None of those terrible conflicts can be said to have been caused by religious fanaticism and intolerance

The Stillborn God, secularism: [This is the first in a series of posts responding to Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, published by Knopf in September of this year.—ed.] SSRC Home SSRC Blogs Blog Home About the Immanent Frame About the Editor

The great separation posted by José Casanova

In my view, Mark Lilla reproduces in a very seductive narrative the two main myths of modern Western secularism:
a) that the “religious passions” are particularly prone to violence and therefore dangerous for politics. Supposedly, this was the dramatic lesson from the catastrophic experience of the long, brutish, and nasty religious wars of early modern Europe which left European societies in ruin.
b) that the “Great Separation” of religion and politics, namely the secularization of the state and of politics and the privatization of religion, was the felicitous response of Western societies to this catastrophic experience. Hobbes is here the great hero who opened the way for purely secular political philosophy and offered the formula for a secular Leviathan that would tame the religious passions.
Beginning first with the second premise, Hobbes may well have inaugurated the tradition of modern secular political philosophy, but as a historical narrative of the actual transformation of political institutions in early modern Europe, this is simply a historical myth. The religious wars of early modern Europe and particularly the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) did not ensue, at least not immediately, into the secular state but rather into the confessional one. The principle cuius regio eius religio, established first at the Peace of Augsburg and reiterated at the Treaty of Westphalia, is not the formative principle of the modern secular democratic state, but rather that of the modern confessional territorial absolutist state. Nowhere in continental Europe did religious conflict lead to secularization, but rather to the confessionalization of the state and to the territorialization of religions and peoples. This was the formula of the continental European Leviathan.
Moreover, this early modern dual pattern of confessionalization and territorialization was already well established before the religious wars and even before the Protestant Reformation. The Spanish Catholic state under the Catholic Kings serves as the first paradigmatic model of state confessionalization and religious territorialization. The expulsion of Spanish Jews and Muslims who refused to convert to Catholicism is the logical consequence of such a dyamic of state formation. Ethno-religious cleansing, in this respect, stands at the very origin of the early modern European state. Religious minorities caught in the wrong confessional territory were offered not secular toleration, much less freedom of religion, but the “freedom” to emigrate.
For almost three hundred years, European societies continued exporting all their “sects” and religious minorities overseas, while the confessional territorial boundaries between Catholic and Protestant and between Lutheran and Calvinist throughout Europe remained basically frozen until the drastic secularization of post-World War II European societies made those confessional boundaries seemingly irrelevant.
As to the second assumption driving Lilla’s argument, that the religious impulse is an apocalyptic one, imposing God’s justice by violence, it is indeed astounding to observe how widespread is the view throughout Europe that religion is intolerant and creates conflict. Mark Lilla simply offers an erudite version of this secularist “doxa.” According to the 1998 ISSP public opinion survey, the overwhelming majority of Europeans, practically over two thirds of the population in every Western European country, holds the view that religion is “intolerant.” Since people are unlikely to expressly recognize their own intolerance, one can asume that in expresing such an opinion Europeans are thinking of somebody else’s “religion” or, alternatively, present a selective retrospective memory of their own past religion, which fortunately they consider to have outgrown. It is even more telling that a majority of the population in every Western European country, with the significant exception of Norway and Sweden, shares the view that “religion creates conflict.”

Such a widespread negative view of “religion” cannot possibly be grounded empirically in the collective historical experience of European societies in the 20th century or in the actual personal experience of most contemporary Europeans. It can plausibly be explained, however, as a secular construct that has the function of positively differentiating modern secular Europeans from “the religious other,” either from pre-modern religious Europeans or from contemporary non-European religious people, particularly from Muslims. Most striking is the view of “religion” in the abstract as the source of violent conflict, given the actual historical experience of most European societies in the 20th century. “The European short century,” from 1914 to 1989, using Eric Hobsbawm’s apt characterization, was indeed one of the most violent, bloody, and genocidal centuries in the history of humanity. But none of the horrible massacres—neither the senseless slaughter of millions of young Europeans in the trenches of World War I, nor the countless millions of victims of Bolshevik and communist terror, nor the most unfathomable of all, the Nazi Holocaust and the global conflagration of World War II, culminating in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—none of those terrible conflicts can be said to have been caused by religious fanaticism and intolerance. All of them were rather the product of modern secular ideologies and of very secular “passions.”
Yet contemporary Europeans, and Lilla with them, prefer to selectively forget the more inconvenient recent memories of secular ideological conflict and retrieve instead the long forgotten memories of the religious wars of early modern Europe to make sense of the religious conflicts they see today proliferating around the world and increasingly threatening them. Rather that seeing the common structural contexts of modern state formation, inter-state geopolitical conflicts, modern nationalism and the political mobilization of ethno-cultural and religious identities, processes central to modern European history that became globalized through the European colonial expansion, Europeans prefer seemingly to attribute those conflicts to “religion,” that is, to religious fundamentalism and to the fanaticism and intolerance that is supposedly intrinsic to “pre-modern” religion, an atavistic residue which modern secular enlightened Europeans have fortunately left behind. One may suspect that the function of such a selective historical memory is to safeguard the perception of the progressive achievements of Western secular modernity, offering a self-validating justification of the secular separation of religion and politics as the condition for modern liberal democratic politics.
Indeed, what I find most disturbing in Lilla’s genealogical reconstruction, presented as a straightforward history of ideas, is the attempt to attribute the violent impulses of modern secular totalitarianism to the rebirth of religious politico-theological messianism as a reaction to the “stillborn God” of liberal German Kulturprotestantismus. Barth and Rosenzweig are surreptitiously presented as “guilty by association” with Gogarten and Bloch, fellow travelers respectively of Nazism and Communism, who, one must infer from Lilla’s narrative, opened the gates to the religious apocalyptic demons who had been kept in check by secular political philosophy since Hobbes. One could easily reconstruct a more direct and less contorted genealogy from Hobbes’ Leviathan to the totalitarian state. Ferdinand Toennies and Carl Schmitt, two Hobbesian secular political thinkers, could easily be linked to an anti-liberal secular (not religious) politico-theological discourse which not only prepared the ground but offered explicit political philosophies more akin to the totalitarian Leviathan. But such an attempt would offer a no less distorted and problematic genealogical history of ideas.
The point is that “religion” has no monopoly on the “passions” and taming “religious passions” offers no security from secular political violence. At least the discourse of “the end of ideology” of the 1960’s, just before the counterculture and the worldwide student rebellions, knew that “secular ideologies” could be as dangerous and as deadly as “religious” ones.
Lilla’s construction of the “great separation” is based on a paradigmatic contrast between theocratic political theology and secular political philosophy, a pure analytic construct, which is however then superimposed upon real history as a real separation which actually happened supposedly in the 17th century with Hobbes. Even as a pure analytic history of ideas, such a construction would be highly problematic.

But certainly a history of ideas that disregards altogether social history, institutional political history, and the history of mentalities, is not in a serious position to offer a credible interpretation of Western developments, much less to present “the actual choice contemporary societies face…between two grand traditions of thought, two ways of envisaging the human condition.”
The great separation, if there was one, was not a radical break that happened in the 17th century but rather had a long medieval history. The process of Western secularization must either remain unintelligible or be simply the projection of a secularist philosophy of history, unless one begins with the premise that the very category of the saeculum was a particular Western medieval theological and legal-canonical category, which is not to be found in earlier forms of Eastern Christianity, nor for that matter in other axial civilizations.
Sociologically speaking at least, the “great separation” was a long-term historical process that began with the Papal Revolution and the Investitures conflicts of the 11th-12th centuries and attained its modern institutionalization first with the American and French revolutions. Crucial, however, in challenging Lilla’s account is not just the fact that the separation began de facto much earlier in the Middle Ages, but that when it actually happened institutionally for the first time in the constitutional separation of church and state in the United States, it owed a lot to the influence of religious “fanatics” and “enthusiasts,” namely to radical “sectarians.” Dissenting Baptists played a crucial role in guaranteeing the passage of the Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty, which served as the model for the First Amendment.
The arguments of the Deist Jefferson owed much, no doubt, to the tradition of secular political philosophy inaugurated by Hobbes, most particularly to Locke’s defense of “toleration.” But the argument for “religious freedom,” so brilliantly elaborated by the anti-establishmentarian Madison in “Memorial and Remonstrance,” has a different intellectual pedigree, namely the theological argument of dissenting sects and religious enthusiasts claiming the individual right to religious freedom and to freedom of conscience sheltered from both absolutist state and ecclesiastical institutions. The dual clause of the First Amendment had certainly the function of protecting the secular state from religious entanglements, but even more importantly, and this is what distinguishes the American separation from the French secularist one, to protect the free exercise of religion in society from both secular state and hegemonic church.

