GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

I have been diligently reading the post-mortems by conservatives and Republican partisans the past couple of days and one thing seems to me undeniable:  the Republican defeat means the end of the Bush Doctrine in the War against Terror.  The resignation of Donald Rumsfeld and his replacement by Bush I crony, CIA connected Robert Gates simply confirms what Bush probably had no choice about anyway–support for the Bush Doctrine even among Republicans could not survive this defeat.  Regardless of what anyone thinks the election was really about (Republican corruption and incompetence, a normal 6th year Presidential power trim, failures to halt the orgy of spending, to control immigration, etc.) no politician (especially those running for President in 2008) will gamble his political future on the unknowable possibility that it wasn’t, in fact, a repudiation of the President’s policy on Iraq.  We have just witnessed an epic battle between a courageous, novel, and, of course, risky strategy for transforming the very conditions that have made us powerless against victimary Islamist blackmail, on the one hand, and the forces of continuity with pre-9/11 policies (I would say “illusions,” but part of my argument here will be in favor of stepping back from these more immediate polemical stances), in particular foreign policy realism and transnational progressivism, the political form of White Guilt, on the other.  The forces of continuity have won, and our first task is to process that.  (There was always a third possible approach to Islamic terror and totalitarian advance:  the approach of what I have recently seen referred to as the “endgame conservatives,” those who–John Derbyshire is a well known example, but there are quite a few others, like Andrew McCarthy at NRO, writers at the American Spectator and Claremont Review of Books, and I would include columnist Diana West here–who believe that trying to transform the internal politics and culture of Muslim societies is a chimerical goal, and we should focus on developing unmistakable and reliable responses to their external behavior.  In short, the massive use of force against very specifically defined transgressions against U.S. or Western interests.  Up until a few days ago, I saw the debate between these thinkers and adherents to the Bush Doctrine to be a crucially important one (I was preparing a couple of pieces to address it)–but could anyone really believe that the loss of Republican majorities makes it more likely that the endgamers will get a serious hearing?)

So, what I will try to do now is give the Bush Doctrine a decent burial, and, even more, to try and articulate its moral, political, historical and anthropological presuppositions, because I believe the three alternatives I have mentioned are, in one form or another, likely to be all that we will have for the duration–since I believe the others will ultimately fail, the Bush Doctrine, in whatever new form it emerges, is likely to get its chance again and next time we should try to provide it with the kind of intellectual “ballast” it will need.

So, let’s begin with “pre-emption”:  first, we will not distinguish between the terrorists and the states harboring them; second, we will not wait for threats to crystallize before acting against them.  The doctrine of pre-emption recognizes the way the connection between the structures of blackmail and deniability on the one hand, and the increasingly availability of deadly weapons to even non-state actors, on the other hand, creates a new reality, the outlines of which were revealed on 9/11.  Terrorism had been parasitical on the “stability” of the state system from the 70s on:  the assimilation of Western instititions to the victimary standpoint means that victimary blackmail is only limited by realist calculations:  if the attacks are low level enough, it will be worth paying the blackmail (in the form, say, of the recognition that Palestine is indeed central to any resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict) rather than upsetting the delicate network of corrupt, brutal and ultimately vulnerable (at least according them the strongmen themselves) dictatorships which keep things simmering so as to prevent them from boiling over.  On the one hand, we know that the various states which provide weapons, propaganda, money, etc., to terrorists (or allow their elites to do so) will keep things under control, and if things get a little out of control, we can focus on a relatively minor player (like, say, Libya), which the other Arab and Muslim states will probably be able to cut loose anyway.  The 9/11 attacks destroyed this implicit arrangement, and the doctrine of pre-emption means that we will ourselves impose accountability upon the states which play this duplicitous role, no longer routing our actions through the superstructure of complicit international institutions and alliances, like the UN.  But pre-emption reveals a broader truth:  one has to choose between erring on the side of too much caution (one more round of negotiations while the plot takes shape) or too much risk (attacking a particular country before all the facts are in regarding its capabilities and intentions)–there is no position of perfect knowledge here, especially since very often what we do know and can find out depends upon what we are willing to do.  So, a profound shift of attitude is implicit here:  we shift the burden of proof from ourselves to those whom we have reason to suspect might be colluding with terrorists or even (depending on how “energetically” we wish interpret the doctrine), say, providing propaganda back-up.

