Postmodern Late Antiquity – Part II: Tony Judt’s Vanishing Margins

In any event, all such labels [like “Jewishness”] make me uneasy. We know enough of ideological and political movements to be wary of exclusive solidarity in all its forms. One should keep one’s distance not only from the obviously unappealing “-isms”—fascism, jingoism, chauvinism—but also from the more seductive variety: communism, to be sure, but nationalism and Zionism too. And then there is national pride: more than two centuries after Samuel Johnson first made the point, patriotism—as anyone who passed the last decade in America can testify—is still the last refuge of the scoundrel

To be sure, there is something self-indulgent in the assertion that one is always at the edge, on the margin. Such a claim is only open to a certain kind of person exercising very particular privileges. Most people, most of the time, would rather not stand out: it is not safe. If everyone else is a Shia, better to be a Shia. If everyone in Denmark is tall and white, then who—given a choice—would opt to be short and brown? And even in an open democracy, it takes a certain obstinacy of character to work willfully against the grain of one’s community, especially if it is small.

Unlike the late Edward Said, I believe I can understand and even empathize with those who know what it means to love a country. I don’t regard such sentiments as incomprehensible; I just don’t share them. But over the years these fierce unconditional loyalties—to a country, a God, an idea, or a man—have come to terrify me. The thin veneer of civilization rests upon what may well be an illusory faith in our common humanity. But illusory or not, we would do well to cling to it. Certainly, it is that faith—and the constraints it places upon human misbehavior—that is the first to go in times of war or civil unrest.

We are entering, I suspect, upon a time of troubles. It is not just the terrorists, the bankers, and the climate that are going to wreak havoc with our sense of security and stability. Globalization itself—the “flat” earth of so many irenic fantasies—will be a source of fear and uncertainty to billions of people who will turn to their leaders for protection. “Identities” will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas.

Being “Danish” or “Italian,” “American” or “European” won’t just be an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. The state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps. Intolerant demagogues in established democracies will demand “tests”—of knowledge, of language, of attitude—to determine whether desperate newcomers are deserving of British or Dutch or French “identity.” They are already doing so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the marginals: the edge people. My people.

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/407338276/edge-people

U.A. When’s the last time we’ve heard of these vanishing margins: Images on the Edge? The Renaissance had no need for an edge defined in relation to (and existing because of) the center, for it claimed the whole. Contrapuntal lines gave way to unified melodic themes, until the idea of melody was in turn broken. But knowledge of this idea is not so easily unlearned! There is no going back to Tudor madrigals precisely because we don’t want to. What do we want, then? Judt’s point, I take it, is that nobody really knows what is meant by “we” these days, but – and this is what makes him more than a sea urchin – it’s probably a good thing that we don’t know.

All hail the known unknowns.

“Neurological evidence”

“Despite compelling neurological evidence to the contrary, there is a strong tendency in the liberal West to view emotion and reason as locked into a zero-sum relationship in which any gain for one is a loss for the other. N5”

N5. Liberal thought, Roberto Unger argues, is plagued by a fundamental conflict between moralities of reason and desire: “For reason, when it sets itelf up as moral judge, the appetites are blind forces of nature at loose within itself. They must be controlled and if necessary suppressed. For the will, the moral commands of reason are despotic laws that sacrifice life to duty. Each part of the self is condemned to war against the other.” See Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics, p. 55.

Peter Hays Gries, China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), p.88.

U.A. The above-quoted sentence struck me as uncommonly funny. Fearing to misjudge the author, I looked up the note, and found stronger justification than I could have ever hoped for. Recorded here as an example of how not to do CLS.

Conversations with Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel and Richard D. Heffner

But whenever intellectuals get power, it’s dangerous. Take the French Revolution – Danton, Robespierre, Marat. They were intellectuals. And because of that they became dictators. The moment they assume power, it was dangerous for everybody. They became victims their own experiments. Danton was beheaded, Robespierre was beheaded, Marat was assassinated. Take the Catholic Church. In the beginning, it was a church of ideas, of spirituality. It was a laboratory of the soul. The moment the church acquired power, I think it realized that it was no longer the soul that mattered. (19)

U.A. I can just about imagine P. R. Palmer screaming from beyond the pale. Peter Brown is alive and kicking (although presumably as donnish as ever). People, historians are professionals and they are here for a reason! This holds even if you think historians are closer to plumbers than doctors.