Moreover, the separation of church and state in the United States did not entail the great separation of religion and politics that Lilla seems to presuppose. The entanglement of religion and politics has been a constant in American history and many of the movements for social and political reform, from abolition to civil rights, from temperance to women suffrage, used as much the discourse of Christian political theology as that of secular political philosophy. American secularism and American liberalism owe more to the political commitment and the civil disobedience of religious “fanatics” and “enthusiasts” than liberal secularists like Lilla are apparently willing to recognize.
One should be suspicious of any argument that presents the multiple alternatives facing contemporary societies around the world today as a simple binary choice between theocratic political theology (i.e., religious fanaticism) and secular political philosophy (i.e., liberal toleration). To present such a dichotomous alternative, as “the two ways of envisaging the human condition,” not only ignores the many other complex ways in which Western and non-Western societies have envisaged the human condition, but it views societies as individual actors facing existential choices, a rhetorically dramatic but rather problematic conception of human history and of the human condition. This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under The Stillborn God, secularism. RSS 2.0 feed.

Maoists are battling on behalf of private property owners

INI About Why Pragati? Subscribe Ironies on the road Date: Monday, December 03, 2007 Time: 9:22 pm Category: Perspective Discussion: 0 Comments Raj Cherubal

Ironically, while Liberals, the only people who have the principled right to protest Nandigram or similar land grabs are no where to be seen (except in some rarefied newspaper columns) it is the Maoists who are battling on behalf of private property owners against abuse of eminent domain by fellow Communists. Orwell must be grinning in his grave!
One can sense the Liberal’s dilemma and glee coexisting within the same skull. While it is fun to watch Communists squirm, it is difficult to criticise a business friendly, reformist Communist chief minister. Here’s the rub: chief ministers come and go, parties come and go and being pro-capitalist is not necessarily being pro-capitalism. Liberals would do well to stick to their principles.
The time is fast approaching when pro-poor activists have to reconsider their socialist leanings. Take abolition of private property rights. This is usually done in the name of the poor and as a way of redistributing “ill-gotten” wealth of the propertied class. But bizarre as it may sound, it is the poor who need property rights protected by rule of law, and not the rich. De facto, all over the world, the rich and the powerful already enjoy these privileges and defend them with might. More on Raj Cherubal’s blog» This is an excerpt. Download the issue to read the entire article « The killing fields of Bengal

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The new Manhattan Project Atanu Dey

India imports about 70 percent of its current oil needs. It can barely afford that, to say nothing of what it will be like when oil prices continue to hit higher peaks and its needs increase in pace with its growing economy. It lacks nuclear fuels, and has to debase itself begging to be given access to them.
India cannot continue to ignore reality: its continued economic growth and development is predicated on it developing the technology to exploit solar energy, and base its industrial, transportation, commercial, and household energy needs to be met through the derived electrical energy. Every bit of modern technology India uses has been developed elsewhere. It would be a welcome change if it developed the technology that would be its lifeblood. Developing technology is a matter of will, vision, and sometimes dire necessity. The Manhattan project and manned missions to the moon are examples of what can be achieved within a short time if the will exists.
India cannot afford not to develop solar energy technology for a number of reasons. More on Atanu Dey’s blog» This is an excerpt. Download the issue to read the entire article December 03, 2007 Editor (0)

The Indian republic owes its existence to the loftiest moral struggle in modern times

INI About Why Pragati? Subscribe Why Pragati? From our inaugural editorial April 2007

The National Interest

In a land of over a billion minorities, the Indian republic—which owes its existence to the loftiest moral struggle in modern times—presents the best hope for the well-being and development of all its citizens. The survival, security and strengthening of the Indian nation and its institutions, therefore, is not only a matter of supreme moral consequence, but of immense human importance.
Frequently imperfect application, repeated attempts at its perversion and creeping cynicism about its effectiveness must not prevent us from recognising that the Constitution of India offers an enlightened way for us to organise our society and ensure the greatest welfare of all citizens. Surely this is something worth defending. We at The Indian National Interest community strongly believe so. Ergo, this publication.
To rule over the hearts, minds and affairs of the Indian people, their rulers and their adversaries alike have historically employed the device of ‘divide and rule’ and exploited the immense diversity in religion, language, ethnicity and economic background to their own advantage. To our collective loss, we observe that it is happening to this day.
We believe that the national interest lies in defeating the divide and rule paradigm: by upholding the rights and freedoms of the individual and by dismantling the barriers which stand in the way of equality of opportunity.
Pragati expresses several of the themes that we care about dearly: economic freedom, realism in international relations, an open society, a culture of tolerance and an emphasis on good governance. The environment, poverty eradication and rural development have long been appropriated by vested ideological and political interests, over which they have come to assert an exclusivity of sorts. We challenge these claims of intellectual monopoly…
This publication is the product of independent minds, who—­transcending ideological pigeonholes—are ­united in our determination to see a better future for our nation. Subscribe

Karan Singh's action betrays a total disregard for this core aspect of their teaching

NewThought Friday, December 07, 2007 Taslima Nasreen wanted to come to Auroville?

"No", the Chairman of Auroville Foundation Dr. Karan Singh is believed to responded to the news report to the effect that the controversial writer Taslima Nasreen who has been in exile in India for the past twelve years may take residence in Auroville.

It is not known if she had made any application to the Entry Service of Auroville but it is as if she did and the entry service had recommended her but the Chairmain vetoed. Probably Karan singh was reacting to media speculation as a politician which is disappointing. Had he kept silent because it is an issue supposed to be dealt by Entry service of Auroville first and foremost not him except in the final stages it would have been just right. But his reaction betrays a 'we-know-what-is-good-better-than-you' attitude as well a disregard for the role of the Entry Service. Though Entry Service may not be performing to the highest expectations, arbitrary decisions like this by the Chairman shows Auroville in a poor light as a department of the govt. at the whimsical control of a political appointee. Looking deeper, his reaction makes Auroville appear like some kind of a territory under personal dictat of Dr. Karan Singh which is an insult to the constitution of India itself.

According to the Auroville Act passed by the parliament of India Auroville town is to be developed in accordance with the ideals of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And it is known to all those who have studied the Masters' teachings that they considered freedom of action and life as essential for growth of spirit in an individual and society. Karan Singh's action betrays a total disregard for this core aspect of their teaching. He ought to have kept himself away even if the writer had infact applied and the Entry Service of Auroville had approved. They may be right according to the divine will, (who knows?) and if they are wrong it is an opportunity for them to learn form it.

Hope those will avoid tendency to interfere when dealing with Auroville related issues. This is very important if the experiment of Auroville is to proceed in the expected lines of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. posted by aurodas # 3:45 PM Comments: Post a Comment Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]<<> Archives September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007

The realm of freedom came as a new stage of capitalist development

How America's 'Age of Abundance' Has Paved the Road to the 'Pursuit of Happiness'

Capitalism, Lindsey argues, made it possible for Americans to climb Abraham Maslow's motivational pyramid, a "hierarchy of needs" that begins with basic physiological requirements (food, sleep, air), passes through safety (security of body, family, property) and belonging (love, family, intimacy), rises to emotional needs based on esteem (self-respect, respect for others, the respect of others), and culminates in self-actualization (personal growth based on morality, creativity, awareness, trust, fairness, love and individualistic expression). In other words, as health improved and lives grew longer, as disposable income increased and daily life came to center on choice, Americans began to be able to devote themselves to the "pursuit of happiness" that was so central to the Founding Fathers' conception of independence.

