GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

A little kerfuffle in a tiny corner of the art/literary world seems to me to bear some significance worth exploring. The conceptual writer Vanessa Place has been removed from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs committee for refereeing the panel presentations for the 2016 AWP Convention. This is as a result of her latest project, which is the gradual tweeting of the entirety of Gone With the Wind, on a Twitter page with a picture of Hattie McDaniel (the “Mamie” of the film version) and an image from the cover of a sheet of music for a late 19th century “coon song” on it. Place’s removal was the result of a petition initiated by AWP members, on the grounds that her project was racist and caused pain to people of color (henceforth “POC”).

Meanwhile, another conceptual artist (one of the best known), Kenneth Goldsmith, has been under attack for the presumed racism of a recent project of his: a public reading of the autopsy conducted by the police medical examiner of Michael Brown, the young man shot in a now globally known incident in Ferguson, Missouri. Here, a new actor enters the scene, a group calling itself the “Mongrel Coalition.” The Mongrel Coalition demands, forcefully and obscurely, immediate “decolonization,” and, with strategic wisdom, chose the soft targets of Place and Goldsmith (as a synecdoche of white dominated innovative literature and art more generally) to denounce the exploitation of black bodies by white aesthetes (“gringpo”): http://gringpo.com. The Mongrel Coalition seems comprised of graduate students; at the very least, they know all the white guilty vulnerabilities of the academic literary elites, and are familiar enough with the discourses of said elites to establish the double bind: one the one hand, innovative literature is formalistic play that ignores and, by implication, is complicit with, the oppression of POC; and, on the other hand, innovative aesthetic devices were invented by POC and stolen (and tamed) by white people. As you can see from the mock titles on the website, the indictment of these cultural black body snatchers is that they want to keep their “white privilege” while (by) gesturing towards an alliance with POC. How would one actually align oneself with POC? Presumably by finding ways of implicating others in that double bind, which keeps you one step ahead of those who might implicate you.

Place, as we can see from her Artist’s Statement in response to the dust-up (https://www.facebook.com/notes/vanessa-place/artists-statement-gone-with-the-wind-vanessaplace/10152841235969212?pnref=story) and, no doubt, Goldsmith, want very much to be exemplary leftists and allies of POC (Goldsmith has, in response to the unexpected and vehement criticism of his performance, requested that the transcript and video be suppressed). Place, in particular, sees her project as a kind of performance of White Guilt, in which case she might (but doesn’t seem to) see the ferocious attacks on her as a part of the performance itself—if you volunteer yourself as a scapegoat so as to cleanse the community, you shouldn’t be surprised if others take you up on it. She acknowledges the “cruelty” of what she has done, in iterating a history of cruelty, and so the “cruelty” of the response to her would seem to affirm her intentions. At any rate, if not paralyzed by White Guilt, that’s how she could easily take up the consequences of her action—and then things might actually get interesting.

The kind of conceptual art Place and Goldsmith does is very much in the tradition of Duchamp’s “Fountain,” aimed at transgressing and confusing the boundary between what is art and what is not art. Goldsmith’s previous books have mostly been transcriptions, for example of 24 hours of traffic reporting in New York City, or, more recently, his Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which transcribes reports of JFK’s assassination, RFK’s assassination, John Lennon’s murder, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the Columbine massacre, 9/11, and Michael Jackson’s death. Place has done some more “modernist” (surrealist, stream of consciousness) type writing, but quite a bit of transcription as well—of court documents of sexual offense trials, for example. To put it simply, the idea is that if you read these texts within a frame reserved for “literature,” you read them differently, and they resonate in surprising ways.

Whether one enjoys or is interested in conceptual art or not, it is useful to consider why it might be a target for victimary fanatics—especially when it tries to be “politically relevant.” The purpose of conceptual writing is to de-authorize texts, to treat them as floating discourses that no one controls and therefore no one should own (part of the point of Place’s Gone With the Wind project is to bait the Margaret Mitchell estate into a copyright lawsuit)—and in which we are also therefore all implicated—any text is just part of our language, and cannot be contained within the circumscribed fields of authorship, genre, etc. To de-authorize is to de-sacralize, and to de-sacralize, for those invested in that version of the sacred, is to desecrate. For the victimary activist, iterating, without comment, without credit, descriptions of violence done to black bodies, is a desecration of those bodies just as much as drawing an image of Muhammad is a desecration of the prophet for some Muslims. The experience of POC (and, perhaps LGBTETC, as honorary POC, but the Mongrel Coalition doesn’t seem to me so certain about that) is sacred, in other words, and only an authorized priestly caste can perform the rituals sanctifying it. Reading over the website of the Mongrel Coalition, I wouldn’t expect violence from its members—if anything, we can see this as an extremely savvy career move, which is sure to open up publishing and job opportunities (situating it firmly within the tradition of the avant-garde and Romanticism more generally). But the logic has already, and will continue to, seep out into the broader culture, and its implications are violent. If certain modes of experience become sacred, their sacrality can and must be defended with all means necessary, and “argument” will not be a very effective means. Only anathematization will suffice, and anathematization requires the support of various means of intimidation—to defend something sacred to you is to show that you are willing to go to lengths to which those who might desecrate it are unwilling to go. This little incident (from which I’m sure Place and Goldsmith will recover, a bit tarnished, perhaps) is a useful reminder that to engage the victimary is, necessarily, to engage in desecration; indeed, that desecration must be the main means of struggle in the attempt to neutralize the victimary, in particular since if the much desired (by the left) hate crimes legal (and moral) regime is to work, it must rely upon the sacrality of experience (otherwise, how would you know when a Confederate flag is being displayed in a “hateful,” as opposed, say, to a satiric or scholarly, way? Only a POC priest[ess] is duly authorized to tell you). And it is best to understand what that implies. For me, at any rate, the possibilities of conceptual (and procedural) writing and art have just risen a bit in my estimation as potential cultural weaponry.

In no particular order I list here, not the only lies spread by the Left (far from it!), but the ones that, it seems to me, have attained total coverage, i.e., that guarantee swift, coordinated, thorough and effective responses when questioned:

One: There are no real differences between men and women.
Two: Same sex attraction is as normal as opposite sex attraction.
Three: Blacks are always and only victims of white supremacy.
Four: Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.
Five: Illegal aliens are just American citizens who haven’t yet received the proper documentation.