That said, Wiesel is right. Of course he’s right. Everyone who gets power becomes dangerous. That’s just part of the definition of power. The problem with intellectuals is that they can be dangerous even without power. 02/27/2010

Dean Acheson on Foreign Policy

“80% of the job of foreign policy was ‘management of your domestic ability to have a policy.'”

Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz, Foreign Affairs 86.4, pp. 82.

U.A. Back to politics next term. Must Winter always be about propaganda – to wit: linguistic determinism, collective myths, etc.? It may well be the season of high-mindedness… provided that we overlook the distributives. [Isn’t this profoundly wrong, though?] But then, Fall is for formalism, and Spring for prologues – game theory, Daniel Ellsberg, and will I add Kahn to the list? A good question to contemplate in the cold…

Technicians and Tacticians

Technicians’ lies may be discovered after a battle… tacticians lie, but their lies can only be discovered after a year… (General Guderlian)

U.A. I had high hopes for this quote’s opening a chapter of my thesis. I even printed it out! Alas, it did not come to pass… 02/27/2010

Antonio Gramsci

What “ought to be” is therefore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics.

Quoted in “We are All Republicans,” (206), Mark Garrett Longaker, Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007).

U.A. What a steel-plated stomach I had! Surely, Nabokov’s “aniseed-flavored” haze wasn’t the only cause (emollient)? Now I understand what taste is: adaptive immune system. But much still turns on the cook. – 11/10/2010

The Opium of the Intellectual

Raymond Aron, translated by Terence Kilmartin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1957)

The party of the Revolution pours scorn on the descendants of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Kafka as the intellectual jeremiahs of a bourgeoisie which cannot console itself for the death of God because it is so conscious of its own death: the revolutionary, not the rebel, holds the key to transcendence and meaning – the historic future. (49)

The idolatry of history is born of this unavowed nostalgia for a future which would justify the unjustifiable. The fall of Rome convinced St. Augustine that one could not expect from mortal cities what belonged only to the City of God. The decline of Europe has prompted our contemporaries to take up the predictions of Marx as adapted for our times by the Leninist – Stalinist technique of action – unless, after the fashion of Toynbee, they begin by following the path of Spengler and find their way back by a tortuous route to the shrine of St. Augustine. (192)

….

Philosophies of history of the Marxist type bring order to the chaos of events by relating it to a few simple principles of interpretation, and postulating an irresistible movement towards the fulfillment of human destiny….

At this point what we call the idolatry of history raises its ugly head, a caricature of historical awareness. The latter teaches us respect for the facts, innumerable and incoherent, and the multiplicity of meanings which they possess or that one can ascribe to them according to whether one relates them to individual actors or crystallized traditions or the consequences they have developed. The idolatry of history arrogates to itself the right to ignore the brute facts or to give each of them the meaning which will fit in with an allegedly definitive system of interpretation. This… carries the risk of setting up the victors as judges of the vanquished, the State as the sole witness of the truth…. (193)

….Religious experience gains in authenticity as one comes to distinguish better between moral virtue and obedience to the Church. The secular religions dissolve into politico-economic opinions as soon as one abandons the dogma. Yet the man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in living communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. (323-4)

Perhaps it will be otherwise. Perhaps the intellectual will lose interest in politics as soon as he discovers its limitations. Let us accept joyfully this uncertain promise. Indifference will not harm us. Men, unfortunately, have not yet reached the point where they have no further occasion or motive for killing one another. If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. (324)

If they alone can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the skeptics. (324)

The Specter of Communism – the United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953