Material security enabled us to turn our attention inward, Lindsey says, to focus on ambitions, desires, dreams and pleasures. Popular culture rose to the occasion, with new music, new entertainments, new fashions and new distractions. By the middle of the 20th century, there were Mad magazine and Leave it to Beaver, teen angst and drive-in movies, Dr. Spock and the Kinsey Reports. And, as Elvis gyrated and James Dean rebelled, some began to recoil in response to what they saw as a disturbing loss of moral tone. The modern conservative movement thus arose out of the same conditions that created the Age of Aquarius (William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale was published in 1951).

In Lindsey's terms, "mass affluence" triggered a "mirror-image pair of cultural convulsions" in which movements we now associate with the left and the right were born. The left, Lindsey notes, embraced the personal freedoms created by wealth, but rejected the engine of wealth itself, capitalism. The result was its romantic preoccupation with collectivism and its emphasis on tolerance, rights and free expression. By contrast, Lindsey observes, the right embraced capitalism but rejected the manner in which a thriving market inevitably opens up new choices and broadens the range of acceptable behavior. Each movement was, and is, urgently felt and relentlessly advanced, Lindsey notes, but each is ultimately misguided in its failure to comprehend that mass affluence involves both a free market and a free society. As such, they offer "conflicting half-truths" about what America is and ought to be.

Possums, Pizzas and Bow Ties
Instead of taking sides in what is by now a rigid ideological standoff, Lindsey attempts to offer a more rounded and complete story about what America has become. Our polarized politics are a sign of a nation that has yet to understand its own immensely stable, ultimately centrist synthesis of left and right, he contends. The American middle has pragmatically combined parallel appreciations for the free market and the cultural abundance it supplies. At once fiscally conservative and socially liberal, mainstream America represents the real heart of a nation that has found a way to finance a free society organized around almost infinite variety -- one with health food and yoga, therapy and religion, civil unions and sex changes, Wal-Mart and Amazon, MySpace and microwaves, cell phones and laptops, blogs and iPods, home pregnancy kits and soft contact lenses, and societies for every hobby, profession and interest group imaginable, including the Possum Growers and Breeders Association, the Bow Tie Manufacturers Association and the Frozen Pizza Institute.

As the consumer-oriented cast of this list might suggest, the founding premise for Lindsey's exuberant rewriting of American history is that abundance is the prerequisite for freedom. "Liberation from material necessity marks a fundamental change in the human condition," Lindsey explains in apocalyptic language reminiscent of Karl Marx. And in this he is consciously and somewhat ironically reworking Marx's theories, acknowledging how very much the Victorian visionary got right in order to offer a modern libertarian analysis of what he got fundamentally wrong. According to Lindsey, "the realm of freedom came as a new stage of capitalist development"; far from yielding the tranquil utopia of Marx's fantasy, mass affluence unleashed a "clamorous desire" that has not only transformed American culture, but has reshaped our souls.

The vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute, Lindsey is a free market advocate whose economic ideals color his understanding of American history. If The Age of Abundance is a bit thesis-driven -- libertarian think tanker writes a book proving that modern American culture is naturally and inevitably libertarian -- it is nonetheless compelling and provocative, a heady mix of detailed anecdote and sweeping analysis that offers us a chance to view our present and our recent past through new eyes.

There is a lingering suspicion in America that prosperity is somehow shameful -- that, like power, it corrupts us absolutely. But, Lindsey notes, that is a sign of just how luxuriously free our wealth has made us. People who can afford to despise the economic system that sustains them are very rich indeed, he observes; so are those who feel free not to tolerate the social choice and cultural expressiveness that comes with mass affluence. But one risk we can all safely take, Lindsey asserts, is to contemplate alternative accounts of who and what we are.

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The Tudor-Stuart-like alternation of the Bush-Clinton dynasties

Democracy in the Americas By ROGER COHEN NYT: December 6, 2007

The United States needs a new beginning. It cannot lie in the Tudor-Stuart-like alternation of the Bush-Clinton dynasties, nor in the macho militarism of Republicans who see war without end. It has to involve a fresh face that will reconcile the country with itself and the world, get over divisions — internal and external — and speak with honesty about American glory and shame.
Speaking of U.S. shame, I found myself thinking back as I watched the Caracas festivities to terrible scenes I witnessed in Santiago in 1986. Another Latin American strongman, a true dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, had responded with savagery to an attempted assassination.
I wrote then in The Wall Street Journal of a kid called Alfredo Díaz who’d been beaten up by Pinochet’s goons:

“He has very little hair. This month, soldiers slashed off most of it, then stuffed it in his mouth. His wrists are dotted with circular burn marks. The soldiers stubbed out their cigarettes on him. His face is cut and his eyes restless with fear. They finished by dumping him naked in a pond.”

Díaz survived; more than 3,000 Chileans did not. In neighboring Argentina, more than 20,000 vanished as the junta’s corpse-dumping helicopters did their business. These cold-war crimes involved U.S. complicity. Chávez’s anti-Yankee rage, served up with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, has its Latin American resonance.
Such dark chapters have never been acknowledged with sufficient forthrightness by a U.S. leader. It’s time. Perhaps a president from a new generation would do so.

The Americas are a better place today. Openness has done its work. Chávez’s so-called revolution and other regional leftist rumblings reflect enduring social chasms, but Venezuela’s democracy with brio shows the length of the road traveled.
Let’s be clear: Chávez is a caudillo. His “socialismo” equals “Hugoismo.” He’s a menace. He’s about to introduce a new currency, the strong bolívar, with monetary policy in chaos, inflation rising toward 20 percent, and his crony bankers pocketing millions by arbitraging the disparity between the official and black-market rates.
Crime and drug-trafficking are thriving. He’s still a believer in building socialism through local councils for which the Russian translation would be “Soviets.” He accused his opponents of a “Pyrrhic victory” and vowed not to change a “comma” of his rejected reforms.
But his honoring of democracy’s brittle wonders still merits a salute. Above all, however, I salute the Venezuelan people. Chávez said before the referendum that a “no” vote equaled a vote for Bush. Unperturbed, Venezuelans went ahead. And they gave a civic example from which Bush’s battered and blathering democracy can learn. Nicholas D. Kristof is on book leave.

With Mauss, I consider that money’s principal function, like that of the gift, is the extension of society

Money is always social, global and virtual Keith Hart

9 October 2007 Filed under: Commonwealth — keith @ 1:49 pm

Summary
The term “social money” suggests that some money, such as the form we are familiar with, is not social, even anti-social. With Mauss, I consider that money’s principal function, like that of the gift, is the extension of society, just as Simmel saw society’s potential for universality reflected in money. People have always made money personal and social by adapting it to their own special purposes, but this was in dialectical tension with its ability to reach the most inclusive levels of association. It is therefore mistaken for proponents of “Local Exchange Systems” (SEL) to imagine that the principles they wish to introduce are something new; and, by designing money as a closed local circuit, they have failed to harness money’s global potential. Too often, in unconscious mimicry of national currencies, these introverted initiatives stand alone and fail as a result. The movement to reform money needs to embrace the power of federation more wholeheartedly in future. This in turn requires us to engage with the virtual society opened up by the internet. Money’s ability to make social connection has been vastly expanded by the “network of networks” and those who wish to work for economic democracy cannot afford to turn their backs on these developments. Michael Linton, who founded LETS 25 years ago, is now pioneering this next phase — developing smart-card technology, new software and multiple domain naming systems as the means of sustaining money on an open source basis. (more…)

The classical economists focused on the commodity’s higher-order ability to enter into abstract relations of exchange with other commodities through money (quantity) rather than on its concrete value in use (quality). But the commodity remains something useful and in that use lies its concrete realization. The reality of markets is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete. If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination. It is not enough to retreat into the local; we urgently need to develop more effective institutions at the level of world society too. Money’s ability to sustain local meaning and universal connection at the same time is an indispensable means to that end. Local money without global pretensions is as sexy as kissing your sister.