Any facts contrary to these assertions are evidence of actual oppression or reactionary lies.

With the exception of number four (regarding which the public has far less first hand evidence), the Left is never foolish enough to assert these lies; rather, it just goes ahead and acts as if they are self-evidently true (there is a lesson for us all in that).

We are already beginning to see the extraordinary destruction that must be wrought to civil discourse and civil society to sustain these brazen lies: Christians who believe in traditional marriage must become cynosures of hate, any Islamic group or state marginally less psychotic (“moderate”) than the most demented (“extremist”) is to be empowered, all attempts to defend American borders or preserve the distinction of American citizenship must be dismantled, criminals must be given an ever larger space in which to destroy; even more: anyone who points to health or safety issues resulting from unrestricted migration, who points to actual crime statistics, who directs our attention to longstanding Islamic doctrine and practice, to the benefits offered by one family form over another—that is, anyone pointing to a vast range of obvious truths, which you only have to pay the faintest attention to the real world to see, is evil. Big Lies require All Lies All the Time. The large digital corporations, like Yahoo, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook (along with many more traditional corporations), are all clearly ready to get on board with a campaign to keep these Big Lies hermetically sealed.

We have not yet begun to see the large scale violence that will be needed to ensure these lies remain the ruling doctrine. But therein lies the only possibility of resisting the victimary perfect storm. There is another compulsive Lie of the Left, which surfaces periodically but which we must call “aspirant,” rather than “Big” because it has not yet prevailed nearly to the extent of the five above: self-defense is the source of violence. This is the argument of the gun control fanatics, and it has been conveyed by the usual furious and grotesque demonization of guns and gun owners (the type of propaganda so successful in installing the other lies). The reason push back against this lie has had considerable success (the right to gun ownership is more firmly established in law than it was 50 years ago, running counter to left wing victories on virtually every other front) is simply the existence of tens of millions of Americans who are determined to maintain their own guns and right to self-defense, forming a compact lobby to help them do so. Still, why has Obama not tried to override gun rights through executive action—isn’t this another area where Congress has failed to act, so he must? I think the only reason is some dim awareness that an attempt at gun confiscation would lead to a blood bath. Still, so what? Does the Left not have the stomach for the massive bloodshed of their enemies? Would they really have a problem with a few more Wacos? On the contrary—they would cheer it on; indeed, there have been indications for years that Obama and his gang would relish the chance for a showdown with some fat target within the bitter clingers community. It must be, then, that they are not sure that they would win, which is to say they are not sure that the men (and occasional woman) with guns under their command would obey the order to use force to take the guns away from those who have them by right (or at least not enough to avoid a fiasco). But if the bodies of armed men (Engels’s excellent description of the state) would hesitate there, perhaps they would hesitate elsewhere. Perhaps they would also refuse to act against thousands of Churches refusing to pay their taxes, against parents whose homeschooling does not conform to new “marriage equality”-friendly NEA dictates, or to enforce millions of dollars in fines against counties and cities refusing to issue same sex marriage licenses, or against local police officers or citizens practicing self-defense framed by mobs, or local authorities and citizens enforcing the border on their own initiative, etc. Slowly at first, for sure, but given the persistence of the dissidents, perhaps over time there will be more refusals—and it might not take many to set in motion a cascade.

It is easy to see that conservative pundits and politicians have been paralyzed in the past few days, suffering shell shock from the hammer blows of the recent Supreme Court rulings, and reluctantly awakening to the realization that we now live in a different country. The usual proposals—win more elections, go back to court, take back the culture, come up with cleverer appeals to the youth, etc.—all ring hollow and smack of denial. No one knows the next move in the game because all the rules have been suspended. We all know that leftists in power will do whatever they want and no one will stop them. (We also know that much of what they want to do is crazy.) The right is already splintering between those who want to accept the devastation and “move on” (usefully revealing their contempt for their “base”) and those who realize there’s something more at stake here than whether the Republicans gain a few points now that they can avoid the issue of “marriage equality,” while those ready to fight have no unifying program or manifesto. Leftist penetration has been very deep and there are few normal people who would not be loath to surrender at least some part of at least one of the Big Lies that they have bought into. Opinions changed and convictions abandoned after years of resisting and sustaining psychological battering for years (yes, I must be complicit somehow in racism; ok, I guess homosexuals can marry) are the hardest to revisit and reconsider.

So, here’s a minimal proposal. Refuse assent to any of these lies or any of their corollaries (refuse the entire network of lies)—openly if possible, “between the lines” if necessary. Caution is called for—ultimately, the Big Lies are instances of Leftist trolling, that is, laying out bait to get a response they can use to draw their enemies out into the open and make them easy targets. (To ask whether the Left “believes” its own lies is to make a category error—the Left has nothing to do with belief, only with the exposure of the presumably fraudulent beliefs of others—Leftism is OCD, obsessive compulsive debunking, with complete faith deposited in the most tireless and unrelenting debunkers.) Truth bearers will, indeed, become targets—that’s the point of the whole enterprise, as the Left has no real “positive” agenda, no better version of civilization, no model of social order. But people can try to be massive and dispersed targets rather than isolated and concentrated ones, and targets engaged in cultivating the practices of civilization in the face of social disorder. To get their way, the victimo/bureaucrats will have to take children out of their homes, arrest those responsible for the physical defense of vulnerable communities, shut down houses of worship and expropriate businesses, and at each point along the way men who have sworn to uphold the Constitution and who share much with their targets will have to decide if they can really, in good conscience, do that.

