GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Power has always been a bit of a mystery for political thought—some people do what other people say—why? Maybe because they will be harmed if they don’t obey—but that just means that the person giving the command can also command others to harm the disobedient, which just pushes the question back another step. Maybe because they agree with the command—but in that case, they would agree no matter who issued the command, and their obedience has nothing to do with the person giving the order which means that power is not involved at all. All of this is still true if, instead of speaking of “hard” power (commands) we think of “softer” versions, like the power of an example (why did people follow Martin Luther King Jr., whose opinions and proposals were no truer or more remarkable than plenty of other people’s?). We can follow Hannah Arendt in distinguishing “power” from “strength,” insofar as the former involves “acting in common” while the latter is the capacity to have effects—that is, dropping a bomb on a village has nothing to do with power (other than the power the commander has over the bomber), but why do people act in common when they do and why—an element of power Arendt seems to me to have neglected—are some people more capable than others of initiating such action, of directing and sustaining it? Here as well, someone has to go first—but you have only gone first when others have gone after you. So, the question of power is, why do the others go after?

I think that power is simply a display of discipline greater than those impressed by that display consider themselves capable of. I’m drawing here, as I have often done, on Philip Rieff’s theory of “charisma,” the original meaning of which (exemplified by Moses) he took to be obedience to a higher imperative manifested in extraordinary levels of abstemiousness. The individual you see resisting temptations you give way to and controlling impulses you are overpowered by has power over you—you will defer to him because you know that your own indiscipline (revealed to you by this example) blinds you to cause and effect, good and bad, and that the more disciplined individual will have more insight into these matters. Rieff also contended that the notion of “charisma” has been debased and reversed in modern times (he sees Max Weber’s study as the crucial turning point) so that it now refers to the individual willing to transgress against established norms. It is still the same concept, though—for the modern, over-civilized and over-regulated individual, temptations and impulses are channeled into the market system, and it is breaking with that system and its norms that seems to require courage and therefore greater self-control and self-command (in the American context, Ralph Waldo Emerson is probably the central figure here). To transgress—quit your job, leave the rat race, have an affair, tell your neighbors what you really think of them, whatever (it has all become clichés by now)—in a sense does call for greater discipline, as the temptation to back down, give in, try and fit back in, recover the benefits one discovers one has thrown away, is very powerful. And this kind of disciplining of the fear response is different from mere criminal activity (criminals also must master fears that would cripple normal people—which is why their activity can be represented as more than “mere” criminality) insofar as it is driven by self-sacrifice rather than self-interest.

The same logic holds for intellectual power—the founder of a discipline has managed to control, set aside, and think outside of assumptions that everyone else has so far taken for granted and have been incapable of challenging. Such a founder opens up a world others can then move freely within, making the modes of thought previously adhered to constraining by comparison. It takes discipline to take those founding assumptions and, one by one, control for commonsensical ways of accounting for things and replace them with this new way. In the normal operations of power, where we obey fairly uncharismatic (by any definition) people and most resort to familiar ideas in making sense of things, it is the residual power of the founding, replenished unevenly over time, that attracts us. The politician is clothed in the dignity of the office, the manager embodies the accumulated capital and knowledge present in the enterprise, the mediocre academic plays by the rules of and takes on a patina of the prestige of, an institution that has been a home for geniuses and site of discoveries and innovations—in which case, power is conveyed by a tacit reference to the founding and maintenance of the institution, which did require degrees of discipline well beyond the capacity of the average individual. The same people who ordinarily obey figures legitimated by past discipline (but also by the disciplinary demands, iterating the demands met in the original founding, required to enter and remain within the institution) can be brought to rebel against them, to follow a new form of power, by a new display of discipline, whether it take the form of exposing what has been hidden by those institutions, including their “mythical” foundings, or by a claim to hew more closely to that founding, or even by a simple show of insolence towards authority figures you yourself would never have considered challenging.

This approach to power might be compatible with Michel Foucault’s notion of power as all-encompassing, as always involving an interaction with some “counter-power,” and as working through the myriad “capillaries” as much as through the main “arteries” of the social order—as long as we keep in mind the fundamentally qualitative dimension of power I am examining. “Power” is not just what one is capable of doing to others, with those others in turn capable of doing something back in turn—if we ask where this capability comes from, we just go around in circles. But if we follow the reactionary futures blogger in prioritizing power (over culture, morality or economics), then the sovereign power Foucault wanted to make secondary to “micro-power” does indeed work on all kinds of micro levels we’d need to attend to. But the real problem is distinguishing between Rieff’s two modes of charisma, evidenced in what we might call the power of deferral, on the one hand, and the power of transgression, on the other. The distinction is not so easy to make—as I have been suggesting, transgression relies upon a certain kind of deferral, while Rieff’s favored form of charisma might take on transgressive forms—can anything be more transgressive than Moses challenging the divinely sanctioned might of the Egyptian empire?

