GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgMwUV1wnYo

This segment from the Daily Show records how the Zuccotti Park occupation was geographically divided by class into “uptown” and “downtown”; a division exemplified by the split between those who owned iPads and those who didn’t. When the TV journalist challenged one of the Protesters to share his iPad2 with those on the other side of the Park, he affably refused, saying that his iPad was a “personal possession,” and that he was only opposed to “private property.” (See 4:40 of the video) The show also discovered that the OWS leaders were holding their decision-making meetings in the lobby of the Deutsche Bank! away from the hoi polloi. The segment demonstrates nicely that the OWS movement is essentially elitist, despite its socialist facade. Who has the leisure to spend months camping out (with expensive camping gear) in the park  except modern aristocrats? The socialist opposition to private property, apart from its moral self-righteousness, is really only the desire to appropriate the private property of others. When my students start proclaiming the justice of socialism, I can only wonder, where are the angels who will govern and inhabit this utopia? (I was informed that the state will “wither away,” magically leaving no need for government.)  Are we really willing to trust the government to distribute wealth fairly and produce an “ideal society”? Who will get to decide what exactly constitutes the “ideal”? And who will pay for it? The latest issue of The New Criterion has an important article by Kevin D. Williamson (“Everybody Gets Rich”) in which he comments:

The welfare state isn’t a very good buy. The average Social Security benefit runs just over $1,100 a month—peanuts, hardly enough to keep you in cut-rate butter once your median rent of more than $800 has been paid. For that, you’re taxed 12 percent of your take- home pay. Compare that to this: A married couple, each earning the minimum wage, investing only 10 percent of their earnings at a modest 7 percent return, retires with an annual income of more than $100,000 a year—even if they never touch the $1.5 million principle they’ll leave to their children. President George W. Bush was mocked for calling his proposal to cultivate such minimum-wage millionaires the “Ownership Society,” but it was the most important initiative of his presidency.

And even the entitlement system we have now is unsustainable for more than a few more years at most. Ultimately, people vote their self-interest. Government union employees and welfare recipients will vote Democratic because they hope to benefit financially. But that’s actually short-sighted, because our attempt to create an ideal society of wealth and equality is leading us to a financial crisis of epic proportions. Read Williamson’s article. Government exists to protect our liberty, not to enslave us to a socialist pipe-dream that’s more elitist than the aristocracy we left behind in Britain so many years ago.

The problem with liberalism as it exists today and political correctness in particular is that it truly is a slippery slope. As Eric Gans has pointed out, there’s no conceivable reform that could satisfy the OWS protesters. And it’s the same with multiculturalism, feminism, animal rights, environmentalism, and gay rights. The great advances we have made in the last 50 years have only resulted in more discontent and escalated demands. Modern liberalism is an existential condition that will suffer no remedy. Samuel Beckett’s comment about the “syndrome known as life” applies well:

“I greatly fear,” said Wylie, “that the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.”

The OWS movement has staked its existence on the issue of inequality of wealth, as evidenced by the “we are the 99%” slogan. The issue of equality goes very deep; the most powerful political movements of the modern era are based on the rhetoric of equality. Indeed, our sense of equality is originary and constitutive of human consciousness as mediated by language. We have a virtually instinctive sense of reciprocity; when our contribution is not reciprocated, we do not need anyone to teach us to feel upset. Eric Gans is the first thinker to place a solid anthropological foundation under this basic human intuition, by recourse to his originary hypothesis.

A 30-something member of my family suggests that OWS is a generational movement, but it is supported by many of the older generation, including, notably, the leaders of the Democratic Party including President Obama, even if they don’t themselves camp out in the public square. The differences between the two political parties have thus perhaps never been so starkly set out. The Democrats have become the party of the government redistribution of wealth, while the Republicans still believe in the free market (“capitalism” in the idiom of OWS) as a valid means for the production and just distribution of wealth.

The Democrats have quite explicitly defined themselves as the defenders of Medicare and Social Security—which no one can deny are forms of welfare, a redistribution, moreover, which generally benefits the more wealthy at the expense of the less wealthy—as well as public employee unions and union “rights,” large and powerful special interest groups which have cannily skewed the government budget process and burdened our children with debt for generations to come.

The pernicious influence of public employee unions upon the political process makes the lobbying efforts of large corporations look amateurish. Public employee unions are by definition monopolies, and the union fees which are automatically deducted from each employee’s payroll check serve to feed a huge political machine. Those public employees who negotiate with the public employee unions have no incentive to drive a hard bargain, since the government has no bottom line of profit to worry about, and the ability to tax is virtually unlimited.

The Democrats also position themselves as the thoughtful and educated party who care about the environment and the rights of minorities. One thing the Democrats cannot do is claim any larger economic benefit to their program, since unemployment has remained high despite the enormous power Obama wielded during his term, especially the first two years.

Yet unemployment is and should be the main issue of this campaign, since it is the direct result of the government redistribution of wealth, not only by Democrats but also Republicans more eager for re-election than for making hard choices that require time to bear fruit.

The problem is that the government does not itself produce wealth; it can create a limited number of jobs; but such job growth is not sustainable, not efficient in actually producing anything, and must be paid for by the taxpayers. All the government can really do, economically, is to take money from one pocket and put it in another, or borrow against younger generations and ransom our future to the foreign nations who are our largest creditors. Economic growth is created by people and businesses which produce items or services for consumption. The government’s role in this process is to protect private property and prevent monopolies.

The Government must also, of course, protect individual rights; and this is what the OWS movement has staked its claim upon. Rights lead us into the realm of justice. For OWS, inequality is prima facie evidence of injustice. But equality of rights, it bears repeating, is not the same thing as equality of outcomes; inequality of wealth is in fact no evidence of injustice. When the Government intervenes in order to redistribute wealth it violates its own “prime directive,” which is to protect private property. By breaching this essential function, it actually discourages the creation of jobs and wealth. Until America is willing to make some hard choices that may be painful for a great variety of special interest groups, then job growth will suffer.

What the Democrats are banking on is that virtually everyone today belongs to a special interest group that benefits from government spending. But we have apparently reached the tipping point in our economic evolution, when Government intervention becomes ever-more-clearly counter-productive, benefiting a disproportionate few at the expense of the productive many. This is the irony of OWS; the redistributive policies they advocate can only produce further economic stagnation and suffering.

I should clarify that I am not opposed to welfare as such. An economically and morally advanced society like the US has an obligation to help its citizens from abject poverty and suffering. The vast majority of government largesse, however, does not fall into that category. Attempts to help the so-called disadvantaged encourage not only corruption, they also end by “enabling,” to use the language of psychology, the behavior or condition they are designed to change.

Hi Everybody,

The 4th annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference (GASC) 2010 is shaping up to be a very exciting event, with presentations from many of the regular Anthropoetic contributors and several first-time attendees. We are all looking forward to Eric Gans’ Plenary lecture on “Haven’t We Always Been Modern,” a lecture in dialogue with Bruno Latour’s book “We Have Never Been Modern.” Vince Pecora, English dept. chair at the University of Utah, is giving the other Plenary Lecture on “Secularism, Secularization, and Why the Difference Matters.” The conference is being held this year at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City. Please check the conference website regularly for the latest version of the schedule and other new information. Anyone with an interest in Generative Anthropology or the conference theme “The Anthropology of Modernity: The Sacred, Science, and Aesthetics” is welcome to attend.

http://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/pgoldman/GASC_2010/index.html

~Peter