If money is global as well as social, we must also recognize that it is virtual. Keynes (1930) distinguished between its abstract function as ‘money of account’ and the thing that passes between hands, ‘money proper’. Identification of currency with precious metals – either as coinage or later as the gold standard – lent credence to the idea of money as a scarce natural resource, obscuring its more fundamental role simply as a measure. We may lack the raw materials to build a house, but we can never be short of the metres, kilos and litres to measure the wood, cement and paint. So too it is with money; and this has become more evident as transactions have become increasingly virtual. The society opened up by the digital revolution now offers universal means for the expression of universal ideas. Money’s ability to make social connection has been greatly amplified by the internet, “the network of networks”, so that markets, world society and virtual reality feed each other’s explosive growth at this time.

Those who wish to work for economic democracy cannot afford to turn their backs on these developments. Yet many of them are unfortunately wedded to reactionary ideologies that owe more to Aristotle and the medieval schoolmen than to contemporary social possibilities. Linton has always regretted the narrow localism that has plagued the movement for ‘social money’ in its first two decades. He is working with a number of colleagues (http://openmoney.info) to pioneer the next phase — developing smart-card technology, new software and multiple domain naming systems as the means of sustaining money on an open source basis. Some of the principles remain the same – the design of money as a closed circuit, the money issued by each participant as a promise to contribute their own goods and services – but others, such as sophisticated communication between circuits, are new. Now individuals may join any number of these circuits at once, reflecting their interests at several levels, not just the local, with a single smart card able to support simultaneously 15 or more of the circuits. It is lonely work and there is still much to be done; but without it ‘social money’ will remain an irrelevance to a world rapidly moving in a different direction. 5:25 AM

Marcel Mauss' idea that for something to be a gift it must be circulated or shared

I thought about Marcel Mauss' The Gift and his idea that for something to be a gift it must be circulated or shared. The receiver of the gift in an exchange economy is tied to the giver through a community-enhancing bond because the gift given always carries a part of the giver with it. In this way, the gifts are more of a "loan," and the receiver is spiritually obligated to reciprocate by giving his or her own gifts to others, including the giver...

To meet the conditions of gift-giving, gifts cannot be kept without reciprocity; they must be shared... December 05 8:43 AM Add a comment Send a message View trackbacks (0) Blog it Thoughts Spaces home

Neoliberal governance, with its two institutions of State and Market, is fundamentally and at the core anti-democratic

Rancière (1) from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

The protestors in Seattle in 1999 were entirely Rancièrean when they chanted, “This is what democracy looks like.” And the city’s response to the protests — effectively suspending civil liberties and imposing martial law for several days — demonstrated how “policing” is the inverse of politics, how the smooth functioning of both government and capitalist commerce depends upon the suppression of democracy, or of politics proper.

I can see two major consequences that follow from this. One is to point out the way that neoliberal governance, with its two institutions of State and Market, is fundamentally and at the core anti-democratic. There is a continuity between allowing decisions to be made by the “market” or by supposedly nonpartisan “experts” (like the Fed) in order to shield these decisions from the supposedly noxious effects of political controversy, and bringing out the cops in force to protect the WTO meeting from popular discontent. (I can’t remember the author or title right now, but I remember reading some reviews of a recent book that argues that, since voters always act “irrationally,” it is better to leave as many social decisions as possible to market mechanisms instead of democratic ones. While we may question how “democratic” the opportunity to choose between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani actually is, it is clear that leaving issues to the “decisions” of the “market” is far more autocratic. The “market” is supposedly the sum of individuals’ “preferences”; but in reality, it is both the sphere of maximized inequality — since unequal income distribution is very far from one-person-one-vote — and also, we cannot avoid confronting the “market” as a vast impersonal force against which we have no power whatsoever. Neoliberal ideology regards the “market” as an ineluctable force of nature, like gravity or the speed of light).

The second consequence of Rancière’s argument is to shed a new light on the political dimensions of art. It is no longer a question of looking at a work of art’s “ideology,” nor of asking what the artwork’s actual political “efficacy” might be. Rancière allows us to get away from both of these tired ways of looking at the politics of art. It is rather that art and political action run parallel, because both of them, against the backdrop of a socially given distribution of the sensible, both enact and contest this distribution, work to reconfigure it, and to bring out potentials within it that have not previously been realized. Art is thus already a political intervention — not in what it says, but in its very being, in its formal and aesthetic qualities.

Rancière probably wouldn’t like this assimilation, but I think that his theory of art fits well into the Kantian-Deleuzian genealogy of aesthetics that I have been trying to pursue. Kant’s aesthetics has to do with the singularizing limits and extremities of the mental faculties, with the points at which they break down or enter into discord with one another, or (as Deleuze reads Kant) find a harmony only through this discord. In other words, commonality and universality are precisely problems for “aesthetic judgment”; Kant takes commonality and universality for granted in the First and Second Critiques, but problematizes them in the Third. The problem of aesthetic judgment is the problem of communicating things (sensations) that are absolutely singular, and heterogeneous in relation to one another. In a way, therefore, the problem of aesthetic judgment is the same as the problem of the commodity in Marx (how a universal equivalent can be found for things that in themselves are heterogeneous), and also as the problem of how to find a “common” or commonality or communism that is not just a reductive quantification via translation in terms of the universal equivalent (this is the side of the Marxist problematic that is highlighted in Hardt and Negri’s discussion of “the common”; following it out would seem to involve both thinking Marx and Kant together as Karatani does, and thinking about alternative currencies and trading systems, which Karatani approaces vis his interest in LETS networks, and which Keith Hart has done a lot to illuminate, referring to Mauss’ The Gift as well as to the Marxist tradition).

Now, Deleuze radicalizes Kant in this respect by the way that he rewrites, and radicalizes, Kant’s pushing of the mental faculties to their limits. Drawing on Blanchot and Klossowski, among others (and implicitly drawing, as well on Foucault’s Kantian reading of Bataille in “A Preface to Transgression,” despite Deleuze’s own evident contempt for Bataille), Deleuze in Difference and Repetition and elsewhere outlines a scenario in which each of the faculties pushes to the point where it breaks down: which means that, going to the maximum extent of “what it can do,” it both uncovers the (transcendental) force or energy that impels it but that it cannot apprehend directly, and ruptures itself, thereby compelling thought to jump discontinuously to another faculty, which (precisely through this discontinuity or discord) picks up the process, pushing itself to its own limit, and so on in turn…

What I am trying to suggest is, that, in his examinations of the distribution of the sensible, Rancière in effect historicizes the process that Deleuze describes in more absolute terms — just as Foucault, in his middle period (The Order of Things) historicizes the a priori conditions of thought that Kant describes in absolute terms. (Actually, this is an oversimplification; because Foucault in effect historizes Kant’s Categories, his “Transcendental Deduction of Concepts”; whereas Deleuze radicalizes, and Rancière then historicizes what corresponds more to Kant’s “Transcendental Aesthetic.” This is something that comes up in the Kant/Whitehead/Deleuze book, but that I eventually need to work out more careflly here).