Now, the doctrine of pre-emption could conceivably be installed as policy without the other pillar of the Bush Doctrine, the spreading of liberty as the war against Islamic fascism.  But spreading liberty does answer some questions which immediately emerge once one commits to pre-emption.  First of, what counts as a successful pre-emption?  Let’s say we had invaded Iraq, chased Saddam Huessein from power, scoured the country looking for weapons and material which could be used for weapons, ignoring everything and everyone else, finding (or not) what we were looking for, disarming the country–then what?  Saddam was in hiding–should we stay and look for him?  Why?  If we stay, what exactly are we doing while we’re looking for Saddam?  Are we looking for Saddam or his helpers as well–his sons, his security forces, etc.?  Why–what makes any of that our business?  After we’ve done what we came for perhaps Saddam will return to power.  Or his sons will.  Or one of his generals.  Do we care?  Let’s say we leave and they immediately start to rearm.  We can repeat what we have already done–but since we can’t waste the time and resources (not to mention looking ridiculous after a little while) the next time around we won’t bother to invade and look.  We’ll just destroy the country, so that it will take decades to rebuild again as a threat.  Can we be sure of that, though?  How much effort and time would it take for a ruthless gang, ruling over a traumatized people living among rubble, to acquire weapons and networks of people capable of doing great damage?  There is a bizarre repetition compulsion pattern to such behavior, and it can only really end by just commiting genocide against entire peoples who still haven’t “learned their lesson.”

So, spreading liberty answers the question of what we do once we have pre-empted.  In a certain sense we might consider it a weapon of war against tyranny, designed to use the characteristic weaknesses of tyrannies against them.  And we have an interesting precedent for us in this case:  the Emancipation Proclamation (as an aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pursue the obvious fact that neo-conservative politics are Lincolnian before they are Straussian or anything else).  It is often noted, usually by hypocrisy-spotters, that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed those slaves held in territories which the Union government did not yet control; which is to say, it actually freed not a single one.  There was a good, legalistic reason for this:  Lincoln did not believe he had the authority under the Constitution to free the slaves within the Union, in which case it could only be advanced as a war measure, targeting the rebels.  But there was an even better, political reason (and it’s not a coincidence that the legal and political reasons lined up so felicitously–that is what happens when you make sure to double the particular policy you pursue as a defense of some threatened portion of the Constitutional order itself):  the Proclamation in one stroke produced a new powerful ally, those, black and white, slave and free, who saw the real meaning of the war in the abolition of slavery.  At the same time, it radicalized the war precisely when it was necessary to do so, when the slogan of “Union” was no longer quite enough to justify the enormous sacrifices already and yet to be made, and when the unforseen consequences of unjustified Confederate resistance needed to be met with an escalation in the consequences they would confront–in other words, it provided a “no turning back” character to the struggle.  And can anyone really believe that, once the war was over and slavery had been abolished in the intransigent states like the Carolinas, Alabama, etc., it could really survive long in the states which had remained loyal (or which abandoned the rebellion)?  In which case, the Proclamation provided an incentive for slave states to return to the Union which was ultimately cost-free–and even if no states took up the offer, it certainly introduced divisions throughout the South.

Precisely the same logic applies to an assessment of the spread of liberty in the War against Islamic fascism.  We don’t seek to forcibly democratize Egypt, not because it is less dictatorial than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (it is, but that’s not the criterion) but because the Egyptian government has not ranged itself against us, with our enemies, much less challenged us directly.  If it were to consider doing so, it is aware of the consequences.  Installing free governments is intrinsically connected to regime change–a punishment for our enemies and an attempt to turn their subject peoples into allies.  The hope is that this will break the cycle of installing one friendly dictator after another, until each is overthrown or becomes unfriendly in turn–or, worse, simply wiping out, Carthage style, any society that looks at us wrong (and I will return the question of why we can’t do that later–at this point, nothing should be taken for granted).  Meanwhile, while we don’t directly overthrow the Egyptian government, we can be confident that the spread of free societies in the region will increase the confidence of the Egyptian people and the pressure on the Egyptian government.

Now comes the difficult part.  Two questions or claims account for the opposition to the Bush Doctrine by conservatives in particular; these objections were never adequately addressed by the Administration, but they deserve to be, and like all good questions answering them will clarify our own understanding of the Doctrine.  First, what happens when free elections bring inimical or tyrannical regimes to power, thereby intensifying the problem they were meant to solve?  Second, simply because it fits our strategy to transform these societies along these lines, there is no reason to assume that the “human material” comprising them is at all fit for the transformation.  These are, of course, related questions, touching upon the unreadiness of the Arab and Muslim worlds for liberal democracy, and they also raise more basic questions about the cultural prerequisites of democracy and the actual political conditions (beyond elections) that we are willing to consider genuinely democratic.  I will not argue that the claim that Muslim societies are unsuited for democracy is overstated, although I have seen that argument made, with regard to Iraq and Iran in particular; rather, I will simply stipulate to it, so that we can confront the questions in the most minimal way. 