Melvyn P. Leffler 

The strategy [of holding the Republicans accountable for endangering the nation’s security and allowing the Reds to take over Europe if Congress did not agree to the Marshall Plan] sought to lock the Republicans into support for an American leadership role around the world. Truman’s political advisors believed that the special session of Congress and the emergency relief bill boosted the president’s political standing. They knew that fighting Communism resonated with the American people s did no other foreign policy slogan, because Communism was seen as an alien ideology poisonous to private enterprise and democratic pluralism and repugnant to ethnic Americans who saw their brethren in Eastern Europe oppressed by the Soviet behemoth. In the minds of Americans, Soviet Communism was now no different than Nazi totalitarianism. (69) 

From the viewpoint of Washington, there was no alternative but to continue to build a configuration of power that safeguarded American interests…. This strategy constituted a double containment policy, a policy that at the same time thwarted the expansion of the Soviet Union and contained the rebirth of autonomous German and Japanese power. By integrating all non-Communist nations into an American orbit responsive to their needs and requirements, officials in Washington hoped to gain their assent to a more open and multilateral economic order, an order U.S. policymakers deemed requisite for worldwide capitalist growth and American prosperity. And if such a geopolitical and economic order could be forged abroad, it would nourish democratic capitalism at home. (125) 

This vision was a captivating one, but it wasn’t certain to succeed. The Korean War, in fact, highlighted how problematic it could be…. Even more threatening to democratic traditions and a free society was the new Red Scare. McCarthy’s allegations of treason and his investigation of innocent individuals fostered an atmosphere of conformity at best, repression at worst. (126) 

Paradoxically, the strategy of containment and preponderance, designed to protect the core values of democratic capitalism, threatened to crush them. In the quest to enhance U.S. security, the agencies of the federal government proliferated…. Under the pall of the Soviet threat abroad and McCarthyism at home, the intrusion of these agencies into people’s lives mounted dangerously…. (126) 

That Americans tend to forget the suffering of the Koreans and the Vietnamese is not surprising, because in waging the Cold War their principal aim was not so much to help others as to protect themselves from the specter of Communism…. (129) 

(Hill and Wang, 1994)

American Diplomacy (Expanded Edition) (University Of Chicago Press, 1984)

George F. Kennan

History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic politics. If you say that mistakes of the past were unavoidable because of our domestic predilections and habits of thought, you are saying that what stopped us from being more effective than we were was democracy, as practiced in this country. And, if that is true, let us recognize and measure the full seriousness of it – and find something to do about it. A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster… the margin in which it is given to us to commit blunders ahs been drastically narrowed in the last fifty years…. (73)

Except for our own Civil War… our involvements with the use of armed force in the modern age have occurred primarily in the confusing and to some extent misleading experiences of the two world wars of the century. Both these wars ended in unconditional surrender, encouraging us in the view that the purpose of war was not to bring about a mutually advantageous compromise with an external adversary seen as totally evil and inhuman, but to destroy completely the power and the will of that adversary. In both these wars, but particularly the second, we departed increasingly from the principle, embodied in the earlier rules of warfare, that war should be waged only against the armed forces of an enemy, not against the helpless civilian population…. We are now finally being brought to recognize that to follow that practice to its logical conclusion is to destroy ourselves and probably civilization itself. We have, in other words, worked ourselves into a blind alley; and now, as we try to retreat from this dreadful trap, it is becoming apparent to us that we have no workable alternative theory of the uses of armed forces to fall back on. Both of these errors – the commitment to unconditional surrender and the commitment to massive civilian destruction – have led us seriously astray. (175)

No wonder, in the face of all this confusion, that our greatest mistakes in national policy seem to occur when the military factor is most prominently involved. (174)

But I wonder whether this confusion is not compounded by certain deeply ingrained features of our political system. I am thinking first of all about what I might call the domestic political self-consciousness of the American statesman. By this I mean his tendency, when speaking or acting on matters of foreign policy, to be more concerned for the domestic political effects of what he is saying or doing than about their actual effects on our relations with other countries…. When this is carried to extremes, American diplomacy tends to degenerate into a series of postures struck before the American political audience, with only secondary consideration being given to the impacts of these postures on our relations with other countries. (174)

This situation is not new. We have only to recall Tocqueville’s words, written 150 years ago, to the effect that “it is in the nature of democracies to have, for the most part, the most confused or erroneous ideas on external affairs, and to decide questions of foreign policy on purely domestic considerations.”…. But this tendency seems to be carried to greater extremes here than elsewhere. This may be partly explained by the nature of the constituency to which the American statesman appeals…. (174)

U.A. Filed under “History” as a primary source.

