The logic lurking behind the authors question is the assertion that if you benefit from capitalism you should just shut up and not voice problems with other aspects of capitalism. This has little or nothing to do with the elementary economic observations you make about the functioning of capitalism. A parallel would be as follows: if you benefit from technology are you mistaken to nonetheless criticize and fight against some of the problems of technology (environmental problems, health problems, etc)? By the authors logic the answer would be no. One can both be critical of certain aspects of capitalism– for instance, working conditions in third world countries, the destruction of local jobs, etc., etc., etc –while nonetheless endorsing other aspects. Similarly, one can endorse certain aspects of technology while having serious problems with other aspects. The form of the author’s question is designed to put the respondant in an either/or situation and insinuate hypocrisy, which is the mark of a very primitive, simplistic, and vulgar form of thought; not a product of the economic sophistication you try to point to. Given that the author also chose to name himself according to an extreme rightwing southern apologist in the original email that he sent to me, I have little or no doubt that he would ask a similar question like “do you feel that it’s okay to criticize the American government when you benefit from living in America in a number of ways?” Questions such as this are one of the favorite tools of the reactionary conservative. They all follow a common “logical form” expressed in the old standby: “love it or leave it!”
To put the matter a bit differently, the original post wasn’t seeking to understand the authors question, but was poking fun at this type of question altogether. Yes, yes, I’m familiar with the ideology you outline and explicate. I just think it’s mistaken for a variety of reasons.
I suspect that many who have a thorough grounding in economics would disagree with both your “we must destroy to create” thesis, your thesis that socialism is inevitably accompanied by horrors such as we saw in the Soviet Union, or in the inevitability of capitalist economy. That, however, is another conversation.
larvalsubjects said this on April 27th, 2007 at 6:47 pm (edit) Sorry, you sound insulted. Perhaps I was pedantic. I really didn’t want to offend you.
Personally, I don’t have a problem criticizing capitalism or the negative impact capitalism has on people. And I don’t believe my elementary observations delegitimize your complaints in any way. I thought you asked about how the author might respond to your analogy and I shared my view with you on that. Was your question merely rhetorical? Or, do you think I’m incorrect about how the author might respond or was that not really what you were asking? It seems that you reacted to me as if I was the author and you were arguing with my response. That’s an argument I haven’t the least bit of interest in engaging in.
Really, I might be misunderstanding you, but I thought the question was essentially, ‘how would the author of the statement respond?” I could have said, Levy, your argument is very powerful. You would leave the author slackjawed and stunned, but I don’t think that is what would happen.
To reiterate, I believe that such a person would say that abuse is not intrinsic to parenthood, but destruction is intrinsic to material production and prosperity. I’d add that by introducing the notion of an abused child, you’re introducing something that the author would likely react to as an inflammatory accusation of a highly personal nature. That’s because I think the analogy is more than just a straightforward analogy. It also conveys a less manifest, inflammatory meaning, even if that isn’t what you intend. I think there is an excellent possibility that the author of the statement would hear you morally equating them with a child abuser. Whether that’s how you see the author or not, I think that might be conveyed. The author of the statement would probably be thinking, ‘hey, Buddy (this isn’t me, this is how cspitalists talk — and that’s a joke, Levy), I just built you a computer, you like it and because you chucked your typewriter now I’m just like a child abuser? Voices will get raised.
I’m quite sure that is the response you would get from most capitalists whether you agree with that response or not. If you don’t either acknowledge the elementary insight and propose some way to work around it, or, alternatively, offer an informed disgreement with the elementary economic insight that demonstrates an understanding of economic creation, I don’t think you will draw a capitalist into serious engagement. You’ll probably be dismissed or end up being the recipient of insults.
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you’re interested in how to engage others in everyday discussions in ways that might influence their thinking on matters such as these. I’m just offering my two-cents based on my experience with this particular subject.