So, when Muslim countries vote, they elect Islamic fundamentalists, terrorist gangs, and Parliaments which make Sharia the law of the land.  Our first question here is, if they were enemies before, are they enemies now?–if we stick to the rule that we only execute regime change upon enemies, this is the initial form in which we confront the question.  If they are still enemies, well, the policy has failed in that particular case, but nothing much has changed–we are still at war with them, and the fact that we are now at war with a democratically elected government, i.e., with a people that has chosen to be at war with us, in fact widens our options:  we are no longer restricted to the kind of surgical strike that the strategy of spreading freedom would dictate.  We might have to defer the question of what kind of government we would insist upon in the wake of that war, but we might be in a better condition to impose liberal democracy upon a chastened population–however bitter they might be about it, a new generation raised under the imposed institutions might very well make something of them.  If the new, less than ideally democratic government is not an enemy, well, at the very least we have gained something, and we are in a position to exploit that new government’s dependence upon us to insist upon (or support those fighting for) more incremental democratic transformations.  At the very least it will be in a poor position to resist the demand that it continue to submit itself to regular elections. 

And we will have, again, at the very least, brought such societies out of what Lee Harris calls the “fantasy ideologies” which enthrall them–in the Muslim world, in particular, the fantasy of an eternal “resistance” to the West, to the Crusaders, to imperialism, to Zionism, to whatever–a resistance without criteria and without measurable consequences because the West’s dependence upon Middle Eastern oil means that we can neither ignore such victimary resentment (as we might do if it were coming, say–but this is why it is not coming–from Africa) nor settle accounts with it once and for all.  The Bush Doctrine would introduce symmetry, accountability, even a structure of causality into our relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds.

And regular elections are not a small thing, regardless of the contempt in which many seem to hold “illiberal democracy.”  We prefer the liberal kind, of course, but the historically privileged route of gradual liberalization, development of a middle class, extension of the franchise and of civil liberties has pretty much been closed to us in the Muslim World.  Perhaps in countries like Jordan or Morocco, the development of a more liberal, and then more democratic culture within the framework of a fairly decent and legitimate monarchy is possible–even in these cases, that possibility is fading, if not gone.  Elsewhere, such regimes were destroyed long ago, and so there is no middle ground between autocracy and democracy.  Without elections, freedoms will never be taken seriously, and the longer you delay (imagine if we had not yet held elections in Iraq on the grounds that the “conditions were not yet ripe”), the greater the suspicion that you will never hold them, or if you do, only when you are assured of the results (which, by now, is also impossible, so that if you do hold out for favorable results you will look incompetent as well as repressive, a deadly combination). 

To accept the result of elections, once, twice, three and then four times, to have one ruler or party voluntarily step down in favor of another repeatedly, is already to exhibit some of the habits of liberalism, which are really simply advanced habits of deferral:  if I am capable of letting the other side win and rule for a awhile because I know I will get my chance I will also be ready to let the other fellow speak or practice a different religion because when he is in power he will let me do so as well.  So, there is absolutely no reason why the simple act of repeated elections can’t take us quite a bit of the way toward genuine liberalism.

And why, after all, would people who have not yet done so, people who are used to dominating or being dominated, habituate themselves to such a regimen of deferral if not for the simple reason that they have experienced the alternatives (or have stepped back from the brink of them), have found those alternatives to be too horrible to undergo again (or contemplate), and are thereby kept on the only path capable of keeping those alternative at bay.  Indeed, could the origins of freedom and democracy lie anywhere else than in some pact made by antagonistic tribes which found themselves unable to conquer but capable of destroying each other; or found themselves facing a more formidable foe who could be defeated only with their combined powers?  Once such a pact, displacing the particular ritual center of each of the tribes or groups involved in favor of the sacralization of the pact itself, is secured and repeated, the details can be filled in afterward.  And for countries in the Muslim world today, those alternatives must be, on the one side, the far more horrible damages ethnic groups and states are capable of inflicting upon each other today and, on the other side-us.  To put it crudely, what must supplement the deficiency in cultural prerequisites is our giving these countries absolutely no other choice.

And here, it seems to me, is the answer to those whose variant on the arguments I have been addressing focuses on Islam and the doctrines of violence, imperialism and intolerance built into it doctrinally and historically.  We could, perhaps, quarantine the Muslim world, but if we wanted to set up conditions under which Muslims themselves would be forced to confront the consequences of Islam in the modern world, and to either reform it accordingly or abandon it (and, first of all, to open a space in which Muslims could discuss these alternatives freely), then the Bush Doctrine would provide the best conditions for that as well.  Only a genuinely political space, even an only partially open one, would make such contests over the fate of of Islam possible:  fine, a democratically elected Parliament will implement Sharia, but then they will have to pass laws which actually define its meaning, bringing it into the secular realm; imams may be given a privileged place in the political order, perhaps akin to a Supreme Court, but they will also come under public criticism for their decisions.  We must have the patience to allow such processes to play themselves out, while at the same time setting some outer limits regarding, say, the execution of “apostates.”  In the meantime, while maintaining some degree of neutrality in supporting the processes established by a given state, we will also be free to express our preferences for the more liberal elements.