Sidney A. Pearson, Jr.’s Criticism of NP – Darkness at Noon

From Arthur Koestler 1978 by Twayne Publishers

Rubashov represents the modern perversion of reason, but it remains a form of reason nonetheless. It is as a rationalist of the materialist mold that he is led to “think his thoughts through to their logical conclusion.” Physical torture would only serve to divert attention away from the ideas of the movement. The confession to crimes that he never committed is not intended to cast Rubashov outside the revolution, but just the opposite. Confession is the only way that he can return to the fold. The confession serves to reunite the victim with the executioner in the common purpose of serving the revolution…. So long as Rubashov either does not or cannot disassociate himself from the revolution he has, for all practical purposes, sanctioned his own arrest. Since his personal life and the life of the revolution are inseparable, to deny the right of Ivanov to arrest and interrogate him would mean to deny the justice of the revolution and of his own life and actions as part of it. (54)

Had Rubashov confessed for reasons of physical torture, Koestler’s novel might have more closely resembled Orwell’s nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four. It might have been easier to understand the trials in one sense if the confessions were forceably[sic] extracted, but the revolutionary unity of theory and practice would have been obscured. The freely given confession points toward an entirely different order of ideas in the service of revolution than does a tortured one. Although Rubashov presents the reader with the revolution in terms of almost pure reason, Koestler does not lose sight of the close relationship between theory and practice of the revolutionary tradition. Here we can also see more clearly why Rubashov is not the “typical” victim of the trials but rather the “atypical” victim; the dilemma of ends and means for intellectual revolutionaries could not be explored otherwise. The final confession is necessary in order to keep the theoretical question clearly in view. Rubashov is a martyred saint of the revolution, not just another faceless nonentity. He is a faithful servant of the new god, who follows the laws, the reasons, the acts of the movement to their final and inevitable end…. (54-5)

Ivanov knows that Rubashov will confess because of the logic of the party’s, position, not by torture. He tells Gletkin, “When he has thought everything out to its logical conclusion he will capitulate… it won’t be out of cowardice, but by logic.”… Unless it is understood that Rubashov confesses for reasons of logic and not fear, the point Koestler is making will be lost…. (55)

In Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon

U.A. It doesn’t take an idealist to see why historical determinism (a form of Popperian scientism) is one of the most pernicious sources of cruelty. Intellectual slavery is no worse than physical slavery, which also prowled under the judge’s robe and the scholar’s gown. But determinism is a most potent laxative of the human conscience. Today, historians speak of “scientific determinism” too freely. We ought to become advocates once more. There is much to Popper’s calling Open Society his “war effort.” It is said that open war is not (yet) upon us, that academics do not declare war, and that in any case the pithy Gibbon took three volumes to chronicle the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. I am tempted by Montale’s contention that we live in a new Middle Ages, which is to say and the walls are closing in upon us, and there is no “good fight” to die in, because posterity defines.

Perhaps I have done little more than to admit my intellectual dishonesty. Had not Milton’s noble fury in Areopagitica shield for centuries the doctrinaire inductivism underwriting it? And even Popper, who justly condemned epistemological expediency, resorted to the same in dismissing conventionalism. Though he thought he must (side B of “resort”?).

Alas, the modern academics feed upon a watery diet, and their flesh is pale as veal. Only the most exceptional are still capable of Orwell’s courage , or Spender’s chilly naivete, or Rubinstein’s outburst, and even so – capable and no more. Should I ever find such a naked nameless thing in me, let it be known that they are due to those aspects of my biography commonly regarded as disreputable in academia. 02/27/2010