Dr X said this on April 27th, 2007 at 9:03 pm (edit) Well, I’m wondering about the economic regime in which the letters themselves were invented - back in the days when Baal was properly worshipped and a rulers were not treated as gods, but literally were gods. But read any of the classical economists, and are they grateful? Do they say, at least, that sacrificers to Baal did do a few good things? No, those spoilsports. Capitalism arose on the bones of earlier systems WHILE EMPLOYING THE SIGNS AND SYMBOLS developed by those earlier systems. Myself, I just want to see a sincere apology from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, followed by a fund to build some temples to Baal
. roger said this on April 27th, 2007 at 11:03 pm (edit) Dr. X, yes I intended the question rhetorically and it was meant to be inflammatory. I get a couple emails like this a week and never respond to them. I don’t feel that there’s much point in engaging people such as this in discussion and tend to advocate ridiculing them out of existence. That is, I think Voltaire was on to something in Candide. They are of interest to me only in terms of how their rhetoric is structured and for whatever insight they provide into the psychology of minds full of ressentiment.
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that you’re interested in how to engage others in everyday discussions in ways that might influence their thinking on matters such as these.
It’s likely that I haven’t been entirely clear here, that I’m not expressing myself well in this regard. I’ve spent about six years off and on observing various conservative blogs and sometimes even participating in the guise of a rightwing conservative. I’ve experimented with rhetorical techniques, to discover what will earn prestige in these communities and what will earn vilification. There are a few I continue to read daily to this day, carefully examining the structures of their rhetoric and how these discussions function in relation to information and stories that are uncomfortable to their cause. These are blogs that regularly ban others that don’t tow the party line, so I think I’ve been pretty effective in these interactions given that I’ve never been banned. I’ve thought about these observations as fieldwork studying particular types of rhetoric. The fundamental lesson I’ve learned in this time is that these forms of discourse are populated by a number of highly effective defense structures that render them almost immune to any change or discussion with folk from the outside.
In a number of cases there really is no question of engaging someone else in dialogue or trying to reach and persuade them. Rather, if a dialogue takes place between two people where there’s no chance of persuasion possible, the purpose of this dialogue does not relate to the two people involved but to those witnessing the discussion, to the audience. The discussion is had for the sake of the audience, not for the sake of persuading the other person. Perhaps you’ve seen O Brother Where Art Thou. Recall one of the final scenes where the ugliness of the leading politician is revealed over the radio in a debate between the Soggy Bottom Boys and him, and he’s carried out on a post. This is the point of such discussions, not the persuasion of the politician himself.
When I speak about influencing public discussions, what I’m referring to is putting certain things publicly on the table that aren’t currently available within the public sphere. For instance, in today’s political climate in the United States, being a communist isn’t really a viable option. Sure, you can be a communist. But you won’t find yourself getting serious attention from the news media or from the public. Perhaps this is now changing as we elected our first socialist recently. However, the question here would be “what would have to change in order for being a communist to be seen as just as viable an option as being a democrat or a republican or a libertarian? How does this become a recognize option for the public?”
This can fruitfully be thought of in terms of populations in an ecosystem. How does one go about shifting a population that is almost completely absent in a particular ecosystem to being one that is dominant or the plurality within an ecosystem? The same holds true in public rhetoric. In order to understand this point, rhetoric shouldn’t be thought of two people talking to one another and seeking to persuade one another (what you seem to imply in your comment above), but rather in terms of themes that circulate throughout a social space like an obvious common sense that all parties involved share, even if only in the form of taking a postion for or against. Very few take a position for or against communism today as it isn’t a real position in the social field. The question is one, then, of how to get certain themes on the table at all, how to make them obvious furniture of the social environment.
Let’s take a concrete example. On a few occasions I’ve praised Dawkin’s
God Delusion and Dennett’s
Breaking the Spell. Why? I don’t think these texts are particularly sophisticated. I don’t think they make very new or interesting arguments. I don’t think all of their arguments are even that plausible. Certainly they aren’t the sorts of texts that I would cite or take seriously in an article I would write for an academic journal. Most importantly, I don’t think these arguments are going to persuade any of the devoutly religious.
