In case you hadn't noticed, the Sotomayor hearings were broadcast this last week from somewhere in LookingGlassLand-a place where an all-white committee of Senators questioned a Latina nominee for hours on end, and the all-white-male Republican contingent spent the largest chunk of its time cross-questioning her on whether she was a racist, and if not, how could she prove it to them?
Of course there were problems with this approach. Such as the complete lack of judicial record supporting their accusations. And that's precisely what gave the proceedings their utterly surreal character, leaving us only to wonder if it was more Lewis Carroll or George Orwell. If MSNBC were half as savvy as they think they are, this is the question they'd be asking folks to call in and vote on. But, of course, they've got Pat Buchanan doing commentary for them. So what are the chances of that?
Yes, everyone with half a brain or more knows that it's utterly surreal. But what's lacking, generally is the vocabulary to say anything more precise than that. And that's symptomatic of a very big problem indeed. In fact, at bottom it's the same problem we saw in Sotomayor herself, as she repeatedly told the world that she had no judicial philosophy. (In fact, philosophy gave her hives, and might possibly even send her into anaphylactic shock!) No philosophy for her, nohow.
Pardon me for not believing a word of it, even if Sotomayor herself actually did.
What's the connection here? Simple: At its most basic, ideology means nothing more than how you slice up the world-or at least the human part of it. Who are the players? And what are their relationships? Kings over subjects-with virtually nothing owed by Kings, except to God? Lords over vassals-with a system of mutual, though vastly unequal obligations? Slaveowners and slaves-with slavowners alone defining the limits of absolute power over those who have none? Or citizens with constitutionally-recognized rights and equal protection for all? These are the big-picture examples of how political ideology is political ontology (the branch of philosophy dealing with questions of existence). And it's quite literally impossible to function without one, conscious or not, whether you know it or not.
The right has a very well-developed multi-billion dollar machine in place to constantly articulate its ideology, and apply it to any situations that happen to emerge. The fact that its ideology is almost always contradictory and incoherent is entirely irrelevant. They're busy cranking it out at mass industrial production levels, and if you're busy pointing out contradictions at cottage industry levels, then you're not cranking out your own ideology, and you're definitely not doing it at mass industrial levels. (Or, to put it another way, for the past 40 years, the right has been involved in a Gramscian culture war/war of position, and the left has been AWOL.)
Actually, the Democratic establishment has come up with it's own ideology-the "we don't have an ideology" ideology. Which leaves the rest of us tearing our hair out, screaming "Why the hell not?" Because not having an ideology of your own essentially means accepting the other guys ideology, their way of cutting up the world, and then trying to get your goals achieved playing their game by their rules with their set of cards-which, of course, they have diligently marked back during the Nixon Administration. In fact, it doesn't matter if you're playing 11-dimensional chess. If you let the other guy define everything, the game is hari-kari (see, "Lather," Jefferson Airplane),
I'm a radical. I have an abiding interest in understanding and attacking problems at their roots. From my point of view, the value of liberalism is that it codifies and institutionalized the great radical struggles and achievements of the past-what once were "untkinkable", such as the abolition of slavery, or the attainment of legal equality for women.
Much of what we take for granted is never seriously questioned. And much of that is simply false. Fortunately, much of that doesn't really matter all that much. But some of it does, intensely so. And so does getting a handle on the deeper common denominators that keep us from questioning what's taken for granted as we should, and keep us from seeing things from a different, more liberating, more insightful, more inclusive perspective.
In this diary, I want to discuss one of the most fundamental factors that keeps us from questioning things deeply enough, and developing new perspectives. I call it "thinking from small to big," as opposed to "thinking from big to small." The later is the abstract concept behind the slogan, "Think globally, act locally." The former is simply what comes naturally, given how our brains are wired. But it's also natural to grow beyond that sort of thinking. Indeed, that's one reason why human societies around the world have routinely venerated their elders as unique sources of wisdom-one function of age is to expand the horizons of ones vision, and to come to see the particulars that fill our lives when we are younger as pieces of a larger, unified whole.