The Bush Doctrine, on a more “originary” level, is, finally, a response to the double bind the most powerful nation is in in a post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima world–a double bind that is aggravated by the end of bi-polar superpower rivalry and, as has already been analyzed extensively, has produced the currently metastasizing White Guilt.  This double bind is that we cannot, possibly, fight “all out” (another of the frustrations expressed by many conservative supporters of a forceful anti-terror, anti-Islamist policy):  fighting all out would mean completely wiping out any enemy, perhaps even merely potential ones.  We are inevitably withholding some of our power:  but the problem here is, it is impossible to prevent this restraint from being interpreted as hesitancy and even fear of the consequences, and hence as a victory for whoever simply manages to survive our assaults.

And the fact is, this would be the correct interpretation, although not for the reason usually assumed, that we fear producing further uprisings among the “wretched of the earth”–it can’t be that because such revolts could be settled just as easily if we were ready to go “all out.”  Our fear, in fact, is of civil war within our own country and our own civilization:  if some of us made others of us complicit in genocide we would no longer be able to live together.  Rather than a conventional shooting war among factions in the West, the aftermath of going “all out” would be gradual poisoning of relations as we all look at each other and see reflected our own renunciation of responsibility for our collective “re-barbarization” (to use Mark’s Steyn’s term), or our inability to match the re-barbarization of the world with anything other than a thoughtless mimetic response.  It is true that if we turned out to be capable of that, there is very little that we could assume (of each other and ourselves) that we wouldn’t be capable of.  The power of White Guilt lies, I would suggest, in this implicit threat to withdraw consent and initiate (or, perhaps, accelerate) this process of civilizational suicide–for White Guilt, this is a form of blackmail, applied in perfect harmony with victimary blackmail, which itself aims at inducing this civil war cum civilizational suicide (it might be compared to the strife introduced among a family, one of whose members is being held hostage, with any decision, made by any member, being potentially the fatal one, with no criteria for deciding what that might be–in such a condition of suspense, the maintenance of solidarity would become extremely difficult, the temptation to be ready to displace blame onto another almost irresistible).  But this could only be effective to the extent that we recognize the destruction WG continually pre-empts in its own virtual reality as a genuine possibility.

The Bush Doctrine, then, is most fundamentally a deferral of our own tendencies to devolve into a new mode of civil disintegration over the enormous tension between our need to take the lead in establishing new, workable, symmetries and reciprocities and the actual existence of glaring asymmetries which are continually judged in the light of those very responsbilities we must take upon ourselves. This deferral must take the form of a very radical mode of freedom, what Eric Gans has called “omnicentrism,” the power of each individual to constitute him/herself as a new center, and hence a new beginning:   only such a “sign” can effectively defer the temptations of both the ancient tyrannies (the “big man,” now revived by Islamic barbarism) and the modern, “ideological” ones (which usurp human freedom by reducing human action to some kind of controllable process). 

The highest political form taken by this mode of freedom is “civil disobedience,” first made prominent, I suppose, in the passive resistance movement led by Gandhi, but perfected, I would suggest, by our own civil rights movement.  Civil disobedience unites the individual’s freedom to resist unjust laws with a very rigorous responsibility toward those laws and whatever legitimacy (and good faith) might be possessed by their authorizers along with a disciplined, exemplary approach to the antagonisms it deliberately instigates:  representing, embodying those antagonisms while refusing to allow them to escalate into violence.  The conception of the world involved in the Bush Doctrine–which it didn’t live up to, and which perhaps can’t be lived up to but, like Christian martyrdom and monasticism, must come to define our culture as a possible space (realized by a few) to be preserved and allowed to shine forth–was best expressed in Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, and it comes down to, we are always on the side of the civil disobedient.  Even when he is wrong we can be on his side because he allows himself to be proven wrong and accepts the lion’s share of the consequences of his own actions.  The richness of this conception was just barely intimated, and not at all explored, and our tragedy is that now, perhaps, it never will be.  It would not, I believe, interfere with our need to engage at times with even despicable regimes, but it would at the very least shape the way we did engage them, always finding some way to place their civil disobedients at the center of our interactions.  I, at least, will be forever grateful to George W. Bush for the courage to even adumbrate such a conception and will dedicate myself to keeping its meaning out of reach of the jackals and vultures who have been gathering from the beginning and now, I suspect, will not be satisfied until they have paved over all memory of such possibilities, reducing the Bush years to nothing more than a series of criminal adventures, a nightmare from which we can now wake up.