So why do these books interest me? These books interest me in their status as “public books”. That is, they are addressed to a general, non-academic reader or are designed for mass consumption. Since they have been published they have generated discussion on a number of popular television news and radio programs and have been the subject of numerous newspaper articles. The important point here has to do with how these books relate to a certain context in American politics. These books have occured in a media environment that has been saturated by Christianity, where values discussions are constantly pitched in terms of religion, and where atheism is so absent (in news reporting) that it isn’t even discussed premised on the assumption that atheists just don’t exist in the United States. As a rhetorical event and fact (an enunciation that took place and inscribed itself in the media system), these books are thus interesting in that they challenge this assumption and introduce a new creature into the social space: The Atheist. Atheists now, perhaps, come to be recognized as a population that must be counted and recognized as having a say in public debates about policy. A believer finds that they must respond to this position in these debates, whereas before the existence of atheists in the United States didn’t differ markedly from that of biological organisms such as ourselves and infrared light, i.e., they were invisible. All response also entails concession and compromise at the rhetorical level. As such, the simple appearance of something like this– whether one agrees with it or not –shifts the nature of the entire debate and what is rhetorically obvious in subsequent discussions. Time will tell whether the growing voice of atheists has this effect on public debates or whether the hundreds of thousands of agonistics and atheists in the United States will continue to be voiceless and invisible in how public discussions or molded and framed.
No one is going to persuade the likes of Pat Robertson and his followers. What can be done is a shift in the very assumptions underlying the populace in such a way that it is increasingly difficult for such positions to even be heard or recognized as anything but fringe or lunatic positions. That is, positions can also be taken off the table and delegitimated. No one worships Greek gods anymore, perhaps organized religion as we know it today will someday disappear as well. This is why I’m always emphasizing the ethics of repetition and why it’s so important to repeat. It’s not simply a good argument that matters. Every rhetorician knows this. Rather, it’s important to repeat and repeat and repeat again until things are so ingrained in the unconscious of the population that they seem obvious. At one point, a person was on the fringe if they advocated mechanism (in physics) and heliocentrism in astronomy. Now everyone takes these things as being self-evident and assumes them as a part of the furniture of their universe. Even the religious who fought these things believe them today. This was through constant repetition or a saturation of the social space much like cane toads came to saturate the ecosystem in Australia.
Today conservative assumptions are the common sense of even many “leftist” oriented people in the United States. If you frequent democratic blogs like dailykos you discover that their positions are almost indiscernible from those of Barry Goldwater decades ago. This shows just how successful the right has been in shifting the entire field of discussion to the right. This has occured because conservatives successfully dominated the radio and news spheres, repeating their message over and over again and creating certain assumptions about the nature of reality, through a combination of argumentation, production of affects, mockery, vilification, and humiliation. In the meantime, other leftist thinkers feel as if they’re doing something by writing articles on Judith Butler or Zizek addressed to other academics, as if this is how change is produced. The point is not to persuade but to make a certain theme so ominipresent that it comes to be seen as an obvious reality. This also involves the destruction of certain forms of discourse. No one today can publicly stand up and advocate the positions of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis without being booed out of the room. This didn’t occur by persuading the people that had these beliefs, but by changing public attitudes towards people that have these beliefs (i.e., the audience witnessing the discussion). It involved a combination of mockery, humiliation, vilification, and condemnation, as well as sound arguments. This ad hominem style of argumentation made the price too high for others to advocate these positions or tolerate them in the public space. I would like to see that happen with figure such as Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Maulkin, and their more moderate versions. In short, by posting his questions publicly I was mocking the person who wrote me with the hope that he wouldn’t write me again and perhaps that he might feel a little shame and that others who have occasionally thought such things might feel a twinge of guilt.
I am not, of course, suggesting that my blog is somehow doing these things. Here I’m concerned with theory of various sorts, not the actual activity of producing these changes. Clearly I have a lot of work to do in expressing myself if you’re reading my remarks as a plea for Habermasian communication and persuasion with fascists
. larvalsubjects said this on April 28th, 2007 at 12:07 am (edit) 