This truth bearing approach is the only way to test the weak link of the Left: the likelihood that the demands for enforcing the Big Lies will eventually strain the loyalties of the men with guns (we can easily imagine how many in the military are filled with disgust at the current regime’s alliance with our enemies, how many in the border patrols chafe at the refusal to let them do their job, how angry police must be at the opportunistic race baiting—I don’t know about the FBI or ATF, though). Once upon a time the Left could recruit its own militant cadres, ready to handle weapons, wield clubs, bust up a meeting; they could even set up parallel quasi-state institutions where civil society was weak enough. Other than their dwindling union ranks, form where could they recruit a steady supply of thugs—gay pride parades? (Well, there are historical examples, but the numbers just aren’t there.) They are stuck the forces they have been demoralizing for years. It follows that, more important than taking back the academies or Hollywood or the courts is making sure that the force available to the regime is lacking in the numbers and/or reliability needed to apply effective violence against those who only defend their own right to bear witness to subversive truths. This certainly implies that overt partisan appeals should be to law enforcement, but whether it further means those forces should be joined en masse or, on the contrary, starved of personnel replenishment by people who would rather defend their communities, must be left open for now. Individuals will ultimately have to make up their own minds about that, but, either way, the natural right to self-defense in bearing witness to truths in danger of being lost can be the basic unifying principle around which resistance can gather. And, this, incidentally, is also the only way of ensuring that there will be enough trained, organized and moralized people to fight the Caliphate, when it comes to that. Ultimately, these new centers will have to attract the younger, digital crowd to help construct new economic and security networks—the only way to do that, though, is to allow them to do their jobs in a way that the politicized incompetence of government-linked corporations doesn’t, and that’s more of a long term matter (there are probably quite a few libertarian hacker types, though, just to get things started).

The starting point, though, is constant questioning on the most basic topics whenever we are confronted with the Big Lies—elementary, even childish questioning, which might start to drive the Leftists mad like a buffalo under attack from a swarm of mosquitos. I suggested a few questions a few posts back: what is a man? What is a woman? What is marriage? Things which everyone knew without thinking not too long ago, but which raise storms of controversy now. We can add many more questions: what is “law”? What is “government”? What is a “right”? What is “equality”? “Democracy”? “Liberty”? What is a “judge”? In their ferocious deployment of these terms, the Leftists have forgotten that someone might ask, given all that seems to depend on these terms, what sorts of entities, exactly, we are to take them to be, and why? We would be returning to a kind of Socratic naivety (or irony, if that’s your reading of Plato). We might even start a “national conversation.”

The King v. Burwell decision affirming the constitutional and legal rectitude of the federal government’s application of Obamacare provides official confirmation of what some of us have known for a while: we no longer live in a constitutional republic, or under popular government, or in accord with the rule of law. The contempt for common sense and the demands of serious legal reasoning in John Robert’s majority opinion speaks volumes: Congress was trying to do a good thing, the executive branch and federal bureaucracy tried to do that good thing in a goodly way, and so let’s get rid of any language in the actual law that gets in the way of providing the goodies. According to the logic of this decision, it’s impossible to see why Congress would have to do anything more than pass laws that say things like “make America safer,” or “overcome racial divisions,” with the executive and bureaucracy then free to “interpret” these mandates in the “spirit” in which they were intended. If you object to a particular use of power to advance these good intentions, the Supreme Court can simply direct your attention to the good intentions specified in the law—can’t you read—what part of “make America safer” don’t you understand?!

For a while now, Congress has been passing not so much laws as grants of power to unaccountable federal bureaucracies. Charles Murray, in a recent essay in The New Criterion and, presumably, his new book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, explains very clearly and irrefutably how deeply rooted and longstanding this development is, and why it’s impossible to reverse or even slow it within the normal political channels. This is really the original meaning of “bureaucracy”—rule by anonymous “bureaus.” What we can add to this analysis is the natural convergence between the bureaucracy and the victimocracy. De Tocqueville already noted, in his prevision of the administration state, the relation between that kind of “soft tyranny” and the centrality of meeting “needs” (as opposed to protecting property) to governance. Once the job of government is to meet needs, it tilts toward the needier. Even more, since most of the bureaucracies rely either on a clientele or an activist constituency, enhancing the power of that clientele or constituency enhances the power of the bureaucracy. The neediest, the clients, the activists=the victim base. The growing role that civil rights law is playing in this development further detaches the state apparatuses from anything resembling popular governance or legislative intent or accountability, essentially identifying “the people” with the victims of “the people”—in a case that got less attention (Texas Dept of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc.) the Court ruled that racism is completely separate from racist deeds or intentions: “racism” is what the government uses to micro-manage communities as it sees fit. That regulators also get “captured” by the industries they regulate, and those industries in turn use the regulatory apparatus to build monopolies for themselves binds the big business community to the victimocracy and bureaucracy alike.

Bureaucracy works through inertia, gradually accumulating power by finding new “problems” that only it can “solve,” but victimocracy works as an accelerant, which simply means an Argus-like attentiveness to previously unseen problems. It makes sense that the bureaucracy would eventually realize that it need not depend upon its own tiny militia of investigators, but could, rather, draw upon a vast army of victimocrats to widen the scope of its power. The role of the media is to turn all the new problems turned up by the victimocrats into moral panics that must be addressed yesterday, because that’s who we are as a people. There’s no way of stopping or slowing this process within the system, and there is no evident way of getting outside of the system. Murray’s proposal for mass civil disobedience that would overload the system is intriguing, but that assumes the government won’t simply start killing dissenters or rounding them up into concentration camps. A very problematic assumption, since there is no political ethic intrinsic to either bureaucracy or victimocracy that would interfere with such solutions. Both forms of government are remorseless and voracious, driven only by political appetites.

I, of course, have nothing in particular to propose by way of resistance. In a way, the destruction of liberal, popular government is liberating, though, because as long as you feel yourself to be part of a democracy you feel bound by the rhetoric of democracy—a rhetoric of conciliation, compromise, and appeasement, which gets even worse the more popular government becomes a pretense. If we are confronted by the equivalent of a political eating machine and nothing more, well, we need to be careful about what kind of bait we might be throwing out, even inadvertently, and we don’t want to simulate the movements or coloration of the beast’s favored prey, but we can carve out a space where we can start to develop a more truthful, which is to say less democratic, kind of language. Here’s a thought experiment: how would an intelligent alien, who just looked at the interactions between state and society in the US, without any familiarity with liberal democratic pieties, describe things? Keeping that thought experiment in mind might help us to a new political language, one to be advanced between the lines. I remember, a few years ago, thinking that, regardless of the virtue, courage and ingenuity shown by Soviet and East bloc dissidents, their example had lost its relevance with the fall of European Communism—that their revolutionary politics was sui generis. I was completely wrong: the notion, in particular, of “living in truth” in a world not just of lies, but lies that deliberately insult one’s intelligence and therefore one’s dignity, might very well become the most important political concept in the near future.

