mestizo (mixed white and indigenous), mulato (mixed white and black) and zambo (mixed indigenous and black). Anyone in possession of such a certificate was, according to the state, white, from a legal perspective, making one eligible for any political office, impossible to enslave (unlike negros) and subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition (unlike indios). (More on this aspect of Spanish imperial society two posts from now.)
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These certificates soon became a commodity in their own right. With the right amount of money, one could purchase such a certificate from a corrupt government official and make that money back within not too much time as one’s employment and entrepreneurial prospects expanded. And that is not just because of how such certificates acted in a formal, legal sense. Although Jews were not part of the North American caste system devised by the Spanish and their immigration was supposedly prohibited, it was understood that some had entered the territory as “Portuguese,” because the adjacent Portuguese Empire, which handled the slave trade for Spain, looked the other way when it came to Jews passing for non-Jews. A limpieza de sangre certificate did not merely attest to the European descent of a person—it attested to a lineage that had never been tainted by Jewish blood, Muslim conversion or work in an unclean industry.

And such certificates did not merely act on one’s fate when the law spelled-out caste-based privileges. They affected the credibility of one’s testimony in court and before the inquisition. They affected whether one was invited to a cabildo (the assembly of Spanish notables who constituted the city fathers of a self-governing town). They affected one’s marriage prospects and a host of other things to which they had no technical pertinence.

It is here, then, under the aegis of the Hapsburgs’ New World empire that we first see the large-scale and systematic modern commodification of reputation, the idea that one can, though good behaviour and good luck or though money, own the portion of others’ opinion that pertains to oneself.

But as with so many other things about the early modern world, what began in Spain came to be more fully elaborated in Britain. Whereas one can trace the spreading of false news or declarations likely to breach the peace as an offense against the state or society to the Age of the Antonines in second century Rome, the privatization of this offense in the form of defamation or libel came into being haltingly.

There does not appear to be any moment that the common law tradition from which English law descends did not recognize slanderous speech to be an injury. As I have suggested elsewhere, the Germanic wergild tradition of law, in which injuries to the person were quantified monetarily and justice meted out through financial compensation gave societies based on it a leg up in internalizing the logic of capitalism, having the foundation of a proto-capitalist legal system. But wergild quantified only one aspect of reputation: reputational depreciation. Changes in reputation that were positive or simply alterations in kind or type of status were outside the purview of the wergild system.

More importantly, the English legal system only compensated those whose reputations depreciated due to a falsehood being circulated about them. While the onus of demonstrating the truth or falsity of an accusation has moved back and forth between plaintiff and defendant throughout the history of libel and slander law, the veracity of an accusation has always had the capacity to vitiate the claim of compensation for lost reputation.

When the accusations against Jian Ghomeshi first became public, the representatives he engaged were not lawyers, rather, they were representatives of the public relations firm, Navigator, a company specializing in “crisis communications” as they pertain to people containing blood and organs, as opposed to the corporations for which the field was first developed. Under the slogan “Navigator: When You Can’t Afford to Lose,” the firm’s web site succinctly explains its purpose: “Corporations and individuals sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. We quickly pull together the right team to manage issues before they escalate into major crises. When disaster strikes, our clients depend on our custom-built communications plans to minimize reputational damage.” The site goes on to offer a do-it-yourself program under the header “Sign Up for our Crisis Preparation and Reputation Recovery Program with Ivey Business School.”

Ultimately, Ghomeshi was too undisciplined for Navigator to handle, but many prominent Canadians like Michael Bryant, the Ontario Attorney-General who killed a mentally ill indigenous cyclist with his car, have benefited significantly from the expansion of reputational management from correcting falsehood to preserve reputation to burnishing it for the same purpose. Across the border, we recently witnessed the sudden reappraisal of a group of Catholic School boys’ confrontation with an indigenous war veteran at a protest in Washington DC. Columnists and news organizations quickly issued mea culpas for their portrayal of the young men as boorish racists, following a recontextualization of some video footage by RunSwitch PR, a Navigator-like firm hired by some of the boys’ parents.

RunSwitch, which goes by the motto “to ensure the right people know the right thing,” was able to perform a kind of reputational alchemy for a hefty fee. Whereas libel law and the work of firms like Navigator has traditionally been used to safeguard a reputation with pre-existing value against depreciation, the alchemy performed by RunSwitch transformed a boy whose name we did not know, with a forgettable face into an Anglo American media star who, for the first time, was given a platform to espouse the conservative views he had gone to Washington to help advance. In this way, RunSwitch’s work did not work like an intervention by Navigator or a libel lawyer but instead like a limpieza de sagre certificate.