There’s a lot more to be said on Rancière’s aesthetics — and particularly on the way that he rewrites the history of art since the Renaissance, and especially of the transition to modernism, in terms of changing distributions of the sensible. But I will defer that for now, as well as the even bigger question of the consequences of Rancière’s understanding of “democracy.” Hopefully I will now be able to start posting more frequently than I have in the last few months. To be continued…

Megawati named her own daughter Orissaputri, or "Daughter of Orissa"

BusinessWeek Commentary December 3, 2007

India: The Battle for Orissa by Manjeet Kripalani The state's mineral reserves are attracting the world's largest metals companies, but local tribes won't give up the rights without a fight

I just returned from Orissa, that eastern coastal Indian state that has been mostly forgotten in India's mad gallop for growth. Those who forget Orissa, however, do so at their risk. For though the state has been known for decades for hunger and poverty, cyclones, and droughts, Orissa is now renowned for its mineral wealth: It has the majority of India's iron ore, chrome ore, coal, and bauxite reserves. And all of this is required to fuel the country's manufacturing revolution.
That's why the world's largest steel and metals conglomerates are sitting on Orissa's shores, awaiting clearances from the government so they can get to work on the mineral ores there. Between Posco , Arcelor-Mittal, Tata Steel, Jindal Steel, and a few others, there is $45 billion in investment waiting to get into Orissa.
So Orissa is waking up to its new importance and central place in the Indian economy. Bhubaneswar, once a sleepy capital familiar to tourists visiting the famous temples at Puri and Konarak, now has wide roads and many nice hotels. There are large billboards advertising cell-phone service, personal insurance, and consumer goods for sale. There are even malls: tiny, homegrown ones, but malls nonetheless. There's a surplus of power, a plentiful commodity in a country where power supplies are often under strain.

Adjusting to Its New Status
A growing presence in Orissa, but one that is discreetly kept under wraps, is that of the steel companies. The biggest names are the state-owned Steel Authority of India, Tata Steel, Jindal Stainless, Posco, and Arcelor-Mittal. They are not on billboards, but inside fine new glass and granite office complexes like Fortune Tower that house the offices of these companies. Posco alone has prepared to invest $12 billion to build a fully integrated steel plant with a port; Arcelor-Mittal's plan is for a $20 billion project. Tata Steel also has a multibillion-dollar plan.
But they are all on hold. Like much of India in transition, Orissa is taking a long time to adjust to its new status. Much of the area on which (or under) the state's mineral wealth sits is tribal, forested land that cannot be cleared and reassigned to companies without due process. Tribals, or the indigenous people of the region, represent 25% of Orissa's population. They are among India's poorest citizens, but are the closest to the land. They are the keepers of knowledge about Orissa's abundant biodiversity, animal life, and other natural endowments.
They are the biggest losers in the transition, and there are very few to plead their case. Especially not the politicians, who in their desire to put Orissa on par with the rest of India, are doing whatever it takes to speed up development in the state, even at the cost of the environment and its people. That has become the basis of a major battle in the courts, in the Orissa legislature, and on the land itself.

Tata's Half-Finished Wall
The results are mixed. In January, 2006, when Tata Steel was trying to build a boundary wall for its 1,000-plus-acre property in Kalinganagar, the heart of the state's iron ore belt, the tribals refused to vacate. The police were brought in, shots were fired, and more than a dozen locals died. The locals blocked the main road to Kalinganagar for more than a month after.
Tata's wall has remained half-finished. All around the proposed Tata site, companies like Mesco and Jindal have built their operations and land continues to change hands. But Tata's site stays pristine, untouched, undeveloped, even though Tata, the oldest commodity company to do business in Orissa, has been mining ore in the state for nearly 100 years.

The last time I was in Orissa was a decade ago to cover the story of U.S. power company AES (AES), which had been trying to set up a power operation in the state. The World Bank was working with Orissa's state electricity board to trifurcate the power operations into generation, distribution, and transmission, instead of having the board do everything. The story was about Enron in Bombay and AES in Orissa.

The Environmental and Social Costs of Mining
Neither company was successful in its endeavor, but India benefited greatly. Indians, which had for decades relied on badly managed state power boards that provided power when they could and sometimes on whim, learned about their power rights, their power needs, and that quaint unit called the megawatt, and how much it cost to produce and sell.
Now Orissa's tribals, and their fellow Indian citizens, are witness to a bitter battle over the nature of India's mineral wealth and its true cost to both industry and society. Like the power story, this one too will take many, many years to play itself out. If all goes well, India will learn about the price of each ton of steel, not just its cost in monetary terms, but also its environmental and social costs. Luckily, Orissa's resources are so plentiful that it will take 50 years before they begin to be depleted. Hopefully, the right battles will have been fought and won by then, and the right lessons learned.
And here's a charming story on Orissa that few know. The former longtime chief minister of Orissa was a giant of a man, a personality, and a force of nature called Biju Patnaik. He dominated Orissa politics for decades. But he also had other interests, and one of them was flying. During World War II, he helped evacuate British families from Rangoon when the Japanese invaded, and he also helped Indonesian rebel leaders fight for their independence from the Dutch, and flew them, under gravely dangerous circumstances, to Delhi to meet former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

A Daughter of Orissa
For his trouble, Patnaik was later awarded the highest civilian honor in Indonesia, and Indonesian President Sukarno gave him the honor of naming Sukarno's newborn daughter. Patnaik, the romantic hero, called her Megawati, or "Goddess of the Clouds." Megawati went on to become president of Indonesia from 2001 to 2004. So longstanding was her gratitude to India that Megawati named her own daughter Orissaputri, or "Daughter of Orissa."
Hopefully Orissa's fortunes will blossom and its troubles soon will be behind it, so more daughters are called Orissa, the daughters of fortune. Kripalani is BusinessWeek's India bureau chief .

Harvey shows how human practices define urban space and gives shape to architecture

Sophisticated analysis of geographical development, October 28, 2006 By Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews

"Spaces of Global Capitalism" by David Harvey consists of two presentations delivered at the eighth Hettner-Lecture at the University of Heidelberg in 2004 and a third related essay. These challening works are the product of a thinker who has spent a lifetime of cross-disciplinary study on the issues of capitalism, politics, geography and related topics. Intended principally for an academic audience, Mr. Harvey's research succeeds in providing guidance for others who may want to further explore these issues in the future.

The first lecture, "Neo-liberalism and the restoration of class power" is by far the most accessible in the book. In essence a 62-page synopsis of Mr. Harvey's exceptional book, "A Brief History of Neoliberalism", the author convincingly reveals neoliberalism to be an ideology whose primary goal is to enshrine and protect elite power. Mr. Harvey's brilliant analysis connects growing income disparities with a concomitant rise in militarism and fundamentalism which he contends must be addressed with a revived popular struggle for democracy. The author's thoughts on this timely and important topic is quite simply essential reading.

The second lecture is entitled, "Notes towards a theory of uneven geographical development". Mr. Harvey explores how developed capitalist nations of the north tend to exploit the periphery, creating a chronic state of underdevelopment for much of the global south. The author discusses the concept of accumulation by dispossession and how it is subject to changing conditions, including: market exchange, spatial competition, geographical division of labor, monopolistic competition, annihilation of space through time, physical infrastructures, production of regionality, production of scale, territorial systems of political administration, and geopolitics. The analysis opens pathways for other scholars who may be interested in applying Mr. Harvey's principles to specific case studies.

The third essay included in the book is "Space as a key word." This seemed to be the most theoretical of the three and will probably be of greatest interests to specialists in the field of geographical development. Mr. Harvey shows how human practices define urban space and gives shape to architecture; for example, collective memory and political struggle are critical to defining culturally significant landmarks such as the rebuilding of ground zero in New York City. The author suggests that space must be understood from multiple perspectives and provides methodologies for others to consider.

I recommend this demanding book for academics or persons who have a sophisticated understanding of geographical development. On the other hand, those who are interested in uneven development as it pertains to neoliberalism are encouraged to pick up Mr. Harvey's highly-readable "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" in order to fully appreciate the author's thoughts on this particularly important topic. Comment Permalink

Most decidedly the absence of markets most certainly does cause poverty

Globalisation Not the Problem: Absence of Markets is the Problem
from Adam Smith's Lost Legacy by Gavin Kennedy In short, living standards, basic as they were, depended on distant markets. Globalisation is not that new. When markets were absolutely local living standards were dire.