I’ve tried this before, and perhaps will have to again, but this is worth doing, even if it takes a few drafts.

Most definitions of the Left focus on their obsession with equality, and that’s certainly a good place to start. The drive for equality is endless, allowing the Left to remain in constant motion: there are always some respects in which people are treated equally and others in which they’re not. It is impossible to treat people equally in one way without treating them unequally in other ways. Equality, despite the common disclaimer, does mean “the same”—citizens are equal, that is to say, the same, insofar as they can all vote. But this sameness now foregrounds differences: citizens with money have more influence beyond their single vote, some citizens are more knowledgeable than others, some find it easier to get to the polls than others, they are equal politically but unequal economically, etc. If sameness/equality is what we want, it makes sense to treat differences as suspect, and that, indeed, becomes the most economical approach to leftism, as we have seen in the current sex wars, where the furious attempt to make one of the more obvious and permanent differences among individuals, that of sex, irrelevant, has no end in sight. We will not have sexual equality until all differences, or at least any difference from which one might draw and invidious distinction in any area of human existence whatsoever, between men and women, and between hetero- and homo-sex are eliminated. As I suggested in my previous post, since this can never be accomplished, the inevitable result is continual violence against reality that just re-surfaces the differences in new ways. It would be easy enough to show that the same holds for racial and economic equality. But it makes for permanent employment for activists.

This is all true, and it explains a lot, but still seems to me to remain within “Newtonian physics”—it takes a homogeneous social space, in which individuals circulate and collide, for granted. Things, including people, can only be the same in relation to some common measure, and someone we imagine applying that measure. The source of the measure in question is that of the modern notion of “rights,” which makes all individuals equal in relation to the government. (Victimary thinking is, ultimately, only an intensification of this longstanding process.) So, it is the state, the heir to the ancient empires, which first reduced all members of the governed population to equidistant margins from the imperial center; or, more precisely, citizens erected such a state to encode and enforce their own resentment of it. The only way to remain immune to leftism is to bind equality of treatment up with shared obligations within forms of cooperation serving specific purposes (which provide the measure in those spaces)—business, schools, trade associations, spaces of inquiry, neighborhood associations, and so on—within a pluralist frame in which no form of cooperation has authority over any other. In other words, a society with endlessly proliferating, non-hierarchical centers—garlic to the vampirism of the left. The state is a necessary precondition for the left, then—it is only possible to imagine endlessly reducing the entire population to sameness once a sovereign bureaucracy cataloguing and accounting for everyone is in place. The imaginary of the Left is intrinsically bureaucratic, constantly on the hunt for unclassifiable differences and anomalies. Even so, for the Left, bureaucracy is always a sign of failure: once the oppressive differences have been abolished, people should spontaneously arrange themselves symmetrically in relation to the center—the abolition of the state still haunts the state soaked imaginary of the Left. Bureaucracy is always called into being when those differences have resisted elimination, or when new, and even more egregious, differences emerge out of the wreckage of the first attempt at differencide. Leftists start off as enemies of the state (historically, the absolutist monarch), which simply means they model themselves on the state that has reduced them to equidistant peripheries as well as on their resistance to that state.

But, still, why do those people comprising the Left want these unachievable, even insane, things? You can never get a straight answer to this question—if you pose the question, what would be a “good society,” you just get a list of hate objects, which are preventing us from doing all kinds of unspecified things, in response. The most coherent answer was probably Marx’s—the equalization of all individuals corresponds to the development of the productive forces, which in turn benefits virtually everyone. But the coherent answer is obviously false, and therefore ultimately incoherent—technological developments generate more differences, differences in human abilities, human desires, and available modes of representation. Eric Voegelin sees modernity as a whole as a post, even anti-Christian gnostic faith: in the terms I have been using here, that would entail a belief that the existing social world, in all of its details, is a product of an evil imperial center that has made us all equal in destitution, material and spiritual; behind that evil existing world is another world, governed by a good imperial center, in which those who see and cleanse themselves of the evil world participate. This explains a lot, as well, especially if we identify modernity with Leftism, in which case the seemingly irresistible progress of the Left would simply follow from the unmoored, post-Christian civilization set in motion by the Reformation and then Enlightenment. The decisive dividing line is the separation of rights from embedded obligations in all the modern republics, real and aspired to. But, still, why the fatal deviation?

By “modernity” I would mean the forgetting of the civilizing process within civilization (postmodernity would be the remembering of the forgetting, but a deeper forgetting of the civilizing process itself). The common association of modernity with the emergence of the market provides us with a good example of this forgetting. Impersonal exchanges carried out through money can take place between communities or within communities—presumably the former developed first, and pre-existed by millennia the latter. Traders moving between communities would always be vulnerable to raiders; exchange could only take root within communities under the sovereignty of some empire, which treats property owners as equal in relation to itself. The same is true of the modern market, which emerges under the protection of, first, the monarchical state and, then, the republics that emerged precisely to protect the newly formed markets. In other words, not “the,” but a particular kind of market emerged—one on which, for one thing, the participants could pretend to disembeddedness relative to the surrounding communities, a pretense which took the form, for example, of the state eliminating and/or replacing forms of property and exchange that didn’t suit the “modern” model. When we speak of “the” market, we evince forgetting of the process that produced this network of markets. Indeed, the development of “the” market might be an index of forgetting, just as it is an index of a more advanced, more tumultuous, deeper and internally vulnerable form of civilization.

Eric Gans, meanwhile, sees the difference between Right and Left in terms of the tension between firstness and reciprocity. The right supports the process of innovation and differentiation while the left tries to ensure that the results can be made compatible with the moral model of reciprocity. This analysis implies the permanence of the Left/Right distinction, and supports the assumption that the Left will always be at an advantage, since innovations and differentiations are difficult to create and even more difficult to control, while finding failures of reciprocity is like shooting fish in a barrel, since any innovation can only spread more or less gradually, exacerbating old asymmetries and creating new ones. But once you have inscribed the Left within the originary configuration, you can only hope to appease it, rather than abolish it; and the only way one can really hope to appease it is by addressing its most reasonable and realistic claims. This entails treating leftist complaints as if they are ultimately about the distribution of goods and resources, with perhaps a bit of recognition of formerly excluded identities. But this can never succeed if the Left’s most reasonable and realistic demands are really distractions from its real concerns—hooks for new recruits and camouflage for political warfare.