Perhaps, though, we can distinguish between sovereignty clarifying and sovereignty confusing power—it may not always be obvious which is which, but we can improve our analytical perspicuity, and assume that disinterested inquiry over time will settle such questions. We can call the sovereignty clarifying power, defying one of the most popular modern maxims, “absolute” power, and the sovereignty confusing power, “dispersive.” Absolute power models itself on sovereign power, trying for minimal application (issuing orders and using force only where strictly necessary), clear lines of authority and identity of power and accountability (when something is done, everyone knows who wanted it done). Even more, absolute power seeks delivers its own power to the sovereign power as soon as possible, and seeks out the most likely candidate for sovereignty when sovereignty is uncertain, taking sovereign power itself if no other candidate emerges. Dispersive power tries to generate more power centers, to uncover potential new centers within existing ones so that no one really knows who’s doing things and why and to turn sovereign power itself into an agent of dispersal, an enemy producing machine for eternal civil war. And this brings us back to Rieff’s two modes of charisma: the kind of discipline yielding absolute power knows and even respects the power of transgression, which is an indispensable discovery procedure—but realizes that transgressive, dispersive power is itself ultimately just another temptation, an excuse to lower inhibitions and act barbarically. Transgression cannot, in the end, produce anything new (it can only disperse), except esthetically, but even there only insofar as the transgression is constrained by some esthetic form and therefore discipline. Absolute power, meanwhile, enhances itself by telling the truth, about itself and about transgression; dispersive power eventually resorts to lies and slanders about any potential form of sovereignty. So, Moses before Pharaoh is not transgressive insofar as he obeys a form of sovereignty superior to that of Pharaoh, even if it’s a form of sovereignty (and here is where Moses is breathtakingly daring, even if not transgressive) that has yet to be vindicated by being housed in an adequate human form (and any form of power must have been so imagined before being realized).

This line of thinking was instigating by my finding myself making extensive use of the notion of “informal power” in my previous post. Even the tightest, more totalizing sovereign, as understood in “reactionary” terms, will delegate power and rely upon institutions the sovereign has not itself created—even when strict orders are given in a clear chain of command occasions arise where those orders need to be interpreted in light of changed circumstances, and the relationship between the individual charged with the order and his subordinates as well as superiors must have an informal, tacit dimension to handle such revisionary situations. How do his subordinates know they should obey? Well, they’ve followed him before, have found him loyal and reliable, and have seen him rewarded by his superiors—in the light of that experience, which cannot be completely formalized, they will interpret this unorthodox proceeding in his favor—no sovereign, however efficient, benevolent and far-sighted could have ordered them in advance to obey in this situation. In that case, ensuring that informal powers—which will always emerge and develop unpredictably, as charisma cannot be planned—reinforce sovereign power is the central problem of reactionary politics. This tacit dimension is, further, rooted in the nomos, and ongoing reformations and deformations of the nomos: new powers emerge when the originary distribution no longer sufficiently accounts for social relations because some members of the community, being more disciplined, have made more of their “part” than others. All social crises, all sovereign uncertainty, can be traced back to such developments, and an assessment of the various forms of power is needed to resolve those crises.

Carl Schmitt took the Greek word “nomos,” usually translated as “law,” but in a broad sense including “norms,” to refer to an originary division of land, a partition, by its first inhabitants. Whether the land has been conquered, discovered, or shared with another people, the nomos grounds the community in a more or less equal distribution and a more or less tacit covenant. The distribution may be according to contributions to the founding, or pre-existing power relations, and the covenant might be retrojected to the origin in order to conceal a more unilateral event, but, either way, the nomos provides a point of reference for all communal events going forward: they can be judged by the degree of their conformity to the nomos. But whoever’s judgment is decisive is sovereign, and such judgments are made necessary by either internal disputes or external threats. The nomos, that is, implies the need for judgment and the occasional organization of the community as an armed camp; while judgment and organization are legitimate insofar as they respect and reinforce the nomos. Sovereignty is ultimately exercised by a single individual—by whatever arrangement, there must be a single voice obeyed when one side in a dispute is favored or troops are ordered to fire on the enemy. The sovereign is both inside and outside the system insofar as its decisions constitute the system. Republicanism doesn’t dispute this, but considers the nomos to be safer if sovereignty is plural and distributed—one person judges, another decides whether we are at war, another commands the troops, etc. The more undisputed the nomos, the more sustainable republicanism is likely to be, but if the nomos is not shared unquestioningly then there will eventually be situations where the troops are commanded independent of a declaration or war or one side in a dispute is favored but the decision is not enforced, etc. Sovereignty then becomes uncertain, which means undesignated sovereigns, forms of power previously or formally auxiliary to the sovereign will, informally, step into the vacuum thereby created, confusing sovereignty further.