British colonies in America were prevented from developing local manufacturing by mercantile policies enforced by the British government, which Adam Smith criticized, though he advised the newly independent United States not to impose tariff barriers to keep out imports of manufactured goods in pursuit of a dash for self-sufficiency, but to allow time for a domestic manufacturing capability to take root and grow naturally by engaging in distant trade itself. Becoming self-sufficient is to go backwards to the world that was left behind, with world population levels close of the hunter-gatherer societies of 11,000 years ago, and living standards to match. It took the best part of 10,000 years to lift per capita consumption above bare subsistence to continual increase for the majority of the population of European countries (principally, Britain and its American colonies) in the 16th century, and towards sustained growth in consumption, knowledge, sanitation, health, medicine and technology from the 1800s.

That the rich are the main beneficiaries of growing GDP is nothing new; it has ever been so, right through the shepherding, farming and commerce millennia. The rich have hived off surplus GDP from the beginning of the modern ages. Apart from personal consumption levels much greater than the average (poor) majority, they also created what we know of recorded, literate, history. If there was another way to achieve these gains it never happened anywhere in the world at any time.

Commerce changed all that. For the first time ever, per capita growth enabled the poor majority to reach per capita income levels unprecedented in all history. This was not market failure; it was market success. The fact that there is widespread inequality is not new: it was unequal once humans left the equality of the hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence. The price of opulence was paid largely by the poorer majority, but from the 1800s, in Europe and North America, the steady march towards opulence has resulted in the living conditions that enable Stan Sorscher to send his views over the Internet to people like me in Edinburgh, Scotland, and for me to comment upon them.

Income inequalities are real problems, though I am bound to say that the real problems of relative and absolute poverty are not those between Stan Sorscher and the ultra-rich of North America (5 billion people would gladly change places with him); they are between Stan Sorcher and the poor of the non-developed (and non-developing) countries outside the ambit of the country that Stan lives in. Smith made exactly the same point in Wealth Of Nations (1776) in the contrast between the gap between the poor labourer in Scotland and the rich European prince, which was smaller than the gap between the poor labourer in Scotland and ‘that the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’ in Africa (WN I.i.11: p 24).

If that problem concerns Stan (it does me) then the solution is not to return to self-sufficient living standards in Seattle (or Scotland). The cause of the differences is not racial, nor geographical, or such like. It lies in the success of the division of labour in markets in the developed countries, and their undeveloped state in Africa (or wherever). Markets do not cause these problems, they are part of the solution, but most decidedly the absence of markets most certainly does cause poverty.

Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise

Speech before the 1936 Democratic National Convention
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania June 27, 1936
A Rendezvous With Destiny President Roosevelt:

"Senator Robinson, Members of the Democratic Convention, My Friends: Here, and in every community throughout the land, we are met at a time of great moment to the future of the nation. It is an occasion to be dedicated to the simple and sincere expression of an attitude toward problems, the determination of which will profoundly affect America.
I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.
For the sympathy, help and confidence with which Americans have sustained me in my task I am grateful. For their loyalty I salute the members of our great party, in and out of political life in every part of the Union. I salute those of other parties, especially those in the Congress of the United States who on so many occasions have put partisanship aside. I thank the governors of the several states, their legislatures, their state and local officials who participated unselfishly and regardless of party in our efforts to achieve recovery and destroy abuses. Above all I thank the millions of Americans who have borne disaster bravely and have dared to smile through the storm.
America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived.
In those days we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear.

But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most nations. But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.
Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776 - an American way of life.
That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy - from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.
And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution - all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age - other people's money - these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.
Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.
An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
The brave and clear platform adopted by this convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.
But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.
For more than three years we have fought for them. This convention, in every word and deed, has pledged that the fight will go on.

The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our government and of ourselves. Never since the early days of the New England town meeting have the affairs of government been so widely discussed and so clearly appreciated. It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle.
We do not see faith, hope, and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization.
Faith - in the soundness of democracy in the midst of dictatorships.
Hope - renewed because we know so well the progress we have made.
Charity - in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.

We seek not merely to make government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.
We are poor indeed if this nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.
In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.
It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America. We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.
Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
In this world of our in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.
I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.
I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war."

Anxious providentialism can also devolve into self-indulgent cynicism

LAT Home > Opinion December 3, 2007

Gregory Rodriguez: We're on the brink of apocalypse! Again!
The Puritanical roots of our fatalism and anxiety over American exceptionalism.

The sky is falling! The end is near!Just in time for the Christmas season, Pat Buchanan has published yet another jeremiad warning that America is about to go belly up. You'd think that the American public would get tired of the unrelenting gloominess of the far right and left. But you'd be wrong. Already the book is climbing up the bestseller lists, giving us further proof that, despite our collective obsession with living the good life, we Americans love the sweet rush of anxiety. Maybe it's just the antidote for our apathy.

You have to admit that there's something unseemly about citizens of history's most powerful country -- economically, militarily and culturally -- always fretting about their coming demise. Sometimes it gets downright pornographic. But like it or not, it's part of who we are, the flip-side of our patriotic jingoism and a legacy of those intensely religious Puritans that lives on in this secular age. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan called the United States a "shining city on a hill," he was borrowing -- and embroidering -- a famous line from the 17th century governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop.

Winthrop didn't use the word "shining" in his original 1630 sermon; his message was not triumphalist. Winthrop and his fellow Puritans believed that in their escape from religious persecution and their settling of a new world, they had entered into a covenant with God. They were ordained to be an example to the world and to establish God's kingdom in wild, chaotic North America.

That meant they had a high standard to live up to. If they pleased the Lord, the Almighty would bless them. But if they did not, Winthrop cautioned, "We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of this good land." In other words, when Winthrop spoke of the new colony as "a city upon a hill," he saw its exceptionalism as less a boast than a warning.

Though the Puritans' rigid theocracy soon collapsed, many aspects of their political and religious vision deeply mark our national psyche. You can hear it in the rhetoric of many more presidents than Reagan, as they speak of America's providential role in history. Abraham Lincoln called Americans "an almost chosen people." Franklin Roosevelt spoke of the nation's "rendezvous with destiny." Most recently, George W. Bush declared that "America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs."

But today as in the past, that sense of biblical errand is coupled with a profound fear of failure. "We've carried forward the Puritans' sense of anxiety," says political scientist George McKenna, the author of "The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism." "It underlies a great deal of American political rhetoric. While we believe we have a role to play in the world, we are not certain that we are destined to succeed."

At its best, says Mckenna, the Puritan tradition of anxious providentialism has inspired the likes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to improve the nation. King proclaimed that African Americans would win their freedom "because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands." But anxious providentialism can also devolve into self-indulgent cynicism, the kind that not only does not inspire but kills the very impulse to make the world better.

The same is true for the jeremiad. From the Puritans on, it has been used to exhort Americans to step up and fulfill their "errand into the wilderness" (in the words of another Puritan preacher). As one scholar put it, we experience a process of "liberation through lamentation." But since the late 1960s and the demoralizing effects of the Vietnam War, too many jeremiads have held out too little hope, abandoning the promise inherent in the Puritans' covenant -- the possibility of redemption. In these works, a new "reverse exceptionalism" has emerged, with critics portraying the United States as exceptionally bad, not exceptionally blessed. Although it's easy to identify the origins of the post-modern jeremiad in the New Left, a generation later, plenty of disgruntled right-wingers employ the same grim, apocalyptic rhetoric.