My main discussion here is going to be a bit abstract. In fact, it's going to be about mathematics (heavy on pictures aka "diagrams", light on numbers, but still, math).The reason for that is simple: virtually all of human cognition has patterned aspects to it, and mathematics if the language of patterns.
Last month, Grammy-winning recording artist John Legend returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated 10 years ago, to give the commencement speech. It was later broadcast in full on Democracy Now, which is how it came to my attention.
In its headlione, Democracy Now! used a quote from the speech, "A Commitment to Truth Requires a Commitment to Social Justice", and below that offered this by way of introduction:
John Legend: "From the war in Iraq to credit-default swaps to the internet bubble to the real estate bubble, too often we got caught up in the hype and fail to see the real truth...Too often, we become apathetic. We see the lies, we see the obfuscation, the deception. And we fail to point it out. We're afraid to rain on the parade, afraid to rock the boat, afraid to pursue the truth."
These are inspiring sentiments, and I was glad to hear them being expressed. But they're not what I want to write about from his speech. Instead, I want to write about something seemingly more mundane, which came much earlier in speech, but which I think is crucially important, as it serves as a very significant, but oft overlooked foundation. John Legend took some time to talk, half-jokingly, about the distinctive aspects of college education, and this goes directly to one of my favorite topics--the subject of cognitive development.
On that subject, here's what John Legend had to say....
Lately, I've been thinking about quotient spaces in politics. What's a quotient space? Take a look at a wall calender, dividing the continuous flow of time into days, weeks, months and years-cycles within cycles within cycles, or an analogue clock, dividng time into seconds, minutes, hours and 12-hour cycles. These are commonplace examples of what mathematicians call quotient spaces. Wikipwedia explains:
In topology and related areas of mathematics, a quotient space (also called an identification space) is, intuitively speaking, the result of identifying or "gluing together" certain points of a given space. The points to be identified are specified by an equivalence relation. This is commonly done in order to construct new spaces from given ones.
For a mathematician, time is a space-a one dimensional space, a line. We glue it together by identifying all midnights, thus making every day, and every time equivilent with the same day and time of every other day. Or we glue it together by identifying all January firsts, making every year, and every day of the year equivalent with the same day of every other years. Okay, you say, big deal. A fancy poants way to talk about time. But what's that got to do with politics?
The proper perspective for viewing the NYT McCain story, the unfolding food fight, and the continuing fallout, is Gramsci's twin concepts of the war of position and the war of movement. I've written about this several times before, but here's a quick refresher.
(A) Gramsci's motivation was that the predicted worker's revolution did not occur in the mot advanced capitalist countries, as Marxist theory predicted. He therefore sought to explain why this was so, and what to do about it. The answers he came up with, described briefly below, have been adapted by people whose viewpoints are far removed from his--Rush Limbaugh, for one--so there is no need to accept his initial premises, if--like I do--one finds his descriptions of processes compelling.
(B) Grmsci attributed the failure to make an anti-capitalist revolution to the capture of worker's ideology, and organizations by the hegemonic (ruling or dominant) culture, transmitted by institutions such as the church, compulsory education, popular culture, etc. as well as appeals to bourgoise ideologies, such as nationalism, consumerism, careerism, etc. which also enjoy their own forms of instutional support.
Such institutions and ideologies have both their own independent rationale and function in their own spheres, as well as their function in the largr social system. Gramsci's conception allows us to view both institutions and narratives at varying different levels of abstraction operating according the same over-all logic, without denying or distorting the fact that they also follow their own particular logic as well.
(C) To overcome the power of hegemony, and create a workers revolution, Gramsci argued for a two-fold strategy, First, a "war of position" to build working-class counter-institutions, and take over bourgoise ones while promulgating working-class ideology. Second, once this stage was successful, then a "war of movement" to the actual insurrection against capitalism, with mass support that Marxist theory originally predicted.