While the name of the boy’s school had been known, his name, Nick Sandmann, was not, until RunSwitch entered the fray. In this way, something more than the defensive action of a Navigator campaign was in evidence: one individual was transformed into a celebrity with a national reputation because fashioning this spokesperson was the most efficient way to defend his school and classmates. But within this instrumentalist reasoning is something deeper: Sandmann’s presumed right to be well-regarded, irrespective of evidence before the very eyes of those judging him.

This is what Ghomeshi’s defenders desire too: to nullify the words of the women who described his brutal acts, to substitute our prior opinion of him for one that we have come to using evidence and our God-given reason because our current opinions hurt “his” reputation. This arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what reputation is and what it is for. “Your” reputation does not and should not belong to you. It belongs to the people whom you encounter, people who are alone with you in elevators or alleys, people you split restaurant bills with, people in the passenger seat of your car. These people own your reputation because they build it; they maintain it; and they are the ones who need it. You see: the purpose of your reputation is to inform people of how to protect their safety when they interact with you. It was never yours, nor should it be.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 3: Galloway, Khomeinism and Saul’s Christian “Body:” the Anti-liberal Theory of the Base Unit

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Of the perplexing figures of the past twenty years in politics George Galloway ranks highly. A British Labour MP originally admired by the international left for his hard line opposition to Britain’s entry into the Second Gulf War in 2003, Galloway has drifted further and further from recognizable left politics over the past decade and a half. This drift began with his creation of the Respect Party in 2004, a coalition of Muslim religious conservatives and socialists, loosely affiliated with the emerging Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, a situational alliance of leftist and Islamist petro-states seeking to end the petro-dollar system of US hegemony over global oil markets.

But whereas the Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, led by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was an alliance based on mutual material interests and a shared enemy, the Respect Party was about more than this. Its ideology constituted a genuine fusion of key elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism and the theocratic ideologies of the Iranian state and its international paramilitary wing, the Hezbollah.

The Gallowayism propounded by the Respect Party sought to represent both the British left and a wide spectrum of ideological tendencies within Muslim diasporic communities in the UK. The party stood for greater community control of schools and education by diasporic communities, greater efforts to address racism and Islamophobia in the private and public spheres, a reduction in immigration restrictions between Britain and the Muslim world, an end of British alignment with US foreign policy, withdrawal from the European Union, reversal of tax and benefit reductions since the 1980s and the return of occupying forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway framed the British state as being “at war” with Islam and Muslims generally and sought to bring about an end to that war. In the predominantly Muslim constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway re-entered parliament now representing Respect.

Ultimately, Respect fractured into two parties with most non-Muslim members moving to the Socialist Workers Party in 2007; this appears to have been related to their dispute with a key non-profit organization that functioned as Galloway’s main campaign surrogate in 2005, the Islamic Forum of Europe, an organization seeking not just the substantial self-government rights for Muslims in public education but a more general personality of law principle for diasporic communities. IFE believes in a legal system like that of present-day India in which Muslims are governed under a separate legal code from the majority religious population. This Muslim code would include a radical reformulation of family law allotting substantial powers to husbands and fathers over their female family members. Without the substantial left and anti-war movement support, Galloway was defeated in the 2010 election.

Galloway re-entered parliament in 2012 with the assistance of another conservative Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (UK). In the byelection Galloway contested, the MPACUK focused its third party campaign on accusations of apostasy against the Labour candidate whom they argued was not, as he claimed, a practicing Muslim.

In 2012, Galloway joined many “anti-imperialists” in defending Wikileaks’ Julian Assange but did so in a highly distinctive way: he suggested that even if the testimony accusing Assange of rape were to be believed, Assange’s behaviour did not constitute anything worse than “bad manners.”

In 2015, Galloway attempted to return to parliament, this time opposing a Muslim Afghan candidate, Naz Shah, who had gained substantial prominence for her feminist activism following her harrowing and violently abusive experience as a child bride, married without her consent. Strangely, Galloway made this his central campaign issue, arguing that Shah was both dishonest and morally corrupt because she had claimed she was contracted into marriage against her will at the age of fifteen when, in fact, Galloway argued, she had been forced to marry at sixteen and a half, something to which he deemed it wrong for her to object. He attempted to demonstrate this with what he claimed was her marriage contract, which his representatives had obtained in Pakistan.