In either case, apocalypse without the possibility of redemption amounts to little more than a tantrum. I haven't read Buchanan's latest book, because it's one in a series that have aggressively played the doom-and-gloom card. In 2001, he warned of the "death of the West"; in 2006, he fretted over the "conquest of America"; and now, "The Day of Reckoning" claims "America is coming apart, decomposing, and ... the likelihood of her survival as one nation ... is improbable." That sounds a lot more like cynical, self-indulgent Chicken-Little-ism than it does John Winthrop. Just what any nation on the verge of extinction needs. grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com

The spiritual vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution has yet to be filled

Wounds of the Revolution By DAVID BROOKS Op-Ed Columnist Go to Columnist Page » NYT: November 30, 2007 The Cultural Revolution swept away much of the old Chinese culture. Dignity is now defined by money and French and Italian luxury goods. BEIJING

During the 20th century, hell descended on many nations, and each one seems to recover in its own way. This is the story of one man’s recovery, and a glimpse into the rise of modern China:
Edward Tian was 3 years old when Mao Tse-tung launched the Cultural Revolution. His parents, ecologists who had been educated in the Soviet Union, were deported to rural backwaters. A mob invaded his home and burned his family’s books. He was separated from his sister and was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in the industrial city of Shenyang.
His grandmother was a terrifying yet fiercely devoted woman, whose child-rearing philosophy was summed up by her motto: “Do not smile until the children are in bed.”
Tian remembers being furious with his parents during their 11 years of separation: “I was very angry. Why didn’t they take care of me? I didn’t have a good relationship with my parents again until my own children were born.” Meanwhile, he was studying Marxism at school and dreaming of becoming a soldier for the revolution.
His grandmother persuaded him not to go into the military, but to continue his studies. In 1981, he enrolled in Liaoning University, and after graduation he sent out letters to American universities in hopes of getting a scholarship somewhere.
Texas Tech offered him one, and Tian, under the impression that Lubbock, Tex., was near New York, accepted. “The first plane ride of my life was the flight from Beijing to San Francisco, then I flew to Dallas where the airport was huge. I was so scared.”
He felt obliged to continue in his parents’ footsteps and study ecology, so the boy from Shenyang ended up getting a Ph.D. in Texas ranch management. He spent five years driving around local ranches. His dissertation was a statistical model of the spread of bromegrass weeds, which was read, after years of work, by 10 people.
But at Texas Tech he did have access to a Macintosh computer. “During breaks I had no family and no friends around, so I’d play with it. It planted a seed in my heart.”
By the early 1990s, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were beginning to transform China, the Internet was beginning to transform the world and Tian seized the historical moment. He and a Chinese friend from Dallas founded AsiaInfo Holdings to bring Internet technology back home. Within three years, he had 320 employees and revenues of $45 million a year.
In 1999, the Chinese government created a new company, China Netcom Group, to compete with China Telecom in bringing broadband to China. Tian was asked to become chief executive, and he accepted. The ranch researcher from Lubbock ended up with 230,000 people working for him.
But the Cultural Revolution still lurks in the mental shadows. “Insecurity is a very important thought in my head,” he says. He now works with business luminaries like Henry Kravis, and observes: “Henry Kravis doesn’t need to prove himself. Because I’m Chinese, I need to prove I can do that. I can travel faster and learn more.”
Recently, he was the keynote speaker at a conference in Malaysia and arrived late and hungry to a buffet dinner. He went to the buffet table, piled his plate with rice and began furiously shoveling it into his mouth. A friend said he was embarrassing his fellow Chinese by behaving like a peasant. “I had to think about why I was behaving like that.”
Meanwhile, the prodding from home continues. On a trip to Japan, he called his grandmother, who is now 92, and told her that despite what she had suffered during the Japanese occupation, he was now standing in a beautiful Japanese park. She responded: “Why are you sightseeing? You should be hard at work.”
Tired of the bureaucracy, Tian resigned from Netcom and has founded China Broadband Capital. It funds firms that are using cellphones as the next information technology platform, and it owns part of MySpace China. He sits alone in a beautiful office in the middle of the park where the Qing Dynasty emperors came to worship the sun. His office was the emperor’s dressing room.
With his lingering insecurity, with his fierce determination to prove and reprove himself, he is in some ways typical of the Cultural Revolution generation elite. But he is also a cultured man, and in that he is atypical. The Cultural Revolution swept away much of the old Chinese culture. It was followed by the wave of commercialism and materialism. Dignity is now defined by money and French and Italian luxury goods.
The spiritual vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution has yet to be filled. Some set of values — good or bad — will eventually fill it, and at that point, the final aftershock of the hell will be finally felt.

Why is it important to challenge the myths that constitute American folklore?

History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World Portray U.S. History, by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward

Founding Myths: Stories That Hide our Patriotic Past, by Ray Raphael

reviewed by Dan Skinner

For thousands of years political thinkers have recognized that myths are essential instruments of political power. Plato’s vision of a well-ordered republic famously employed a Myth of Metals to justify inequality. Similarly, Nietzsche argued that myths were necessary in the creation of national identity and, indeed, for human life to propel itself forward.
Two recent books, Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward’s History Lessons and Ray Raphael’s Founding Myths, make great strides toward challenging some conventional myths and broaden our understanding of American history. Raphael works within the interstices of American mythology to reveal the genealogy of fictional stories central to the American “founding.” Lindaman and Ward demythologize American history by compiling textbooks from nations with which the US has engaged. From their vantage points, both reveal the highly myopic and provincial perspective that often shape American understanding of American history and, indeed, all national myths.
Two central questions underscore both books: Why is it important to challenge the myths that constitute American folklore? And what have been and are likely to be the consequences of these myths? If they are simply benign stories of heroism that make Americans feel proud and help forge a national identity, why not let them persist?
One of the brightest and most illustrative moments of Raphael’s book is his short chapter on the famed order given by American generals at the Battle of Bunker Hill to “wait until you see the whites of their eyes,” which has taught generations of Americans that the Revolutionary War was an intimate and personal war of brave individuals confronting their British oppressors. As Raphael explains, “In Revolutionary times, we prefer to believe, the glory of war was not diminished by impersonal slaughter.” Thus, the war of independence would be seen quite differently if the bloodshed were the result of out and out massacre, as war often is. More importantly, this myth propagates a dangerous view of war that World War I diaries have refuted and the poems of Siegfried Sassoon have given voice to; the fact is that people can often motivate themselves to kill other humans only so long as they can’t see the “whites” of their opponents eyes, that is, dehumanization drives war. It is for this very reason that generations of war psychologists have had to desensitize soldiers in order to kill – victory often depends upon the namelessness and facelessness of “the enemy.”
The glorification of war, as Raphael illustrates with his demystification of Paul Revere’s ride, the fictitious Molly Pitcher, and Sam Adams as patriot par excellence, requires that heroes and their stories be continuously created and maintained. Raphael sees a paradox, here, arguing that “The image of a perfect American in a mythic past hides our Revolutionary roots, and this we do not need.” In reconsidering American history, Raphael contends that Americans will be able to discover that only stories of real people doing real deeds can be the source of a true patriotism, and to do he seeks to peal away the layers.
While Raphael questions the widespread historical assumptions that constitute American identity, Lindaman and Ward are revisionist historians in the most literal sense. Revisionist history is an inevitably controversial practice as Americans—as is true of any people—are uncomfortable questioning the veracity of the stories they were told as children. But Lindaman and Ward return “revisionism” to its perspectivist roots to re-vision, or take a second look at, a historical moment from a different vantage point.
This is precisely what anyone truly concerned with understanding history must do. As we have seen, from Herodotus and Thucydides to such contemporary historians as Doris Kearns Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger, all historians take perspectives. Sometimes they even lie for tragic effect or narrative flow. Recognizing this, Lindaman and Ward help us to reconsider our own history from perspectives that official American doctrine does not allow. As one might expect, these perspectives are not attempts at rewriting “Truth,” but rather of making it clear that Americans are as biased in the writing of history as other nations. Just as Raphael shows us how perspective and the national imperatives that shape it effect how we see ourselves, Lindaman and Ward demonstrate how other nations view the history of their involvement with the United States.
One of the most exciting of their chapters deals with what Cubans simply call “The Missile Crisis.” Unlike American textbooks, which point to an unprovoked act of aggression by Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban textbooks describe the “crisis” as a reaction to continued threats from American “imperialist forces” such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, as well as a logical response to assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. An excerpt from a Canadian text reveals yet another perspective, focusing on Kennedy’s unilateralism: “Neither [Canadian PM] Diefenbaker nor his ministers were consulted—much less informed—about the decision [to ready American military forces and nuclear capabilities for war]. The prime minister was furious that a megalomaniac American president could, in effect, push the button that would destroy Canada.”
Several of Lindaman and Ward’s entries serve to broaden the usual treatment of events offered by American textbooks. A chapter from Nigeria on the Atlantic slave trade, for example, frankly acknowledges the financial benefits Nigeria received from selling off its own people, while an excerpt from Zimbabwe blasts its master, Great Britain, for forcing the African colony into slavery. The British entry, in turn, praises itself for being among the first nations to ban slavery.
Lindaman and Ward’s book is timely and important. At a moment when the credibility and standing of the United States in the world has been called into question, and where political candidates increasingly need to prove their willingness to act unilaterally in order to be considered “strong” by the American electorate, understanding how the world is taught to see America is in the best interest of the nation. This is a matter of pragmatic political strategy – if not to attain respect and trust, then as a matter of long term national security. Whether or not he is right, George W. Bush’s claim that the United States has always been a force for good is not a view shared around the world, and many important clues to the “global test” that John Kerry rightly suggested the United States should consider can be found in History Lessons.
Perhaps more important, these books call into question whether a nation so deeply invested in a set of national myths can make decisions that will make it stronger or help it to pursue the equality or justice to which American founding documents lay claim. For example, the contemporary myth of a cheerful heterosexual nuclear family that has never in fact existed is being used to deny rights to gay and lesbian citizens. Similarly, a decade ago, Reagan’s legend of the “welfare queen” conditioned many Americans to believe that efforts to combat poverty were nothing more than a waste of tax dollars. National mythologies that conveniently serve the interests of economic or religious factions, or that are used to mobilize a nation for war, can have real and serious consequences.
These revisionist historians do not advocate denying America the right to a past. But the spirit that unites both books is the conviction that any nation’s guiding assumptions must be continually re-examined before they can serve as a sound basis for future action. History Lessons and Founding Myths show that looking back and reconsidering history is a prerequisite of the very possibility of moving forward.