Consciously or not, the American right has adopted Gramsci's fundamental insight, but adapted it to their somewhat different position in society. On the one hand, as Gramsci advised, they have dilligently built up their own institutional infrastructure, and attacked existing instriutional structures that they do not control, seeking either to take over or cripple or destroy them. On the other hand, they have combined the war of position and war of movement into a more integrated whole, frequently taking advantage of a constellation of positions to launch a "war of movement" attack on an insitution they wish to cripple, destroy or take over, or an idea, principle, value, or narrative they wish to discredit, or subvert.
With this in mind, the NYT McCain story can be viewed as particularly involving:
(1) The expression of conservative identity politics, a binary worldview that involves the valorization of all things "conservative" and the demonization of "liberals" specifically, and anything generally that stands opposed to, or outside of self-defined "conservatism." I've written about this previously, back in 2006 in diaries at MyDD here, here, here, here and here.
(2) The narrative of "personal virtue" as the foundational concern of politics, which is a core conservative belief dating back at least to Hesiod's Works and Days, and heavily inscribed into the DNA of the Western Worlds in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. This narrative is strongly connected to cognitive developmental levels two and three in Robert Kegan's schema, which I've previously described here and here, for example.
(3) The rightwing war on fact-based (i.e. "liberal) journalism as a specific facet of their overall attack on modernity, empiricism, reason and critical thought. The NY Times, as the nation's leading daily newspaper has long been a prime target in this war, and has long been significantly compromised by their successes.
For a more detailed description of how this perspective affects our understanding of the NYT-McCain story and its repurcussions, join me on the flip....
In the middle of last month, Slate magazine's William Saletan madeafoolofhimself with an article titled "Liberal Creationism", in which he revived the long-discredited arguments--and underlying data--of the racist neocon domestic policy opus, The Bell Curve. It's no accident, really, that Saletan tried to equate the liberal belief in racial equality with the conservative disbelief in evolution. It's the perfect embodiment of the gospel of even-handedness, which holds that every leftwing truth must be balanced by a rightwing lie (if not always, or even often, the opposite).
Indeed, I just feel it in my bones that one of the main reasons Saletin rushed headlong so eagerly into this act of stupidity was the perfectness of this embodiment. "This will show those holier-than-thou anti-racist, noses-in-the-air, we're-so-scientific dirty fucking hippies!"
Yeah, right. Well, having been through this movie before, I was well aware of how it would all turn out. (Saletin was also encouraged by a similarly ignorant outburst by James Watson, which should have served to remind folks of the intentionally neglected crucial role of Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of DNA's structure. But, I digress.)
Three primary compass-orienting facts stand out--aside from the prima facie racism, that is: (1) There is more genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa than there is in the entire rest of the human race. This is a general truth of population genetics: whenever a species emerges in one place, and sub-populations migrate away, the sub-populations always have less genetic diversity. Thus, any attempt to make arguments that would compare African (not just African-American) populations and other populations must take into account the substantial differences in degree of variation. This naturally plays havoc with common, garden-variety racial stereotyping. But it also means that pseudo-scientific studies have one more problem with their fundamental lack of genuine scientific validity.
(2) The existence of multiple intelligences. It is patently obvious that IQ does not measure one unified thing, which is the basis of all human intelligence. It's not just the whole body of work conceptually unified by Howard Gardner, the most up-to-date IQ tests are themselves composed of different modules that clearly reflect a multifaceted conception of intelligence, even if it isn't as diverse as Gardner's. That said, the internal weighting of such tests is undeniably arbitrary and subjective to a certain extent. Which is another way of saying that IQ is a construct, not a thing-in-itself.
(3) The fact that IQ has risen constently from generation to generation shows quite clearly that it is not a measure of a genetically fixed quantity.
These three facts were all well-known to the scientific community when The Bell Curve was published, and this fact did get out to those who cared to be informed. Now, 13 years later, with the fully-functioning internets in place, it seemed intellectually suicidal for Slate to publish such drivel. And so it was.