It may seem at this point in my post that I am simply telling you the story of a reprehensibly sexist man who is also a socialist. But while I think Galloway’s misogyny is indisputable, I want to suggest that something else is also going on, something pertinent to our understanding of the contested and unstable nature of the modern self.

The Respect Party, like many of the neo-traditionalist authoritarian parties that are rising around the world today, was actually saying something large and revolutionary, albeit extremely disturbing. What Gallowayism contested was the liberal theory of the base unit. The liberal junk anthropology that I took down in my last post has served an important, albeit ahistorical purpose: to argue that the fundamental base unit of society is the individual person.

This used to be the thing over which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatives saw as the essential heresy of liberalism: the idea that the organic base unit of society was the solitary, atomized person. As anthropology suggests, this is a notion that is arbitrary at best and absurd at worst. And that is why most societies have understood some sort of larger unit as their base unit. Whereas a liberal sees a family as a collection of individuals, people outside this ideology see an individual as a fraction of a family.
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For the Inca, the base unit was the allyu, the macro-lineage that could be traced to one great ancestor; for much of Indian history, the jati, a guild-like macro-lineage structure was the base unit, the extended family a sub-unit thereof and the individual, a fraction of that; raza, in medieval, as opposed to early modern, Spain, (the cognate of “race”) used to refer to macro-lineages that could be traced to a single ancestral conversion (or moment of saintly patronage), to an Abrahamic religion. The raza, the allyu, the jati are just a few historical examples.

When Saul of Tarsus writes to his followers in Corinth, he is arguing that his intentional communities of like-minded believers, and not the individual, constituted the base unit, that the ways in which some had conceived of salvation as personal was wrong.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

Just as we often fail to realize that what we think is a public policy debate is actually an epistemological debate, we often fail to realize that what we see as a debate about the relative rights of different kinds of individuals are actually debates about our social base unit.

At equal proximity to the ideological core of the modern Republican Party to the episteme of Authenticity is the theory of the nuclear family as base unit. Expressed religiously in the “headship principle” where prayers must be undertaken and led by the family’s head (the father), the fundamental argument of the GOP is that women’s bodies are fractions of a coherent familial body that have no essential independent ontology. The only way they can be severed from the body of the family is through marriage into another male-headed collective body.

Such a family has sweeping reproductive rights; it is just that the rights are articulated by the executive as opposed to reproductive part of the familial body. If one looks at the structure of abortion laws enacted to prohibit abortions and criminalize miscarriages, the ability to punish women for ending pregnancies is contingent upon the participation of the biological father. While getting a mid-term abortion may be technically illegal in many states, the only way the offense becomes prosecutable or actionable is if the male participant make a police report or files suit.

And we see similar approaches to women’s bodies in similar conservative social movements. Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party legalized marital assault and rape in 2017. Narendra Modi’s BJP and Recep Erdogan’s movements, similarly, do not so much view women as inferior members of society as inferior parts of a cohesive social body, that of the extended, male-headed family.

Gallowayism merits our study because it is the first of these neo-traditionalist ideologies to rear its head on the political left. One can effectively reduce Galloway’s political argument to a single unifying point: white, Christian men get to manage “their” women as they see fit; brown, Muslim men do not. There will be no fundamental equality all men enjoy an equal right to manage the bodies and minds of “their” familial or extended familial body. This is, fundamentally, the foundation of Iranian law, since the 1979 Khomeinist revolution and it came to be a sincere part of Galloway’s anti-capitalist worldview.

Gallowayism forces the left to once again confront the way in which its long-term alliance with liberalism has caused us to atrophy intellectually, to quit the field in one of the most central debates of our times. The choice between patriarchal neotraditionalism and the late capitalist theory of the independent, individual choice-maker is no choice at all. We need to rediscover elements of Second Wave feminist thinking and pre-Stalinist Marxist thinking about our own theory of the base unit.

Instead, I fear that the left is choosing to amplify the liberal characteristics of self-making in order to distinguish itself, to find ways to offer more atomized and solipsistic ideas of constructing a modern self. More on that in my next post on this subject.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence Race | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 2: The Junk Science of Liberalism

The term “junk science” has gained unprecedented currency in recent years as flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate denialists and young earth creationists march triumphantly into mainstream discourse. The so-called science that states autism is a parasite and can be driven out by force-feeding bleach to your kids or that which states fossils can be formed on the surface of the ground in less than a decade is distinct from merely false claims or false conclusions. It is a body of pseudo-knowledge with its own journals, experiments, training, museums and twisted logics. In this way, it bears some resemblance to abandoned and rejected scientific theories of the past, like Galenic humoral medicine with its prescribed bleedings.