As sovereignty becomes uncertain, there are several possible responses: some will accelerate the disintegration of the original sovereign forms, believing that doing so will allow for a rearrangement of the nomos for their own benefit; some will gloss over the disjunction between formal and informal power, pretending that nothing fundamental has changed (this is essentially what Americans, who think we still live under the Constitution of 1789 do); while others will direct their attention to rendering sovereignty certain again: now, among this last group, we can distinguish between those who want the original formal power to be restored and those who believe that a new form of power is preferable or necessary—and, among these last, we can make a distinction between those who want to formalize the informal power relations that have emerged and those who see those informal power relations as incommensurable with the nomos, which can in turn lead to attempts to reorder power relations and/or found a new order on a new nomos. We could say that the left aims at accelerating the disintegration of original sovereign forms and ultimately dissolving the nomos; the “center” obfuscates the disjunction between formal and informal power while assuming the nomos is more or less intact; the “principled conservatives” want to restore the original formal power (return to the Constitution) but conflate the nomos with that (by now largely imaginary) formal power; the alt-right seeks to restore the nomos in opposition to existing informal power relations (from what I have seen the alt-right is uninterested in Constitutional forms, and has little to say about “regime types” in general); and the “reactionary” position is to make sovereignty certain, whether by dominating, coopting or sweeping away the existing informal powers—this set of alternatives, meanwhile, introduces a large degree of uncertainty into the reactionary project.

The reactionary project is ultimately the only coherent one, and the one that can assess and contain whatever is valuable in the others, but singularizing sovereignty can only realize that coherence by clarifying the relations between the nomos and the formal and informal powers. Very little thought has gone into this, and the alt-right and resurgent nationalism fall into victimary stances themselves when they rail against the informal powers (from Wall St. firms to Facebook and Google, to the EU and UN) as excrescences upon an otherwise healthy nomos—what kind of power, exactly, exercised by whom, will be brought to bear on global corporations closing down plants in the US, moving them overseas, cutting wages at home, etc.? You can speak of tariffs, but that presupposes the intactness of the existing regime of formal power (Constitutional government)—and if that power was really intact, would we be having these problems in the first place? “What is to be done” may have been Lenin’s question, but it is a good one nevertheless. A direct attempt to capture the sovereign power and make it certain would be to attempt to grab the bull by the horns—an expression which, for some reason, is usually used positively, to refer to determined, effective action, even though, literally speaking, it’s obviously insane.

A good way to start thinking about these problems is to pay attention to the way we talk about political matters. When we say we are “for” something and “against” something else, when we outline or approve of one or another policy proposal, we are presupposing a particular model of sovereignty. In fact, most such talk presupposes clear sovereignty, and clear hierarchies of command: if someone says they are “against abortion,” they presumably want a law passed forbidding abortion, complete with penalties and punishments for offenders, an executive who will give orders to law enforcement to, e.g., enter buildings where abortions have been suspected of being performed, and then place in custody those performing them, for a certain period, according to certain procedures, etc. Everyone along the line, you presuppose, will follow orders—if the local law enforcement agencies refuse to investigate reports that a particular building is housing an abortion clinic, and there are no repercussions from agencies higher up in the hierarchy, then in effect, there is no law against abortion, and, regardless of the changes to the criminal code, the commitments made by politicians, precedents set by the courts, etc., the “anti-abortion” people have not gotten what they want (unless they “really” want something else, some form of informal power, perhaps). And no one says, “I’d like Congress to pass a law forbidding abortion, I’d like the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, and I’d like a President ready to enforce that law, but I don’t really care whether local law enforcement agencies are on board or not.” It would hardly occur to anyone to think in such terms, which is what I mean when I say we all take clarity in sovereignty for granted when discussing political preferences and goals.