Scenic Politics

For a while, when I was first familiarizing myself with GA, terms other than “deferral,” especially “resolution,” would creep into my thinking about the originary sign and scene, and noticing this has come to remind me of how much more minimal “deferral” is, how central it therefore is the specificity of the hypothesis, and to GA’s decisive break with metaphysical forms of thinking.  To speak of the originary gesture as “resolving” the situation of mimetic rivalry, or “preventing” violence, would be to view the effects of the sign from the outside, as if the line separating the convergence on the central object and the renunciation of that object could be visible to anyone not participating in trying to detect and draw the line themselves; and if this were possible, then it would also be possible to reduce the renunciation to a  formal, generalizable rule in advance of any particular act of renunciation.  In other words, it would be possible to find a “cause” leading to the act of renunciation, and this cause would then be found in our biological or some other pre-existing “equipment,” in which case the sign would itself simply be a “superstructural” reflection of some more foundational “infrastructural” reality.  “Deferral,” meanwhile, perfectly captures the position within the act itself, along with its fundamental contingency, between the convergence heading toward destruction and what will perhaps be no more than the mere delay of that tendency.  One can’t know–one can’t know any more than that whatever gesture one puts forth is minimally more likely to subtract from rather than accelerate the momentum dragging us along toward the catastrophe. Instead of imminent destruction, we have really done no more than make it “imminently imminent,” and that imminence of imminence gives us a little space within which to work.  We can’t even think in terms of whether the “problem” has been “genuinely solved,” or “kicked down the road,” trivialized or covered up, or, for that matter, irresponsibly avoided and thereby intensified, to reappear even more menacingly tomorrow–the categories which enable us to make even these distinctions are after the fact, metaphysical accretions, even if we couldn’t really avoid using them to describe what seem to be more or less effective gestures of deferral (and isn’t even this “seeming” taking place on some mimetic scene, upon which the projected “seeming” itself defers some crisis?).  The most fundamental question for an originary social thought as well as epistemology might be, what is the horizon of any act of deferral?  What is its “reach”? It seems plausible to suggest that it impossible to “invest” in any act of deferral while dwelling, or perhaps even entertaining the possibility of, its fallibility–in other words, I have to completely believe my act of deferral will succeed, at least for that period in which I am enacting it; which would further imply that I must exclude from consideration all the indications which suggest that it might not, in fact succeed.  I can and must recognize and assimilate those indications, but only in the form of those unavoidable immediate modifications in my act of deferral as I articulate it, not as fully imagined forces which might render it useless.  The fact that I can look back afterward and note how risky the whole business in fact was can’t, then, provide any knowledge that would be useful in the midst of the next act of deferral except insofar as the very act of looking back, itself, guided by an interest in preserving the sign, sharpens my sensitivity to the immediate appearance of counter-indications.  (But it might just as easily dull my sensitivities to unprecedented indications.)  Our horizons, though, can be progressively extended insofar as any act of deferral leaves behind it a sign, which can be repeated by someone other than me, and provides a starting point for the next act of deferral:  defend that sign.  Defending the sign against attempts to undermine and circumvent it provides for the capacity for ever increasing foresight, especially insofar as cultural signs become increasingly complex, deferring (through a kind of ethical and esthetic economy) a range of rivalries and crises simultaneously.  In that case, though, the real threat to the sign is not so much direct attacks on it or attempts to evade its strictures, but the rivalries the sign itself instigates over who represents or embodies it.  Monotheism defers a far greater range of rivalries than tribal or “big man” social and cultural forms; but who represents the genuine monotheistic stance?  So, another act of deferral regarding this overreaching produces the self-governing nation, intellectual freedom, and finally the modern market, which opens up the possibility of positive sum rivalries–competition for Nobel Prizes among scientists leads to cures and inventions for the rest of us, competition for higher profits and entrepenuerial pre-eminence leads to ever more diverse consumer goods, competition for artistic fame (Oscars and Pulitzers) leads to cultural wealth, and so on.  Here, though, I would suggest (or hypothesize) that the narrowing of horizons implicit in any act of deferral reaches a point where dangers to the signs generated can no longer be discerned.  I am not disputing the Hayekian point that in a market system knowledge is distributed throughout the system as a whole, in the hundreds of millions of daily exchanges carried out globally, and that such knowledge could never be effectively gathered in a single point.  My claim is different–there is nothing in the Hayekian model that says we can’t maintain some knowledge of the value of the market system itself, and the basic intellectual means for defending it against rivals; but nothing in the Hayekian model implies that such knowledge will be widely distributed either.  The market system relies upon, and would collapse without, such knowledge as that regarding the sacrality of the individual soul, of the disinterested mind, of the desire to be well thought of beyond one’s immediate circle (to think well of oneself when alone, for example), of the generative power of giving without any hope of receiving in turn, of devotion to some community larger than oneself and capable of preserving a history of exemplary actions (in turn necessary for all the other virtues I just listed), and so on.  The totalitarian eruptions of the 20th century, which have left as their residue (more deferral) White Guilt, perhaps the closest thing to an overarching theology in today’s world, suggest as much:  by itself, the market cannot defend itself against the resentment it inevitably generates, which accumulates and takes shape as social and political movements before the means of deferring it through the market have developed.  It might be, furthermore, that the kind of long term, supposedly permanent modes of deferral to which the liberal welfare state aspires (Social Security must never be questioned, because 19th century Dickensian workshops are ready to return at any moment, as soon as we let down our guard–this is itself part of the anti-totalitarian deferral, marked, as any deferral must be, by what it defers), now interferes with the kind of medium term forms of deferral we need to erect articulating the myriad short term forms on the marketplace; modes of deferral we might model on insurance, for example, where each one together with everyone else continually hedges, always improvising while gathering the best information available (and generating that very information in our gathering), against the catastrophes we know must be on the way, and will ultimately, in the really long run, overwhelm our best efforts (while–who knows–perhaps calling forth even better efforts of which we won’t be capable until we are capable); or on “intelligence,” listening to as much as we can, piecing together what we hear into plausible patterns (while remaining aware that we are probably blind to other, equally plausible patterns), finding ways of getting “inside” as many different institutions and communities as possible and finding ways to see beyond the way they self-consciously represent themselves to others and themselves.  Both “insurance” and “intelligence” are predicated upon the “imminence of imminence,” capable of memory and tradition while resistant to sclerosis and reactiveness, at least when submitted to the forms of transparency and accountability which correspond to the the structure of these modes of deferral (which is to say, when they aren’t mortgaged to “long term” projections which really aim at institutional self-protection).  And these are also modes of deferral which rely upon firstness–anyone can set a mode of intelligence in motion (by simply asking the questions no one else is), anyone, along with a few others, can cobble together a way of pooling resources against some of the most obvious and inescapable dangers of life–as opposed to the “all together now” model of modern liberalism which believes it can marginalize risk so thoroughly that it simply ends up demonizing whoever appears as its bearer.