One of the reasons that liberals and progressives who wish to accelerate climate change typically embrace climate nihilism over denialism is their discomfort with junk science. Despite its battered state, liberalism’s allegiance to actual science has actually increased in recent years as liberals and progressives have backed away from the more vulgar representations of the postmodern critique, now that it is being used by characters like Rick Santorum to deny climate change.

For this reason, it is generally but mistakenly thought that progressives do not embrace junk science but this is an error. Progressives, and liberals generally, do embrace junk science, just not in the hard sciences. The liberal commitment to anthropological and sociological junk science is every bit as deep as that of those outside the collapsing liberal consensus. There are many reasons for this but the first and by far the most important is that liberalism is necessarily premised on junk science.

The foundation of liberalism is social contract theory, a theory explicitly based on the best cutting-edge anthropology of pre-literate human civilizations seventeenth century Europe could produce. Social contract theory was developed by Thomas Hobbes as part of a multi-part internally consistent argument advanced in Leviathan. The foundation of this argument, as declared by Hobbes himself, was a theory about what early humans were like and how the first human societies emerged. Because there was not yet a theory of evolution, a discipline of primatology or such thing as anthropological fieldwork, no one can fault Hobbes for his methods or the theory he generated using them. Here is what Hobbes thought primitive humans were like.

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes believed that human beings’ original and natural state was a pre-social “state of nature” upon which blank slate society had to be constructed.

John Locke, who further elaborated liberalism offered his own theory of human beings’ natural state, on which his social contract theory was also premised, offers a sunnier vision of human beings’ natural state:

O understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

            Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the third father of social contract theory offers yet a more optimistic and sunny vision of the natural human state:

The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.

This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and consequently becomes his own master. The family then may be called the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while, in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love which the chief cannot have for the peoples under him.

            In this way, we see that liberalism is premised on a set of non-identical but equally scientifically false descriptions of the origins of society, descriptions that are unanimous in these crucial errors:

  1. that human beings begin in a pre-social state, that social bonds among humans began only after we became human beings and only after such faculties as speech and tool-making developed;
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  3. that private property existed prior to any social order recognizing it.

Today, the human sciences tell us that this is all hogwash, that Aristotle, 2400 years ago, had a better sense of pre-literate societies than the founders of liberalism did. And since the last of these texts was published in 1762, no major discovery in the human sciences has produced the slightest revision in liberal ideology, even though the past 256 years have yielded enormous advances in understandings of how human beings form societies in both the past and present.

Like biblical literalists who happily accept the material gains produced by the Darwin-Mendel synthesis even though it requires a recognition of evolutionary genetics, liberals are perfectly happy to recognize discoveries in anthropology, primatology, sociology, psychology, neurology and psychiatry, just as long as those discoveries are understood to exist in a separate domain of human truth that does not impinge on the theories of truth.

A similar situation existed in the Middle Ages when it came to astronomy. It was “known” that the sun, moon, each planet and the “plane of fixed stars” were each contained in a crystalline sphere made of an indestructible, transparent substance known as the Quintessence and that each body could only move in circular motions. But it was obvious, long before Copernicus offered a heliocentric universe, that this did not account for the movements people saw in the heavens. So, universities split astronomy into two disciplines: Physical Astronomy, which contained the crystalline spheres and Mathematical Astronomy, which made accurate calculations of astronomical events. While Mathematical Astronomy was used day-to-day, it was not considered “true.” That was the sole domain of Physical Astronomy.

In the same way, when it comes to making academic inquiries into how human beings make choices, behave in groups, agree to do things, construct their priorities or try to hold onto inanimate objects, liberals are happy to concede the predictive power of the human sciences. Unless these things impinge on law, politics or economics; these domains must be understood only using debunked seventeenth and eighteenth-century junk science.

Worse yet, like the discipline of Physical Astronomy, liberal social junk science has continued to function as a parallel line of intellectual inquiry walled-off from the mainstream of the human sciences. In this vein, we see a particularly hamfisted and uncritical reading of the largely discredited work of psychologist Abraham Maslow taught in nearly every business school, decades after its marginalization within the field of psychology.

Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” presumes that people will/should meet their material needs before meeting any social needs. First, individuals must sort out their food, housing, clothes and a steady stream of income before they can/should get involved in making art, socializing, having fun, etc. This, of course, presumes that human beings were born into industrial consumer societies with low unemployment rates and high demand for non-coerced labour. The reality, whether one is living in a primitive hominid group or in a modern city based on the “gig economy,” one’s best guarantee of safety is a social network that can work together to stay employed, housed, fed and clothed. While this has been recognized in peer reviewed anthropology for a half a century, in the fields of knowledge that determine the actions of the state, this information cannot depose the junk science of liberalism.

How is this junk science held in place, then? It is held in place through an intellectual sleight of hand older than liberalism, itself, one we find just as evident in Aristotelian theories of law, politics and economy. Note that in the paragraph above my use of “will/should” and “can/should”—this is the main way junk social science functions. It offers models that are supposed to be concurrently a description of how the world operates and how it should operate; consequently, whenever these models fail to predict or explain events, it is not because of a flaw in the model but instead because of a flaw in reality.

You know this routine: every time there is an election in which voters do not vote based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which they “vote against their economic interests,” by which commentators mean that they do not choose the party/platform that gives them the most materially the most affordably, it is the fault of the voters, not the model of personal advantage maximization that has once against failed to predict events. In this way, junk science that fails to predict or explain events, again and again, is excused by what social scientists call “blaming the world.”

In fact what has happened is typically wholly explicable through normal social science. But this explanation cannot function as the primary explanation in our discourse because if it did, we might question not just the premising of electoral politics on falsehoods but the premising of our economic and legal relations on it too, perhaps questioning the justice and reasonableness of such things as contracts, consent and consumer choice.

More disquieting yet, it might bring into question the bedrock on which all of these things rest: the Hobbesian falsehood of the autonomous, aware, pre-social self.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 1: Introduction: Why I Am Not a Progressive or Whose Cock Do I Have to Suck to Run for the NDP?

Last fall, I met former BC NDP MLA Harry Lali for the first time. My friend and campaign manager Tom Ewasiuk introduced us. I didn’t think I would get along with Harry but, whatever our differences, we were men who had been around BC politics too long and both felt like ambassadors from another time.

Our interactions soon became shaped by one of the weirder anecdotes of the NDP’s successful 2017 election campaign. The riding of Columbia River-Revelstoke was one of the handful of seats the NDP had retained in the BC interior, due to high levels of precipitation (until 2013, NDP voting in the rural mainland of BC, outside of Harry’s riding, strongly correlated to annual precipitation levels and overcast days) but it was in play because of the party’s poor fortunes in the rural mainland generally and because the popular incumbent was stepping down. Because a white man was resigning his seat, new party rules made it an “equity mandate” riding, one in which only a person who was either not male, not straight, not able-bodied and/or not white could seek the party’s nomination.

Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that while the BC NDP recognizes gender, race and sexuality as sites of discrimination it does not recognize class. Or rather it does, but in the opposite way. It prohibits poor people from seeking party nominations by slapping on a punitive $5000 vetting fee because, as the party president explained to me, people who can’t easily get hold of $5000 are not serious people.

In any case, the only candidate eligible and willing to seek the nomination was a disabled woman who was unpopular with party members so, at the last minute, a person who appeared to be a straight white man was suddenly vetted as an equity mandate candidate. But the party would not disclose to the media what minority identity he represented. Harry’s and my mind went to the same place: the guy had been induced to claim he slept with other men. Where Harry and I differed was on whether the candidate, whom I rather liked, would have felt duty-bound to engage in some same-sex activity so as to engage “honestly” with the process. My feeling was that if this guy was willing to make the sacrifices he had already lined up for to help the party, what was a little fellatio? Harry disagreed.

The voters were unimpressed and the NDP lost Columbia River-Revelstoke, in part, no doubt because voters were split, as Harry and I were, on the ethical way to approach identity politics in our age.

There is a lot to unpack in this story and I will return to it a few times but now, I’m stepping way back and enlarging the optic because this is the first part of a series I really hope to do a better job of completing than my other article series because I feel that I have no collected my thoughts well enough to make a significant intellectual intervention on the subject of identity.

Liberalism and Progressivism

Liberalism, the philosophical description of the system of relationships that undergird capitalism, has, until recently, enjoyed long-term intellectual hegemony in the most powerful empires that have shaped global history. With few exceptions, most philosophical and political debates in a society like Canada’s have been among different schools of liberal thought. Since the mid nineteenth century, our major debates have been about what kind of liberal society to be, what kind of liberal economy to have, what theory of liberalism will win the day.