So, most of our political talk only makes sense if we presuppose clarity in sovereignty—if we presuppose that what we “support” can be implemented in such a way that we would recognize it as the thing we support. But all the relations between the nomos and formal and informal powers are neglected in such discussions and, in fact, almost no one really gets what they thought they were supporting. So, meaningful political talk would have to include these relations. To some extent this is the case for more involved partisans, for example, those on the left who target political funding—for the leftist (and, for sure, some rightist) scourges of “money in politics,” being for or against something doesn’t really matter because the big money donors override our opinions by making politicians dependent on them, so before we are for or against any reinforcement of the nomos, we need to be “against” this form of informal power. There’s always some truth to such critiques, but they are so tedious, useless and ultimately mendacious because they only target the informal powers the critic in question doesn’t like (that same critic is no doubt very happy to see other informal powers unhindered in their operations) and, more importantly, they invariably presuppose a stereotyped version of the nomos, as if, once all the “Big Money” were removed from politics, our respective civic consciences would automatically vibrate in tune with each other’s movements (and those of of the critic in question, of course), leading to spontaneous unanimity.

This is what we need parrhesia for. I noticed that Peter Thiel, in an interview he did with National Review, contended that “political correctness” is the biggest problem we face because it prevents us from talking about all the other problems in open and honest ways. No reader of this blog will be surprised to hear that I agree with this completely. The task of parrhesia is to talk about the informal powers when others want to talk about the nomos as a self-contained entity; to talk about the nomos when others are obsessed with informal powers; to talk about formal powers when other complain about how the informal powers run roughshod over the nomos, etc. If parrhesia is focused on the misalignment of nomos, formal and informal power, the intelligibility of its discourse relies upon the possibility of their being realigned. The practice of parrhesia, then, is to interject where one element of the total sovereignty package is ignored and point out that the question regarding nomos, formal power or informal power cannot be addressed without it. This involves pressing insistently on the most sensitive political questions: the question of nomos requires free inquiry into, for example, who counts as an “American,” and why; the question of informal power directs our attention to all kinds of interest groups that would prefer not to make explicit their relation to either formal power or the nomos, such as “moneyed” interests but not excluding groups qualifying their relation to America along race, ethnic, gender or other lines; and the question of formal power gets us examining, relentlessly, whether those officially delegated certain powers in fact have those powers and use them (which are really two ways of saying the same thing). The telos of parrhesia is showing us the way to make sovereignty more certain, and this practice will be necessary and welcome even as sovereignty is made increasingly certain, because it can never be certain enough. (Perhaps the irreverent parrhesia of the ancient cynics, when directed at rulers, aimed at deflating the sovereign’s pretensions by pointing out all that that exceeds the sovereign’s grasp—taking the point, then, would involve clarifying sovereignty—and remembering that sovereignty in the state required sovereignty of the soul, which politically corresponds to an intact nomos.)

Having raised the question of “political correctness,” i.e., the victimary, it seems to me that the victimary is almost exclusively concerned with breaking up the nomos. It is the originary distribution, according to family, and therefore a specific family and sexual order, and a system of marriage uniting families into a ethnos, that sets the terms of inclusion for future members, whether they be immigrants or those (e.g., native peoples or slaves) who were excluded from the nomos. The left uses various forms of informal power to “occupy” formal power, and it seems to me their endgame is to hollow out the nomos and make it an adjunct to their own reprogramming of formal power.

It is already implicit in my argument, but is not necessarily thereby obvious, that a large part of the attraction of exposing the products of discipline as stolen centrality is that it opens up virtually unlimited fields for the social sciences. We have evidence that discipline leads to benefits, but that evidence needs to be taken on faith, once we consider there is always another way the flow of benefits to that individual or group could be explained. I don’t think we would be going too far to say that the origin of the social sciences—economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, psychology, etc.—lies in the imperative to sever the link between discipline and benefit (which would mean all the social sciences are constitutively leftist). It’s not a coincidence that the social sciences emerged as the notion of “civilization” disappeared. Once you start speaking in terms of social “structures” and “laws” you are undermining the “naïve” sense that increments in discipline generate increasingly disproportionate rewards. Leftism, then, provides a form of challenging and invigorating intellectual resentment that a civilizational politics cannot match because civilizationism (reaction or restorationism) starts with certain undeconstructable notions to be taken on faith. You can always define and analyze the social laws and structures in more complex ways, you can always challenge some previous definition and analysis and, in particular, you can always show that the previous definition or analysis still presupposed some link between discipline and benefit, and therefore was not sufficiently scientific, failing to explaining apparent discipline and apparent benefit in terms of something impersonal. I believe, of course, that the intellectual rewards of the approach I take are far greater than those of the social sciences, but, like GA more generally, could probably never be more than marginal, institutionally, granting, as it does, the irreducibility of “faith.” My approach would also be too “personalizing,” insofar as it must reject other approaches as dyscivilizational.