It is not necessary to ascribe originariness to the Left/Right configuration. The right exists only because of the left—the left is what set “modernity” in motion; the right has always been reactive. There are other possible relations between founders and inheritors, donors and recipients, creators and disseminators. The relation between Judaism and Christianity is certainly not analogous to the relation between Right and Left. Nor is the relation between the founders of disciplines and those who labor in the spaces they have founded. Or between inventors, producers and consumers. The Left/Right configuration is parochial and contingent. There is no originary reason for the existence of a large numbers of people who will never stop denouncing existing institutions until all individuals, in all respects and all areas of their lives, can be subjected to a common measure—which is to say, never. Reciprocity is built into firstness (the donor presupposes a recipient), and resentment (always conjoined with gratitude) is built into reciprocity, and the moral model is always active, but never on the left—it is in our daily interactions within institutions that we work on evening out the discrepancies between our shared projects and the way those projects are marred by desires and resentments they have been supposed to have transcended.

If a male scientist continually remarks on a subordinate female colleague’s appearance, or takes advantage of relations of physical proximity to grope her, the problem is really less one of male-female inequality than of a failure to adhere to the norms of the discipline. Scientists can only work together if they are all, while in the lab, absorbed in their shared attention to the work. The relation of subordination, which has a purely functional meaning within the workplace, is being mapped onto a male-female dynamic imagined to be in place elsewhere—it may not even be a relation of inequality, strictly speaking; rather, it might just be the convention whereby men pursue women, who are presumed to be deferring the advances of men for the sake of testing and selecting possible mates. Whether that form of male-female interaction (which does distribute power between the sexes and does not sanction sexual assault) should be reformed in some way cannot be a problem for the pair in the laboratory—their business is simply to keep it out where it doesn’t belong, whether in a crude or more refined form. Indeed, the very importation of that male-female dynamic to this inappropriate space, a transgression in itself, encourages the transgressor to adopt its cruder forms. The only real answer here is for scientists to act as scientists should—and that will take care of other issues, such as women being treated fairly when it comes to pay and promotions (and it might facilitate more acceptable forms of the romantic attachments that will inevitably form when men and women share the same workplace—there is an eros to shared devotion to some transcendent object). There will, indeed, be times, where the mapping of various male-female dynamics over the personnel in the labs is so powerful that the real qualities of the women scientists are obscured, and attention must therefore be paid to that mapping. In such cases, the disparity between disciplinary norms and imported conventions may need to be “performed.” But this is still just another way of getting at the problem of scientists adhering to the disciplinary norms they have tacitly committed to.

But how is it possible for scientists to act as scientists should, for business people to act as business people should, teachers to act as teachers should, police to act as police should, and so on? Asking the question presupposes the conquests of civilization: as I have been arguing in recent posts, the result of the virtuous circle of deferral and reward (material, intellectual and spiritual). Only the suppression of barbarism (honor culture and the vendetta) and savagery (nomadic raiding of the products of incipient civilization) makes it possible to slice society up into different “functions,” each with its own purpose, its own ethics, its own rules and forms of association—in short, its own discipline. But a crucial part of civilization is the forgetting of the civilizing process—the desires and resentments that have been curbed are also placed out of sight, producing things like an “unconscious,” where fantasies of, say, killing those who have interfered with your reception of the rewards you so richly deserve, can be deposited. And yet civilization is hard, and it remains hard. It’s hard to be in a room full of attractive people and not respond to their attractiveness. It’s hard to see a counter full of food when you’re hungry and not just reach for what you want. It’s hard to have power over people and not use that power to avenge slights, or satisfy fantasies of domination. It’s hard to be berated and humiliated in front of a room full of people and not lash out, or even allow one’s facial expression to betray anger. Of course, once you are able to do these things, they are routine and no longer hard, because your commitment to something more important, to the discipline, along with long years of elementary training in sitting still, sharing with your neighbor, leaving a room in an orderly manner, etc., makes self-restraint possible—but for this to happen those “barbaric” desires and resentments must also disappear as objects of sustained attention. If you are constantly reminding yourself you can’t take a swing at the department head as he details your failure to meet production quotas, you aren’t quite “there” yet.

And there are and probably always will be lots and lots of people in any civilized order who aren’t quite “there” and never will be—that is, who will never stop mapping the savage and barbaric, in a sense “natural,” responses to physical attraction, a range of unsatisfied appetites, insult and frustration onto civilized, disciplinary spaces. They cannot stop carrying out vendettas and forming raiding parties on the representatives of civilization, even if they do so in more or less veiled and hesitant ways. Civilization can never be complete, in part because it can never rest upon its past accomplishments—there are always residues and recrudescenses of savagery and barbarism to mop up (relaxing civilizing restraints, which inevitably happens once they have become successful and therefore seem to have lost their purpose and become rote and mean, will also encourage these reversions). I suppose this is a way of saying that civilization is always on a war footing, even though war, for the civilized society, is the worst form of barbarism, which civilization only recognizes the necessity for war as a last resort, even while engaging in an endless series of internal and metaphorical wars. Even in war, though, civility, which is to say discipline, is possible.