Scenic Politics

These are not normal times.  It would be a mistake, I think, to see the Democrats gaining a majority in the House or Senate as the standard, people-punishing-the-President’s-party-in-the-sixth-year-of-his Presidency.  The Democrats offer nothing–indeed, claim to offer nothing–other than a ritualistic tearing apart and devouring of the Bush Administration and all of its works.  This will not merely be a question of more aggressive oversight, or a rolling back of some more “extreme” initiatives, or “teaching Republicans a lesson”–it will be non-stop subpoenas, impeachment, dismantling key elements of the War on Terror, an abandonment of Iraq, and a signal sent throughout the world to allies and enemies alike that the US cannot be relied upon, everyone should make their own accommodations in this “Final Conflict.”  The Democrats are a deeply pathological party, representing broader global forces absolutely inimical to constitutional government, free market economics, Christianity, Jews and Israel and any assertion of cultural boundaries set by a presumed common human origin.  Any idea that power will make them more responsible is as reasonable here as it has turned out to be with the Palestinians–there is no way Democrats in power would be able to resist the forces that have placed them there–the anti-war “netroots,” funded by George Soros and crazed by years of flailing against what they see as dark, conspiratorial forces. 

I am certainly not predicting such a Democratic victory–in fact, we will learn a lot about how completely the “mainstream media” has “jumped the shark” if, as I suspect, the poll results showing decisive, even overwhelming, Democratic gains are heavily and deliberately skewed for the purpose of demoralizing Republicans and depressing turnout.  But we will know about that soon enough–for now, it might be useful to reflect upon what such an upheaval would mean. 

First of all, it is a very strange time for such ominous clouds to be gathering over the Republican majority.  After all, what’s wrong, exactly?  The economy seems to be in excellent shape–here in Connecticut, one of the Democratic congressional candidates is running against “Bush’s disastrous economic policies” but has yet to specify wherein the disaster lies.  There was the Abramoff scandal, which tainted the Republicans, but, really, how much can that explain?  Mark Foley?–you must be kidding.  There have been no terrorist attacks on American soil which, for the nutroots, might suggest that the Bush Administration has frabricated the entire terrorist issue to implement its plans to install a fascist theocracy, but one would assume that for most Americans that would be an indication to leave well enough alone.  And issues like immigration and out of control spending generates significant resentment among conservatives, but how many people well enough informed to be focused on such issues would take their grievances to the point of wanting to see Speaker Pelosi wielding the gavel in January?

It must really be all about Iraq, it seems to me, and even here the source and logic of the complaint is not very clear.  Can one really doubt that it’s better for Saddam Hussein to be out and us to be in in Iraq?  That some 3,000 deaths is a remarkably low number of casualties?  That counter-insurgency wars are inherently unpredictable and require patience and an ability to improvise, and hence can’t be referred back to some “plan”?  That this is a long struggle and even the worst case scenarios in Iraq might contain a range of silver linings which, if we keep our heads, we should be able to exploit?