A while back, in a post entitled “A Unified Field Theory of the Left” I concluded with the following definition of the Left:

The Left is obedience to the imperative to expose the products of discipline as stolen centrality.

I have been relying on this definition, but generally in less rigorous forms, referring to the Left as essentially an anti-civilization movement. But this more precise definition calls for further exploration. In that post, I saw the Left as drawing upon an almost universally shared resentment towards civilization but being based more precisely upon a revelation of the “fraudulence” of civilization and the barbarism it (barely) veils. So far, so good. But what I didn’t consider at the time was that this explanation of leftism grounds leftism in an important truth—which also raises the question of why leftists lie so systematically.

First of all, the truth of leftism: the civilizing process makes the implicit claim that increased capacities of deferral (discipline) will increase benefits (wealth, power and enhanced and exemplary flourishing in general). From this claim comes the imperative to buckle down and learn the arts of civilization. Now, the claim, in macro terms, is true: those social orders that have committed to the civilizing process have achieved and flourished compared to those that haven’t. On the individual level, the claim must be assessed much more cautiously: not only is it often false, insofar as individuals who have played by all the civilizing rules often fail and those who succeed often cut a lot of corners but, in principle, it can never really be proven true—how could anyone’s accomplishments be completely or even mostly attributed to their own hard work and discipline, leaving out of consideration things like native ability, luck, “connections,” and so on? For that matter, how could they ever be determined to be “accomplishments,” except circularly? From a negative standpoint, failing altogether to comply with civilized norms will almost invariably have disastrous consequences (even here there are some illustrious exceptions), but presenting things that way makes civilization more or a threat than a promise.

Now I, as a proponent of civilization and sworn enemy of the left, can calmly assess the ambivalence of the civilized person and the resentments he inevitably experiences—so, what further revelation is required for one to hear the imperative to expose the products of discipline as stolen centrality—to discredit all claims that wealth, power and flourishing can be attributed to higher levels of discipline? (Keep in mind that the leftist does not feel compelled to deny such a claim categorically—just each and every particular one. You might find a leftist who feels he pays no price to agree that hard work makes success more likely; you will find them much stingier when it comes to admitting that that explains the success of anyone they can’t claim overcame some unjust obstacle.) Here are some reasons, which comprise a preliminary categorization of leftist types:

• the promise of civilization has failed in your particular case: you, in your mind, played by the rules, worked hard, and you still failed according to some relevant measure (this can equally apply to the experience of someone you know or are familiar and sympathize with)
• the promise of civilization has, to all appearances, succeeded in your particular case, but you really can’t be sure: you started off with some of the benefits of civilization in your pocket, so to speak, and you progressed a bit from there, or held steady, but there’s no way of knowing whether you’re living parasitically off of other’s capital; and, if there’s no way of knowing that, there’s no way of knowing whether those others were in fact living off of others’ labor and suffering, perhaps unrewarded and unrecognized labor and suffering—in other words, you have the nagging anxiety that while others might take you to represent the truth of civilization’s promises, on a “deeper” level you represent its ultimate fraudulence and disguised barbarity
• you can see how others are blinded by their faith in the civilizing process—all those people out there doing what they’re told, getting by, believing in their right to their enjoyment of civilization’s fruits but without ever feeling a need to “do the math” and consider how much of their (really, contemptible, if you look at it too closely) “success” is, in the end, attributable to their own efforts; and some others who you can see really just exploited some mechanisms already in place to “get ahead”—you see something all these others don’t, that the closer you look the less connection you see between effort and accomplishment, and between celebrated accomplishments and worthy ones—you might say that this revelation, which in less political orders (or for less reactive characters) might lead one to philosophical reflection and a higher form of self-discipline, resolves the anxiety of the previously described uncertainty by making it a generally applicable dogmatic claim with which you can prosecute others (an enormous amount of youth culture goes into cultivating this sentiment, that everyone who gets ahead either cheats or is secretly miserable, and the only honorable position is the alienated one outside of it all—an extension of Gnosticism and romanticism, of course)