Today, neo-Keynesians debate monetarists; progressives debate libertarians; it is only at the edges of these debates that we see other horizons of possibility, and those are not pretty. It now appears that the American religious right, while retaining certain elements of the liberal worldview is now sufficiently divergent in some key areas like epistemology that we can see the emergence of alternatives outside the liberal consensus that has shaped our thought for the past two centuries.

He feels powerless with price tadalafil tablets the situation. The bulk of this market is controlled by Generic variants of tadalafil 100mg. levitra is greatly useful for men suffering from erectile dysfunction issues. In creating these oral and topical formulations, has created a online cialis mastercard surplus of counterfeit, fake and diluted hoodia products. Try to find out a local online community. levitra 100mg But it is precisely because the challenges to liberal hegemony have moved, since 1991, from the political left to the political right, those of us on the left find ourselves under unprecedented pressure to defend the liberal legacy and, indeed, to become part of a permanent locked alliance between leftists and liberals. The name for this alliance is, of course, “progressive.” To be progressive is to identify with a twofold political project:

  1. to slow the dismantling of the Cold War welfare state and to ensure that new forms of state intervention to ameliorate social problems are piecemeal, non-universal and reliant on partnerships with private corporations and the non-profit sector for delivery. The Affordable Care Act and the post-2015 BC, Ontario and Alberta provincial childcare programs exemplify progressive programs.
  2. to accelerate and intensify a politics of minority non-economic rights and high-level representation, enforced through piecemeal high-level affirmative action like cabinet, corporate board membership and candidate nomination de facto quotas so that various disadvantaged identity groups can experience “representation” and through changes to social etiquette. Most etiquette changes, like labeling gender-neutral restrooms, prohibiting offensive Hallowe’en costumes, etc. are enforced simply through social pressure and offense politics but a growing number are mandated either by statute or through the pursuit of civil and criminal prosecutions for hate speech and exclusionary behaviour.

The progressive project, then, typically entails increasingly “representative” elites presiding over a system that typically further economically impoverishes and politically marginalizes patronized groups, while, at the same time, building and reinforcing systems of patronage that allow people to benefit from non-material ideas of representation. Black Americans strongly identified with the successes of Barack Obama as US president even though a consequence of this was an increase in white resentment and anti-black racism and the further impoverishment of black relative to white America due to Obama’s lack of political capital needed to defend black gains that slipped away under his watch.

This political formula transcends the liberal order and was probably practiced best not by the US Democratic Party but the Ottoman Empire which created a complex system of self-government known as the milet system that saw every major religious identity group in the empire represented at the elite level and offered some degree of self-government, even if that was inextricable from the legal and economic inferiority non-Muslims on which it depended.

Because of the monstrosity of the forces that have emerged to challenge the progressive project, many on the left, I among them, have often been frightened back into the progressive alliance and find ourselves defending various aspects of liberalism because of our fear of the rising tide of the extreme right or our desire to preserve some cherished aspect of the twentieth-century welfare state.

I am making my second effort at a significant intellectual intervention (since I wrote Age of Authenticity in 2012) because I believe that the time for this politics is behind us. The progressive movement will collapse—and soon. Furthermore, progressive movements’ tolerance for climate nihilism means that continuing to support the broad progressive project will simply serve to alter which political movements preside over frying the planet.

In my last major intervention, I feel as though I wrote something that, while not especially enjoyable to read, had significant descriptive and predictive power in observing the rise of Trump and an understanding of the social forces that created and maintain his movement. This intervention will not be an epistemological one but instead one about identity, and, in particular, the fraught and much abused term “identity politics.” More broadly, it will examine the link between identity that the theory of the self, just as Age of Authenticity examined the relationship between epistemology and the theory of the self.

Early in the Marxist corpus, there was significant interest in the nature of the self and an understanding that, central to the capitalist project, was the creation of a certain kind of self, and atomized, isolated self, defined by its desires and aspirations. If we are to survive, we must create new-non-capitalist selves and that will mean addressing head-on the politics and phenomenology of identity. This means asking simple but very serious questions like “Am I what I do or am I what I like?” “Do I decide if I am white or do other people?” “What, if any, aspects of identity are biologically determined?” “Is there a difference between an identity one aspires to have and the identity one does have?”

Stay tuned for part two.

BC Politics Politics of Identity | fusangite |