But a recent New Yorker article has appeared, vastly expanding on point #3, which ties in directly to some of my earlier posts on cognitive development. And that actually gives this tired old subject reason for a fresh look.
In my previous post, "Glenn Greenwald's Ron Paul Problem--And Ours", I argued that Glenn-following some very important lines of critical inquiry over the past few years-was predisposed not to reocgnize the troubling aspects of Ron Paul's candidacy that Dave Neiwart and Sara Robinson of Orcinus were particularly attuned to and familiar with. Glenn is focused on the rhetorical directness and simplicity of Paul's anti-Iraq War and anti-Imperialist/Imperial Presidency self-presentation. Neiwart and Robinson are focused on Paul's whole package, and the role he plays in the larger world of rightwing extremist influence on American politics.
In 2003, Neiwart-a professional journalist prior to taking up blogging-wrote a Koufax-winning series, Rush, Newspeak and Fascism. Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis [PDF] [Illustrated HTML], which dealt at length with the role of Limbaugh as a righwing demogagic propagandist, and in particular with his role as a transmitter of extremist views into the conservative mainstream. It is Neiwart's familiarity with this entire world-which he had previously covered from the ground up-that informs his views of Ron Paul as well.
Neiwert notes that Limbaugh's closest parallel is probably Father Coughlin, a virulently anti-Semetic radio personality of the 1920s and 30s, however:
Limbaugh, in contrast, has always carefully eschewed conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. Through most of the first decade of his radio career, his primary shtick has been to rail against the government and its supposed takeover of our daily lives. This anti-government propaganda has served one main purpose: To drive a wedge between middle- and lower-class workers and the one entity that has the capability to protect them from the ravages of wealthy class warriors and swarms of corporate wolves.
Although quite different in many ways, there is a clear parallel between Limbaugh and Paul-both serve to repackage and mainstream extremist views that are highly damaging to the fate of workers whom they appeal to on cultural grounds. If anything, Paul has more openly embraced classic conspiricism than Limbaugh has.
So far, none of this has impressed (or even visibly registered on) Glenn. My purpose here is not to dig deeper into the material Dave has already uncovered. Rather, it is to sketch out a framework for how we ought to understand Paul's politics, and why the issues Dave and Sara raise are not secondary concerns which can simply be ignored because of the primacy of the Iraq War and Bush Administration lawlessness. The framework for doing this was also introduced in the previous diay-it is Benjamin Barber's analysis of ethno-relgious tribalism and corporate globalization in his book, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. Barber argues that both forces, although ostensibly oppossed to one another, actually work synergistically to undermine democratic republicanism, the only truly viable way for people to democratically and collectively control the larger outlines of our collective destiny. Barber's analysis helps clarify why Paul's opposition to Bushism is, in the long run, more injurious to the progressive cause than it is helpful. That is the argument developed on the flip.
Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
"Supporting the Troops" As An Inherently Deceitful Formulation
Sending soldies off to die in a worse than meaningness, counterproductive war is "supporting the troops." Trying to end that counterproductive war, and bring them home alive is "not supporting the troops." Sending them off to war without adequate body armor, medical care, and R&R is also "supporting the troops." Trying to ensure that they do have adequate body armor, medical care, and R&R is not "supporting the troops," it may even be "not supporting the troops." If they come back badly injured mentally, giving them bogus discharges for previously undiagnosed "personality disorders" is "supporting the troops." Trying to stop this heinous practice is not "supporting the troops," and even, very likely "not supporting the troops."
In sum, "supporting the troops" is supporting whatever Bush wants to do. But we don't say, "supporting whatever Bush wants to do." We say "supporting the troops," instead, because Bush has a long, long history of hiding his failings behind other people's reputations and virtue
Clearly, something very odd is going on here, and while many bloggers have commented on this over the years, I'm not aware of anyone who I think has fully nailed it. I'm not going to nail it either, because I think it might well take a 300-page book to do it justice, but I am going to add something useful, I hope.