Now, I think it is from this last group that the real leftist leadership is drawn from: all those people who don’t see how fraudulent the whole “system” is must be made to see—none of their illusions can be left undisturbed. This is the source of the fanaticism and systematic lying of the left—nothing is forbidden, morality must be subordinated to the higher imperative of making them see—it is precisely that evidence that seems to justify the system that must be debunked. To feel you’ve glimpsed a crucial truth that everyone else (aside from a privileged few, whom you start seeking out and with whom you cement this sense of superiority to “everyone else”) is blind to, and blind to because too self-satisfied and cowardly to see the underpinnings of their comfortable life—this is an extremely powerful form of motivation because you, the recipient and guardian of this revelation, should be at the center, but all these petty, small minded people think they’re at the center—and “society” seems to agree with them. This last group comes from those in the second group who get radicalized (the remainder in the second group are sympathizers and donors), for whatever reason, while those in the first group provide the shock troops of the left. These three groups could, in principle, include everyone in a civilized order, so it’s not surprising that the Left runs up the numbers it does. To resist the Leftist imperative, you would have to understand the rewards of civilization as intrinsic to the discipline itself—that understanding is ultimately truer than the Left’s, but also the most easily forgotten—part of that intrinsic reward is the very power of discernment that enables you to start noticing its intangibility and therefore start questioning it.

I remember reading, many years ago, an interview with Noam Chomsky in which the interviewer asked him how he came by his political convictions. Chomsky traced it back to high school, where he couldn’t understand why everyone in his school cared so much about whether their school teams defeated the other schools’ teams. Why should the mere fact that you happen to go to West Central High rather than East Central High (perhaps because your parents happened to buy a house a couple of blocks away from where they could have just as easily bought one) mean that you should be elated when West Central’s basketball team defeats East Central’s (especially since you’re not even on the team)? Are West Central’s players more worthy—is there any objective reason to prefer them to East Central’s? Just step back and look at all that idiotic cheering in the stands. Etc. OK—all this is fine—every halfway intelligent high schooler gets this feeling of the absurdity of the loyalties, the groupings, the forced enthusiasms, the cliques, etc., in the name of some vague sense that “we’re really all the same” and “there are much more important things out there.” But most high schoolers have other feelings as well—you’re friends with someone on a team, or you’re friends with someone who is friends with someone on the team, and so you know a bit about what’s going on and maybe it’s interesting; you realize that all this cheering might just be a pretext for getting out of the house Friday night, or having a couple of big parties, but you don’t mind having the pretext; rooting for the team makes the game a lot more exciting; it’s a way to meet members of the opposite sex, and the popular girls and guys don’t like people who just think everything is stupid; and, in general, it’s more interesting and fun to have all this stuff going on. So, the Chomskyian intuition is there, but it ends up informing an occasional ironic stance—it consumes you, and you become a Chomskyian, when you feel compelled to preserve that intuition, to elevate it above all other intuitions, and therefore to wage war against all those other feelings suggesting that maybe all the “mindless” rooting isn’t so bad after all. That you have that intuition more sharply or clearly than others, that you have an obligation to increase its sharpness and clarity, to make others see it, turns it into the lynchpin of your identity. You declare eternal war on the kids who are popular through no merit of their own, on the adults who cater to that unearned privilege, and on all the other kids who would like to be like, or be close to, the popular ones—but when you achieve a sufficient degree of political discipline and sophistication, you realize how valuable to the cause it is to “turn” as many of the enemy as you can, and with the exception of those who have remembered the intrinsic value of discipline, they are all potentially vulnerable, so you start to look for weak links—where is the presumed causal relation between effort and reward especially tenuous? Something that seems earned (even something so simple as the right of police not to be killed) can surely be made an example of privilege. And once you’re not doing anything other than looking for those weak links, you are a full-fledged leftist.

So, it’s not quite accurate to say that leftism is anti-civilization—leftism is opposed to any imaginable civilization in the name of an imaginary civilization cleansed of its discontents. And, in practice, opposing any imaginable civilization means sanctioning and encouraging the most uninhibited rage against existing civilization. There are fewer and fewer leftists willing to compromise the imaginary for the sake of the imaginable, probably because of an end of history sense of invulnerability. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have spoken this way on occasion: we can still nuke them back to hell if we want, can’t we? In that case, nothing can really ever be that serious—we’ve got our ace in the hole. But it’s virtually axiomatic that a sense of invulnerability significantly increases vulnerabilities. There’s no easier target than the guy who thinks no one would ever take a shot at him.