No civilization has ever entirely freed itself from its imperial origins. The West has come the closest, which is part of the reason why the West has a Left (thousands of years of Chinese civilization doesn’t seem to have produced one). Empire is civilizing and decivilizing, and this ambivalence haunts Western civilization, in particular through its monotheistic faiths. The Left inhabits this ambivalence, finding hideous empires everywhere while fantasizing its own to eliminate the others. The Left presumes itself constitutively civilized, insofar as it obeys the hidden imperial imperative to reduce all beings to the primal condition of equality to which they are (paradoxically) progressing; the Left is in fact engaged in a constant vendetta and piratical raid on civilization, insofar as civilizing discipline is the main source of the differences that must be destroyed to usher in the reign of the center of centers. It is in this double bind that we can see not just in the Left’s obsession with equality, but its choice of targets and means of attack. To be on the Left is to be perpetually outraged that actual empires obscure the real one to which we would spontaneously adhere if it were visible. It is pointless to focus on what the Left claims to support (science, the environment, a living wage, whatever)—the only thing worth examining is what it uses these shibboleths to attack. And what it always attacks is some form of deferral and discipline that must be adopted by all for civilization to be possible (what most infuriates today’s left is the suggestion that the victimary demographics be held to the same standards of discipline as the victimizers). Those who are disciplined and display self-restraint and thereby generate a center (or what Philip Rieff calls “charisma”) are attacked for having stolen that centrality; those marked as lacking deferral and discipline are defended so as to undermine claims to centrality based on discipline. Deferral and discipline are a sham, constructed only to generate a false charisma, so meticulous rules excluding spontaneity are to be imposed on the privileged (if whites behave in a non-racist manner towards people of color [something which only under great duress will be granted], it must be either because of the successful “resistance” of the latter, encoded in various rules regarding discrimination and harassment, or because the whites in question are ritually cleansed “allies”), while the victims are encourage to behave naturally, which of course includes therapeutic expressions of resentment. The civilized spontaneously seeks to model civilized behavior for the less civilized, so the Left incites the less civilized to chastise the relatively civilized (this often involves encouraging decivilizing tendencies among those who have come later to and are therefore closer to the borders of the civilizing process, and for whom civilization is more likely to be a gift to be cherished but also more likely to be hypocritical imposition to be rejected.) So, yes, “equality” is the weapon of choice in these raids and vendettas, but the constant attack on the actual source of inequality, the deferral and discipline of civilization, an attack, which, if successful, would destroy the Left as well, is the object.

Everyone has reasons to hold a grudge against civilization, so what leads one to pursue that grudge consistently, using civilization’s own means, and become a leftist? It must be a desire to see oneself as exempt from the never-ending, grueling, always uncertain civilizing process—this desire could involve simply abandoning civilized restraints and succumbing to some form of debilitating desire, such as drugs or sex. But that hardly puts you on the left (even if there is quite a bit of crossover). What draws you to the left is the desire to be presumptively civilized and thereby distinguish yourself from those who are just fumbling around—from the heights of the presumptively civilized position, the manual laborer who is uneasy around homosexuals can be just as barbaric as the Muslim terrorist. The presumptively civilized often come by their civilized behavior easily, which is why the demands placed on others to adopt it seems a scam—this is why so many leftists come from the wealthier classes, families with a couple of generations of professionals, and other forms of “privilege.” But, ultimately, it is a revelatory event that brings one to the Left: one sees the barbarism concealed behind the civilized forms (the boss or teacher as bully, the police as gangster, etc.), which is indeed always there to be seen and which guarantees both one’s presumptive civility and demonstrates the fraudulence of the established civilized forms. For such a revelation to take, though, there must be others with whom to share it, and a quasi-discipline to give it form. The unsolvable metaphysical complications of “equality” provide the basis of such a quasi-discipline.

The Left is obedience to the imperative to expose the products of discipline as stolen centrality. It’s not e=mc2, but maybe it will help.

What is a man? What is a woman? What is marriage? It might very well be that asking these questions, much less trying to answer them, now counts as a micro-aggression in the University of California system. The recent innovations in the gender system introduced by the LGBT, or, better, queer, movement would seem to open up these questions for scrutiny; on the contrary, they lock them down and throw away the key. The lock-down is a desperate attempt to evade the incoherence of the implicit answers proposed by proponents of same-sex marriage and defenders of the transgendered. After all, if the only differences between men and woman are culturally constructed, and if those differences exist only to perpetuate inequality between the sexes, what does it mean to “become a woman” (or man), and why is that act to be celebrated—after all, doesn’t the claim that becoming a member of the opposite sex, or realizing that one has been one all along, involves a fundamental and liberating transformation, further imply that the differences between the sexes are significant, after all? Even more, doesn’t the desire to “present” as the opposite sex imply that there are reliable markers of sexual difference? Judith Butler, back when she set Queer Theory in motion with her book, Gender Trouble, back in the 80s, made the very prescient, provocative, and to a great extent true observation that sex roles are “performed,” that such performance always involves a set of normative assumptions, while any given performance also varies from and hence destabilizes those norms. In that case, the norms can be deliberately destabilized, and in this possibility Butler saw the radical potential in what, long, long ago, was known as “cross dressing” and “drag queens.” By performing “femininity” in non-normative ways, these practices destabilized gender difference by showing off the arbitrariness and, “therefore” (this presumably logical connection is never made) oppressive character of the norms keeping them in place. Much of the left laughed at Butler’s arguments, but she has certainly been vindicated.

Still, all this might be true, and we could still imagine a biological basis for gender differences. The “reformist” version of Butler’s theory would acknowledge the claims I just worked through, and still go on to say that chromosomal, hormonal, brain, genital, etc., differences between the sexes still provides a kind of center around which all these variations of gender norms revolve and constellate. Yes, there are many ways of “being a woman” and “being a man,” and there are plenty of manly women and womanly men, and we are better and freer if we accept and even rejoice in this play of differences, and those performance artists who act out and parody what have come to be seen as unnecessarily restrictive versions of these roles are doing us a service by liberating us (in a non-coercive manner) from them. But none of that would change the fact that, left to their own devices, boys and girls and men and women will cluster around certain “male” and “female” characteristics, even if we may occasionally be surprised at what they turn out to be. Perhaps boys will someday come to enjoy feeding their dolls with bottles, and girls will become obsessed with massive toy truck collisions, but this has not happened yet, even with the best, or at least most determined, of intentions of a generation of liberalized parents. I suspect, though, that even this attempt at a compromise in the ongoing gender wars would be shot down with extreme prejudice if floated on Twitter—the cultural vandals of the left are in a take no prisoner mode, which might itself be a sign of desperation—but desperate measures are sometimes successful. The problem is that even the slightest possibility that a gun-toting, barroom brawling, alpha-male harem seeking model of masculinity, on the one hand, and a cradle rocking, stay at home, cooking and cleaning, obey your husband model of femininity, on the other hand, would in the end retain even a sliver of legitimacy presents too great an obstacle to the ambitions of the queer movement. All normative identities must be put through the victimary blender, with no exceptions, because if there is one exception, there could be another, and another, and then (as deconstructing queer theorists know very well) before long you have no rule.