Obviously these are far from rhetorical questions–many, if not most people are doubting these things.  And if we look at the form the doubts take, I think we find something rather interesting.  Those who complain about the number of dead in Iraq will not consider themselves obliged to tell you how many dead they think would be “worth” obtaining our goal there–to some extent this is because those generating such resentments think that America asserting its power inevitably makes things worse so that it wouldn’t be worth a single death and they are simply manipulating the fears and compassion of others; but that wouldn’t explain why the argument seems effective beyond a small circle of the ideologically committed anti-Americans.  Nor does anyone feel obliged to tell you how long it should take to win (much less how they have “done the math” on these questions); or, to get into some of the more specific complaints, if we had tried to keep the Iraqi army in place after the invasion, what negative consequences might have flowed from our apparent identification with that oppressive force; or if we had not invaded Iraq, how would the sanctions regime we were previously enforcing be doing by this point; or… or…. in fact, hardly anyone seems obliged to construct an alternative scene predicated upon their complaint.  Almost everyone, as Victor Davis Hanson has repeatedly pointed out, seems immediately attuned to the “pulse of the battlefield,” reacting to the last crisis, the newly revealed vulnerable point in those actually responsible for making and implementing decisions. 

In other words, the threat to the Republican majority is more of a generalized resentment towards reality–the Republicans represent everything messy, sordid and compromised in our preliminary attempts to create a new world while (inevitably) steeped in the old one.  The Bush Doctrine has initiated a process which genuinely threatens established understandings of world order and the U.S. role in that order; for those transnational progressivists who saw history going their way during the 90s, this is all profoundly upsetting, almost a violation of natural law:  hence the bizarre alliance between those would would like to reconstruct the whole world order in accord with their own idealized, post-soveriegn, version of international law and the kind of old style “realist” who practically prides himself on his amorality. 

None of these alternatives has any answers to totalitarian Islam, which we would lose little understanding of (and gain much) were we to operate under the assumption that it is tailored from top to bottom to exploit each and every weakness, fantasy and vanity of the transnational progressives and realists alike.  And yet the Bush Doctrine has not imposed itself–far from it.  Bush’s own hesitations (which, for reasons I hope this post has made clear, I do not remark on with any sense of self-righteousness), especially in the area of personnel, and especially in uprooting the liberal and “realist” cultures in what should be two of our most engaged institutions (the CIA and State Department), are partly responsible; but so is the enormous resistance his initiatives has produced (the insurgency Bush really failed to anticipate is that of the transnational progressive elite) and the paradoxes and unintended consequences intrinsic to those intiatives.  What happens when a democratic election brings a totalitarian Islamic party, a devoted practioner of the worst kind of terror, to power?  I find it hard to even understand the moral emptiness it takes to pose such questions with a sneer, to discredit democratic transformation–in the name of what, exactly?  But it’s a real question, and a practical answer to it requires a more coherent response than the current divisions in our society and throughout the world seem to allow for. 

Perhaps the best way to put it is to note that, as yet, we simply have no measure for the effectivity, even meaning, of what we are doing.  We don’t have the necessary yardsticks for measuring success, because those yardsticks must be generated by events themselves in any new situation.  We are still applying yardsticks from the past:  WWII for supporters of the war, Vietnam for opponents (and these yardsticks, and many others, can be applied in various ways, producing varying degrees of real insight).  But the further along we go, the less these yardsticks will measure.  Whoever wins a couple of weeks from now, we will need to devise such measures, which is to say, we will need to participate in emitting a new sign, a new mode of deferral that can actually be tried out on the ground.  It may be that we will have to wait until the passion of the sparagmos–which, once it starts, will not remain limited to partisan Democrats–runs its course.  We’ll see what’s left.

Scenic Politics

Islam has been making steady headway in increasing its numbers in the West not only through a higher birthrate but through conversion, which has apparently accelerated since 9/11.  I would present, as a useful hypothesis, the likelihood that the emergent alliance between the Left and totalitarian Jihad will be “consecrated” at some point by substantial conversions among Leftists to Islam.  Why not?  Islam is undoubted the stronger, ascendent party and whatever secularist, Enlightenment scruples the Left once had are incompatible with postmodern White Guilt; anyway, the radical left in particular has always been confronted with the dilemma of how to communicate with its “natural” constituency (the “masses”) who, according to leftist (especially Marxist) theory itself are inevitably in thrall to all kinds of “reactionary” (nationalist, sexist, etc.) ideologies–one solution to this dilemma has always been to “speak in the language of the people” and conversion to Islam would simply be a somewhat more consistent version of this strategy. Not to mention that Islam is in many ways the religion most compatible with various positions of resentment within the West:  some sectors of the poor, racial minorities, prisoners, etc., who desire a religion that demands of them commitment, conformity and sacrifice while preserving and refining the intensity of their resentment for the normal bourgeois world. 