Eric Gans’s latest Chronicle, “The Administrative State and the Victimocracy” raises a set of interrelated questions which GA urgently needs to turn its attention to. I’m going to focus on the following two paragraphs in particular:

I believe that the victimary arrogance of the Left at the present moment is dependent on a factor that I have discussed several times without pretending to be able to calculate its quantitative effect: that of modern, intelligent automation, which as I have claimed is in the process of effecting the first essential separation within humanity by severing the common symbolic link (as expressed in religious and civil ritual) among the social classes. For the first time, a whole segment of the population, more or less the “Belmont” of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, has been detached from the “common folk,” not simply by privilege as in the past, but by the ability to use symbols. GA takes this more seriously than the workaday anthropologies we live with because GA takes seriously the definition of humans as users of language. In particular the split occurs most sharply in language’s least “humanistic,” most narrowly symbolic function: the pure empty tokens of mathematics, the ability to manipulate which becomes increasingly a qualification for the higher forms of work (“STEM”). Perhaps (true) affirmative action can work to bring the two sides together, but as Murray’s book, which deliberately excludes racial minorities from consideration, suggests, this is certainly not to be solved by attacking “white privilege” or putting (often black) policemen on trial for “racist” brutality.

The point is to understand that the heat of all these resentful thoughts is meant to make us forget the “cold light of reason,” which tells us that only some as yet undiscovered form of human engineering will make those currently in the (former) “working class” capable of handling the symbolic activities of tomorrow’s industrial society. Without falling into economic determinism, I think one can say that the world’s current ills, from radical Islam to the sclerosis of the administrative state in Europe and increasingly, the US, all in one way or another reflect the persistent inequalities that depend more and more not on “privilege” but on qualifications, and ultimately, on native abilities, albeit enhanced by the more nourishing childhoods characteristic of the Belmont class. Huxley’s Brave New alpha-epsilon categories, contemporaries of the word robot invented for Capek’s RUR, seem to be proving eerily prophetic. Save, of course, that as bearers of the moral model of reciprocal human equality, we cannot condone a hierarchy of this sort, so that when it manifests itself in some domain of the social order, it must be denied by all means at our disposal.

This account certainly helps us to address the problem of victimary resentment more dispassionately—there is, in fact, a dramatically new and potentially uniquely intractable form of inequality, even if it’s not the inequality the victimary activists complain about. This stratification within the symbolic function may not explain the gender/sexuality wing of the victimocracy, but, then again, that wing might be largely parasitic on the racial one (with” race” defined broadly to include, as the victimocrats insist, opposing cultures and civilizations, such as the West vs. Islam). The anti-immigration (and, I wouldn’t say “white nationalist” but rather “anti-anti-white,” while I maintain the hope that “albaphobia” might someday catch on) website VDARE has one writer who regularly posts on advances in automation—the immediate point is the lessening necessity for importing cheap labor, but there is also a vague sense in many postings that automation might be as destructive to the native working class as immigration itself. And the increase in assortative mating—doctors used to marry nurses, now they marry other doctors, businessmen and lawyers used to marry secretaries, now they marry their peers, etc.—is leading to a heritable class and even at least quasi-racial stratification corresponding to the stratification between those capable and those incapable of advanced “symbolic analysis.”
While this economic stratification is the bigger civilizational problem, I think the furious victimary resentment addresses a different side of automation. Automation has the potential to reduce resentments insofar as it makes it possible to take all kinds of decisions out of human hands (or, at least, remove those decisions to more distant hands). If a police department can have its computer experts do increasingly nuanced mathematical analyses on crimes rates and perpetrators in specific neighborhoods, at specific times, then crime fighting depends less and less upon the judgments and intuitions of police officers—you can stop someone and question him because you can show that he is, according to calculations that can be checked, 7.4x more likely to commit a crime than the guy you didn’t stop—rather than stopping him because he seemed like a “troublemaker.” The same goes for banks loans, school admissions and hiring—all these decisions can be taken out of human hands, and “inputs” (measurable capacities) correlated with increasing accuracy to “outputs” (performance). Since everyone can guess that the results will not conform to egalitarian fantasies, it is this component of automation that is intolerable, and must be resisted at all costs. It’s also harder to rationalize resistance, though—rather than the cop on the beat, or the loan officer at the bank, or the manager at the plant, being “racist,” the entire system of symbolic analysis must somehow be racist—and, since you can’t develop a better, “non-racist” mathematical analysis, the racism embedded in the “inputs” must take on an almost mystical omnipresence, a taint which we can’t even really explain much less cleanse ourselves of. And the victimocrats are not the ones developing the COMPSTATS; the victimocrats are those with humanities and social science degrees that enable them to “prove” that the inequities lie deep within reality itself, and the STEM people are not equipped to fight back on this politicized terrain. It is here that the real battle against the victimocracy must be fought, in the name of the liberation of the algorithm and the recognition of human difference.