As I composed the caricatures of masculinity and femininity in the previous paragraph, I noted an asymmetry—the masculine model is much more of a caricature than the feminine model. This is another way of saying that a more biologically grounded masculinity is much easier to parody, mimic, deconstruct, and so on, than a similarly grounded femininity. The norms of masculinity that have become objectionable, or obsolete, are those grounded in territorialism and the honor of the Big Man—those norms, involving boasting, bluster and intimidation, when transplanted into peaceful occupations, become ridiculous (even if not completely ineffective). But a woman completely devoted to her children, family and home can’t become ridiculous because the activities involved in such devotion still need to be performed. (Mocking such women always involves measuring them according to criteria secondary to those central to their chosen role: they are stupid, prejudiced, slavish, animal-like, etc.—in other words, they are, in a circular manner, not like the professional woman mocking them.) (The complementary male role is supporting the family economically, but that role is ambivalent, and hence an easy target of ridicule, because it often requires emasculation outside of the home, such as enduring the bullying of a boss, demeaning menial tasks, etc.) Even the modes of femininity that are more easily mimicked and caricatured (especially by the transgendered), those associated with attracting a mate precisely by exaggerating the physical features distinguishing the sexes, tend to be lovingly embodied, rather than ridiculed, by their mimics, male and female alike—because the function of attracting a mate cannot become obsolete either.

So, there are many ways of being male and female, and yet the transgendered seem to zero in on a few very specific ways. The female-to-male transgendered (who have garnered almost no attention in the current storm of interest in the matter) tend, almost invariably, to be austere, vaguely intellectual, self-contained, quiet, let’s say “nerdish”—the kind of man who mostly goes unnoticed anyway. The far more common male-to-female version, meanwhile, seems to tend toward the extravagant, adopting the most stereotyped version of a “pin-up girl” femininity. Bruce Jenner wants to dress up like a starlet and have girls’ nights out—there is no talk of a deeply rooted desire to nurture small children. He doesn’t want to be fitted out with breast pumps so he can nurse infants. This is all incredibly interesting but also, I fear, falls under the category of “micro-aggression,” because if we look too closely at these decisions and transformations we can see that they ultimately confirm, even as “exceptions to the rule,” the general “clustering” view of sex traits I presented above. Male-to-female transgenders seem to want liberation from the constraints of masculinity into a fetishized femininity focused on clothes, make-up, jewelry and theatrical flourishes—that is, the most attention grabbing features of femininity. Female-to-male transgenders, meanwhile, seem to want liberation from the intense scrutiny given to a woman’s appearance into a kind of nondescript maleness that can neutralize attention to external features. None of this is “inauthentic” or dishonest: indeed, negotiating the ways others attend to you, controlling that attention as best you can and accepting all the ways you can’t control it, is one of the fundamental and most difficult problems of life—and these solutions may be the best ones for at least some of the individuals involved. But they don’t solve the problem fundamentally, since the problem can’t be solved fundamentally—indeed, by making such dramatic changes one has made oneself an object of attention in a new way (and much depends here on how much one publicizes one’s transformations—again, it seems to me that the male-to-female variant is far more interested in the drama of the transformation itself than the female-to-male variant—which is probably why we hear so much more about the former, along with the fact that entrance into the workforce already has woman taking over many “male” characteristics, so the further transformation is not as astonishing. Of course, that would also mean that there is something inherently “reactionary” about male-to-female transgenders; perhaps something inherent victimary as well, even if it is the transition that is the central victimary category here, not the femininity). Maybe I’m wrong about much, or even all of this analysis. But that would just mean that there are better analyses, that there is more worthy of notice than I have noticed, in which case these questions of gender identification are, as I began by saying, inherently open ones.

What this would mean is that it will be impossible to police the way people speak (and therefore think) about the transgendered—since the questions are open by their nature, lashing out at those who, for example, insist on using the masculine pronoun when referring to Bruce Jenner (as far as I know, he has not yet legally changed his name, although it is perhaps a micro-aggression to note that), will simply drive the questions underground, leading them to be asked and answered in coded forms. In fact, it is very likely that we are going to see a revival of the method of writing that Leo Strauss called “writing between the lines,” and claimed characterized all philosophical writing up until the modern era. One would, for example, write an essay excoriating the retrograde refuseniks who continue to hold their ground on matters of sexual morality, and one would make a point of lampooning and attacking each and every repugnant element of their beliefs; along the way, one would give details about those beliefs that are normally not provided, one would almost unnoticeably lower the tone of one’s diatribe at strategic points, one would find ways of showing the weakness of one’s own stated or presumed beliefs, perhaps by deploring disagreements among the “transies” that highlight the incoherence of the thinking as a whole, and so on—all in order to preserve your livelihood (or even, possibly at some point down the road, avoid civil or criminal charges) while communicating with those fellow dissidents out there who know how to decode. It might be a very good discipline to recover and master. Perhaps modern openness (the principles implicit in our freedoms of speech, religion and association) was really a temporary phenomenon, more limited than we realize, and one that relied on common hopes and enemies that are no longer widely shared. Maybe the need to carve out a space of thinking against both the “people” and the “elites” is the more permanent civilized condition. And maybe it will encourage other subversive lines of thinking regarding sacrosanct categories like “democracy” and “equality.”