What, then, is the answer on the part of us members of the anti-White Guilt coalition, those who want to make the world safe for firstness?  I will suggest here that we should ourselves adopt “conversion” as a model of political and moral communication, one which is far more effective than models of “persuasion” which, to paraphrase Eric Gans on metaphysics, assume that the answer to one declarative statement is another declarative statement which in turn (here is the part generally left unexplained) somehow produces a third, significantly different declarative.  If such change takes place, though, it is because the ostensive has entered somewhere, and if the ostensive has entered it means a new sacred object has been indicated, leaving us with the question, how does one represent such an object to someone who embraces another mode of sacrality?  This seems to me to be a better, and more originary question, than those regarding which reasons people might find more convincing (which already presupposes a shared sacrality).

The answer to Islamic conversion, then, is a missionary spirit of our own.  I do mean this in the most literal sense: first of all, a primary pivot of our foreign policy should be insisting upon (first of all) the rights of Christians to proselytize and the rights of Muslims to convert.  Second, though, we should hope that Christians and even Jews take up (or where appropriate, intensify) the project of converting others–we should all be trying to convert each other, in other words.  At the same time, I present this proposal as a thought experiment, to indicate the kind of cultural transformations that would be necessary for us to possess and project a genuine civilizational self-confidence.  To the rather too obvious (and, of course, true) objection that people trying to convert you are inevitably obnoxious and the urgency invested in missionary activity necessarily subverts personal interaction–if you believe that Jesus and only Jesus saves (or–fill in the blanks), and all boundaries relegating this belief to certain areas of life are removed, what prevents you from becoming terminally intolerable and relations between co-workers, colleagues and even family members from becoming impossible?  Well, the answer is new conventions and norms of politeness–what interests me is the general possibility that conversations could at any point turn toward conversion if they attain the right level of seriousness and trust, not that it actually happens according to any preferred schedule or degree of regularity.  The removal of this taboo, at any rate, need not lead to an orgy of the kind of behavior we fear will raise the level of resentment on both local and global levels.  Our ability to sustain relationships which need not take such possibilities off the table will be an index of our freedom and culteral maturity (and a useful reminder that any religion supportive of habits required for modernity will have to be self-consciously chosen–which further helps us to counter the tendency to absorb religion into the “ascriptive” categories like race, gender and ethnicity, a mere source of victimization rather than an argument about the sacred).

Even more, I am contending that the notion of conversion needs to encroach upon secular territory, where it is already far more relevant than we might imagine:  think, for example, of how you came by your own political commitments and opinions–if they weren’t inherited from your family, then I would argue that you probably had, at some point, what was in effect a conversion experience:  such as being affected by the radiant example of some icon of resistance to injustice, or some violation of sacred principles by members of your own grouping so unforgivable that the principles are themselves irremediably tainted.

So, I will conclude with three points for further discussion:

First, a pillar of our foreign policy must be an open market in faith everywhere, but especially in the Muslim world.

Second, that conversion be seen as a broader, even privileged way of understanding subjective transformation in GA:  we move from one scene to another, drawn by the greater sacrality at its center (which leaves open for inquiry, of course, what makes one sacrality greater than another at a given point in space-time).  Not the only way of understanding subjective transformation, of course:  in fact, moving toward something like an originary psychology, we should want a catalogue of possibilities (another one, I would suggest, being “seduction”).

Third, we should see our own commitments to market society and constitutional order as something to which one converts, in the wake of being granted a revelation regarding the inadequate deferral capacities (the fragility of the scene) constituted by various “Big Man” models of order, attempts to return to a primitive egalitarianism, and so on:  our efforts at persuasion, then, can become the establishment of scenes rendering such revelations more accessible.  And this doesn’t mean PR efforts aimed at showing Western society in an unrealistically positive light:  rather, its a question of arranging in a spectacle all aspects of our society.  And, by the same token, we would thereby be devising tests to determine whether nominal commitments to freedom and democracy are merely that.

Scenic Politics

…by playing in accord with his own rules.  More precisely:  we demand an apology from every Muslim cleric, every Muslim head of state, every Muslim legislator, editorialist, you name it, who has incited violence against the Pope, being as we see this as a direct attack on our civilization.  And if the apology is refused…well, they know better than anyone the consequences.  We can just choose at random one of the psychopathic placards from an equally randomly selected “protest” to determine the proper punishment.

 The emerging question among those serious about our enemy (i.e., not liberals and leftists) is whether the view that we are fighting “extremists” who have “distorted” an otherwise “peaceful” or at least “reformable” religion remains sustainable, even as a polite fiction–or, are we simply at war with Islam?  My view has been, and remains, that we should defer this question for as long as possible, and meanwhile craft policies which will be effective regardless of what the answer turns out to be; and policies that, furthermore, will supply us with data that will ultimately enable us to answer, when we have no choice.  For this very reason we need to take actions that let us see whether your average Imam who screams “Death to America” every Friday does so because he knows there is no price to be paid and a cheaply won popularity to be gained, or whether he indeed wishes to “engage” us.  We must begin to force the question, in other words, even as we continue to defer any definitive answer.

 Scenic Politics