The problem of automation has existed since the beginning of industrialization, but it may be becoming more critical. It used to be that each new wave of automation would destroy whole sectors of the economy, laying off large parts of the workforce, but the increase in the size of markets and the entrance of whole new populations to the workforce and market as consumers would create the number of jobs needed to replace those lost. In the end, there would be significant displacement, which would generate some short-term political effects, but since the resentments always came from a “backward” minority of the workforce, those effects were never particularly consequential. We have been conditioned to assume it will always work like this, but maybe it won’t. Marx’s main argument for communism was not the injustice of the exploitation of workers, but the projected consequences of the unlimited technological development capitalism makes possible—if all you need to provide everyone with the food, clothing, shelter and entertainment they need is to flip a switch, what would be the logic of paying people to work? In order to maintain the wage-labor system, you would have to, perversely, deprive people of what you could readily provide them free of cost. Buckminster Fuller argued that free education up to the highest levels was cost-effective because if you educated 1,000 people for free, at least one out of those 1,000 would invent something that would pay for the education (and more) of the other 999. His colleague, Marshall McLuhan, anticipated that we would soon be paying people to go to school, as if the process of learning itself, presumably within a more “rational” educational system, would be wealth generating. The fact that the notion of a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens has been taken seriously by politicians of both the right and the left since the Nixon Administration (which got the idea, I think, from libertarian economist Milton Friedman) demonstrates that belief in the possibility of a “post-work” society persists despite (or because of) the poor performance of the actual economy according to conventional measures. (No doubt it is easy to call those measures into question—why does everyone need to work, in which case why should we worry about high levels of unemployment? Why does the economy need to “grow” a certain amount? Etc.)

But what renders all such perhaps quite realistic speculation utopian is a good look at our fellow men and women. What would all these people do if they didn’t have to work, or find some way, even illicit, to acquire money? For the Marxists and “visionaries” like McLuhan and Fuller it was possible to imagine that what held us back was the “alienation” caused by institutions that were either oppressive or designed for a “scarcity” rather than “abundance” society—redesign the institutions, and hitherto unimaginable human potential would flourish. A more rigorous and sober anthropology would considerably dampen this enthusiasm. Hannah Arendt had the more prescient question: would would happen to a society whose entire economic and moral order is based on “labor” when labor is no longer necessary? What would everyone do if they didn’t have to work? Write commentaries on Plato? Develop Generative Anthropology? Invent new “apps”? Play Pokemon Go? I think Fuller’s numbers might be on the mark—about one out of a thousand would do one or more of the first three, and the other 999 the last. In that case, why go to school—why have schools? (What did Fuller think the other 999 would do?) What if the top .01% decides they don’t want to waste their time providing the necessities of life and amusements to the rest?

Yes, it will take “some as yet undiscovered form of human engineering” to answer these questions. In very broad terms, though, the answer is obvious: if we don’t rely upon a division of labor to feed, clothe, house, transport, etc., one another, then we will have to make ourselves useful to each other in new ways. We already see the beginnings of this in the new professions that have proliferated in the therapeutic age—all kinds of counseling and advice dealing with increasingly minute emotional questions and arcane areas of interest. More and more people are becoming what Peter-Solterdijk calls “trainers.” People will discover things they have to offer to others, and things they’d rather let others do for them, and it won’t necessarily depend upon native intelligence or even talent. If you managed to lost 100 pounds and get yourself in shape you are “qualified,” through a minimum of self-reflection and narrative ability, to help others do the same. The trainer enables you to construct your reality in a new way: while previously you were a victim of circumstances you can now, by identifying and modifying your own responses to those circumstances, become the master of them. The most famous exemplar of such producer’s desire is Oprah Winfrey, who has always been a punch line for high and even middle brow types while being revered by precisely those most threatened by our increasingly intelligently symbolic order. So, the solution to automated stratification is the spread of producer’s desire. (If you’re supporting yourself by making yourself useful to others by doing something you love, why should you care that someone else is making 1000x as much as you?) How far can such desire spread? How far would it have to spread to support a workable social order? Those are things we can’t yet know, but the fact that human nature remains rooted in mimesis and rivalry leaves open the possibility that people will continue to strongly desire to interact with and prove themselves with and against others.