Dan Skinner is a graduate student in political science at the CUNY Graduate Center. [Home] [Latest Issue] Logos 4.1 - winter 2005© Logosonline 2005

By drawing on the strengths of others, the people in China have freed their minds and broadened their visions and become more open and creative

What the Prime Minister wants everyone to read Vikas Dhoot Indian Express: Sunday, December 02, 2007 Releasing Commerce Minister Kamal Nath’s book this week, Singh referred to a speech by Wen Jiabao in Singapore 10 days ago and said he would get copies circulated to all those present. Here’s why

NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 1: “Only an open and inclusive nation can become strong and prosperous, while a nation that shuts its door to the world is bound to fall behind...A small country becomes big when it embraces the world...The world today is an open one.

“China’s opening up policy is a long-term one. Opening up has brought great benefits to more than one billion Chinese. To deviate from this policy will only impede China’s development and we will lose popular support.
“When the European countries embarked on the path of capitalist (and) Industrial Revolution, the Chinese rulers at the time dismissed Western science and technology as “clever but useless.” In the 100 years after, ...China was left far behind in development and its international standing plummeted and it became a semi-colonial country subjected to humiliation by foreign powers."

This is part of a speech made by China’s Premier Wen Jiabao at the National University of Singapore ten days ago. And Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who witnessed it while in Singapore for the ASEAN summit, wants it to be made essential reading for everyone in India. Stressing the moral of Jiabao’s speech titled ‘Only an Open and Inclusive Nation can be Strong’ to those attending the release function of Commerce Minister Kamal Nath’s book on Thursday, the PM asked his aides to circulate copies to everyone. “I think my purpose in quoting all that is to say that all of us have an obligation... politicians, businessmen, trade unions and all other important agents of social change."

Here are some key extracts from Jiabao’s talk:
“Opening up has worked not only for Singapore. A review of China’s history leads to the same conclusion...As early as 2,000 years ago in the Han Dynasty, China opened the famous Silk Road and started exchanges with West Asia. In the 1960s and 1970s when waves of dynamic economic growth and scientific technological revolution were sweeping across much of the world, China was in the grip of the decade-long ‘Cultural Revolution.’
“Fortunately, we changed course in the late 1970s and embarked on the track of reform and opening up, that is, to carry out reform domestically and open up externally. As a result, China’s overall national strength has been greatly enhanced, the living standards of its people have significantly improved and the country’s international standing has steadily risen.
“Foreign trade has become a key pillar underpinning China’s economic development. By introducing foreign capital, technologies and managerial expertise and using them as a basis for making innovation, we have greatly boosted productivity and narrowed the gap between China and developed countries. By drawing on the strengths of others, the people in China have freed their minds and broadened their visions and become more open and creative.
“Openness and inclusiveness are two sides of the same coin. Only by opening China can we bring in advanced and successful practices. And only by being inclusive, which calls for respect for different cultures and mutual learning, can we enrich and strengthen ourselves. We should boldly absorb and draw upon all the achievements of the human society, including those of the capitalist countries, build on them and make innovations.”
“We in China are working to build socialism with distinctive Chinese features, and our fundamental objective is to boost productive forces and meet the increasing material and cultural needs of the people. The Communist Party of China at its 17th National Congress highlighted China’s resolve to pursue reform and opening up. We will unswervingly follow the opening up policy, move up the value chain as we participate in economic globalisation, and focus on new issues in opening up that have arisen under the current circumstances. We stand for free trade and oppose protectionism.”

No one knows their place or their true identity

Thoughts on the Intrinsic Madness of the Left from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

Because secular leftism is materialistic, it abolishes all archetypal human distinctions, and human distinctions are what make us distinct as humans. For example, if there are no distinctions between men and women, it naturally follows that those opposed to the redefinition of marriage are bigoted as opposed to discerning, for what difference does it make?

But freedom means nothing if it is truly "radical," i.e., if there is no intrinsic purpose to our humanness. Thus, the existentialist is "free," but as Sartre concluded, in the absence of a human essence, it is a freedom that is indistinguishable from "infinite nothingness." But in the Raccoon scheme of things, freedom is the power to realize our specifically human potential, an archetypal potential that lies both "before" and "above" us. In short, it is eternal, but must be realized in time.

Again, on the material view of things, our nonlocal potential must be collapsed into the material domain, so our freedom will be limited to ultimately meaningless material choices down in 3D. This, by the way, is why the wealthy hedonists of the left fantasize that they empathize with "the poor." It's because they project their own spiritual emptiness into them, and imagine that the poor must be as unfulfilled as they are, because so focused on material lack. But another study came out this week -- I'm too lazy to try to find it at the moment -- that showed that a significant majority of Republicans are of modest means, while the Democrats are the party of the wealthy. This is because these conservative "values voters" are unaware of the envious absence, the active spiritual void, that gnaws away at the leftist. How selfish of them!

With the devolution to secular leftism comes the loss of role and the loss of hierarchy. No one knows their place or their true identity, which is one of the things that fuels celebrity culture, which necessarily conflates the famous with the significant. More importantly, because of the assumptions of materialism, it allows everyone to believe that they have either reached the summit of perfection, or, if not, that they have been unjustly denied it. If "everyone is equal," the obvious lack of equality will be intrinsically unfair and corrupt. This again fuels envy, which is terribly corrosive to any kind of human happiness.