So, what is marriage? Part of the purpose of eliminating all relevant differences between men and women (either by eliminating the difference or declaring them irrelevant) is to quell any disquieting questions about the new definition of marriage. Which is what, exactly? The question is posed in all seriousness. Marriage used to be union between a man and a woman, implicitly (there wouldn’t have been any need to spell it out) for the purpose of grounding the link between sexuality and procreation in the shared and publicly recognized responsibility of the parties involved. So, if that understanding is now the equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws, what is the new understanding? As far as I know, a new one has not been forthcoming. In a rare highly civil conversation I recently had with an individual supportive of same sex marriage and well versed in GA and its critique of victimary politics, the following was proposed (I hope I will be representing this person’s view accurately): aside from the link between sex and procreation, marriage serves to take people off of the sexual marketplace, and explicitly signal that they are off, so as to reduce the tempestuous of that marketplace, thereby reducing the incidences of disease, licentiousness and potentially dangerous jealousy that follow from an “unregulated” sexual marketplace. This seems to me the best rationale for same sex marriage that I have seen, and the only one that I can think of that is not grounded in resentment towards the “benefits” married couples receive or the implicit condemnation of non-normative sexual practices still intrinsic to the traditional understanding of marriage. But it is problematic. The most obvious problem, one I pointed out in the conversation, is that this argument has not, in fact, been advanced by those pushing for the legal and political enforcement of same sex marriage, and for a very good reason: in leaving the firm legalistic ground of “equal rights” and wandering off into the realms of psychology and anthropology, one is left with an argument that can be accepted, rejected, or contested; and, furthermore, that can be tested over time and found wanting; or weighed against other consequences of undermining traditional marriage. In other words, it would slow the momentum of the queer movement and make it dependent upon the vagaries of civil discussion, which sometimes doesn’t go your way.

But the problems with the proposed rationale go even deeper. If marriage does indeed serve the proposed purpose, it already does so for something like 98% of the population. Are the disturbances to the social order from the sexual proclivities of that other 2% so unsettling as to require that they, as well, be incorporated? If the answer is “no,” then the argument depends upon the 98% being more concerned than we can expect them to be for the sexual morality of the other 2%. But if the answer is “yes,” that in turn raises disturbing questions, and requires us to make some distinctions. There are male homosexuals, and female. Do I really need to ask where the sexual “turbulence” comes from? Lesbians have, for a very long time, managed to arrange for relationships akin to marriage, living together for decades as “spinsters” in a manner that, to the rest of the world, seemed sisterly and unobjectionable, carving out a space of privacy and freedom while respecting the opinion of their neighbors. Such relationships have no doubt been formed among respectable “confirmed bachelors” as well, but the norm for male homosexual habits is very different. Same sex marriage, according to the rationale we are considering, is meant to solve the problem of male homosexual promiscuity. But it could only do so if the traditional understanding of marriage as monogamous and lifelong were to remain intact. Not only has this traditional understanding of marriage been steadily eroded through the sexual revolution, but it stands to reason that if we can revise the terms of marriage in one respect, we could do so in others. Indeed, why should gays conform to the terms of marriage, rather than marriage being reformed to fit the preferences of gays? In other words, same sex marriage is at least as likely to make promiscuity acceptable within marriage more generally as it is to reduce the promiscuity of male homosexuals.

So, same sex marriage does not, in fact, propose a new understanding of marriage even while it eviscerates the traditional understanding. It is easy to see how individuals wishing to form relationships would find same sex marriage beneficial, but under conditions of civil discourse it would also be recognized that the problems same sex marriage would solve could be approached and solved, or at least minimized, in other ways. So, the only rationale is the resentful one of destroying an institution and a moral tradition that excludes and demeans one. What is at stake in same sex marriage is the so far undiscussed (and, if its proponents have their way, it will remain undiscussed until it is too late, which is to say when it has become undiscussable) demand that all social discourse recognize same sex attraction as equally normal as opposite sex attraction. The feelings of a tiny minority must not simply be tolerated, respected or accommodated, but explicitly and on every occasion upon which the question arises, validated. If a parent is disappointed upon learning that his/her child is attracted to members of the same sex, that feeling must be ruthlessly uprooted, and certainly never expressed, except, perhaps, in a therapeutic setting entered into for the sake of uprooting it. Any suggestion that it is better that children be raised in a home with a mother and father must be extirpated—indeed, we must speak of “spouses” and “parents” exclusively, and not “husbands and wives,” “ mothers and fathers.” What has been taken to be the “normal” way of “acquiring” children must be given no “privileges” over any other way of “acquiring” them, which means that there is no longer to be a presumed relation of parentage between the “natural” mother and father and the child. Since marriage is no longer a natural relationship merely sponsored and regulated by the government but, rather, is a government created relationship, the relationship between parents and children is likewise to be presumed to be legitimate only upon the sufferance of the government. Of course, the state can already remove children deemed to be mistreated from the home of their parents, but the presumption remains in favor of the parents. No longer. There will be no obstacle to looking at any household, examining the options, and asking, “what is in the best interest of the children”? Is it in the best interest of, say, a sexually confused 12 year old to remain in the care of a male and female parent who not only cannot model the kind of relationship best suited (according to expert advice) to that child’s sexuality but are still evil enough to believe that gender has a basis in nature? Rather than in the home of an enlightened and welcoming gay couple who are even better able to support the child economically? Such questions will answer themselves, and our imaginations are currently far too limited to imagine what other questions will emerge.

So, there is my hate filled, homo- and transphobic diatribe. One can still say what I have written here, if one stays under the radar, that is below the threshold of the continual sweeps carried out by the social media mobs. But that threshold will continue to lower, to the point where such arguments as I have made will be unintelligible (perhaps it’s naïve to think they are still intelligible) to the vast majority of citizens of Western countries. That development will mean not so much a change in public opinion as a collective insistence upon living with lies, and stamping out any hint of the truth. And the effects will reverberate—the truth in one area of discourse threatens the lies imposed elsewhere. We can already see what similar lies on questions like race and the environment look like. But one useful lesson we have learned from the Communist devastation of Eastern and Central Europe is that people remember or re-member (piece back together) the truth, even out of the pastiche of lies they are told and forced to repeat. Those of us committed to thinking will have to draw upon the reserves of civilization available to us, upon the genres of writing and artistic production, the skill of “double-talk” a rich vocabulary and discursive equipment affords us. And we will have to get very good at it, because the victimocrats are far better at sniffing out heresy than the Catholic Church ever was. That addresses the “1984” dimension of the cultural revolution. The “Brave New World” dimension will entail recovering and inventing ways of speaking about “Nature,” as a horizon that always lies beyond technological, cultural and therapeutic interventions. In the end, we would have to believe that things have their own way of being regardless of what is done to them (and even as a result of what is done to them), and that limits what we should do to them, even if we could never state in advance what those limits are. Only if we believe that about things will we also believe it about people; and realizing that desire, resentment and an originary mistakenness informs our interventions into people will help us to mind the nature of things.