“My life has been flushed down the drain”

So says one Bears Stearns executive. (via Eschaton)

To which I say: what a sad life. I recognize that losing millions of dollars must really suck. After all:

There was talk Monday that with their life savings nearly depleted, some executives had moved quickly, putting their weekend homes on the market.

Nonetheless, any life that can be flushed down the drain by the loss of any quantity of money is a sad life.

The Lamb-like Innocence of the State

According to the geniuses at Time magazine (via Glenn Greenwald):

In all the examples of diminished civil liberties, there are few, if any, where the motivating factor was something other than law and order or national security.

Well, duh!

Greenwald wants to dispute this characterization by asking for empirical evidence of the motives of those seeking to expand the surveillance state. I don't think any such evidence is necessary, or even relevant. The problem is not that the state has expanded its police powers for some nefarious purpose. The empirical consciousness of those pushing these changes is meaningless. Nonetheless, I think the real intention--i.e., the objective tendency, rather than the conscious aim--of these expansions of police power is precisely the law and order or national security Time cites. Law and order or national security are the only motives for police action ever. That's precisely the trouble with the police.

Brain Dead

No, not me.

David Mamet has a piece in the Village Voice detailing his transformation from a self-described liberal to a self-described conservative. I take this as definitive proof of the limits of introspection.

He claims his conversion is an outcome of thinking about politics in the context of his new play, November. A plot synopsis, supplied by Mamet himself:

The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

Great! Oleanna in the Oval Office.

Mamet has been always a reactionary, and will be always a reactionary. I only wish his confession would have taken the form of his imagined perfect theatrical review:

"I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead."

Are Conservatives Unteachable?

Jacob Levy, following Tyler Cowen:

Why is it easier to find enduring reactionary texts than enduring texts that state the basic position of conservatives in liberal democracies? That's the puzzle.

I think Jacob has answered his own question, actually. Fundamentally, conservatives (in the relevant Burke-to-Buckley-to-Sullivan sense) are liberals (in the classical sense) who worry about cultural decay. That is, they agree with liberals that subjective freedom is the end of the political community, but think that market freedom needs a basis in certain cultural institutions in order to be stable and lasting. Those institutions are always being whittled away by the drip-drip-drip of market freedoms, so conservatives self-avowedly find themselves repeatedly "standing athwart history yelling Stop!" The trouble is, as Jacob says, "history keeps right on going." The drip-drip-drip keeps eroding the cultural institutions, and conservatives have to take some new stand.

To be a teachable classic, a work has to touch something enduring, and conservative texts tend to be caught up in the present crisis. Marxism, too, has produced many such momentary texts, but Marxism also has a theoretical framework that is very different from liberalism's, and so even many of these "conjunctural" texts evince an underlying structure that can sustain analysis independent of the historical minutiae.

I'm just not sure conservatism has such an independent theoretical armature.

The first thought-buds of spring

Back from spring break, and feeling pretty lethargic. One of my students is running for student government on the slogan: "The End of Apathy." Another student remarked: "I'd be apathetic, if I weren't so lethargic."

I had two thoughts over break:

When I read and taught Rousseau's Emile years back, I was quite enamored of his proposal that the child should be raised so as never to encounter the limit of another will, but only the limits of nature. It appealed to a certain romantic egalitarian streak of mine, for it held out the promise of the child learning everything from the things themselves, seemingly independent and self-assured.

But hanging out with my four-year-old nephew over break, it occurred to me in a flash: That's a terrible idea! Other wills are just the desires and needs of other people, and I want my nephew to encounter, recognize, and learn to negotiate those desires and needs just as much as I want him to encounter and learn to negotiate the hills and forests around his home. Desires and needs are no less a part of nature than gravity is.

This was yet another minor epiphany in a slow moving and insensibly growing awareness that I dislike the concept of "the will" wherever I find it.

Second thought: finance capitalists like Marx. Or, at least, many are intrigued by Marx. Over break, I had to promise a gregarious and blustery old finance capitalist that the next time I was in Marin, I would sit down and talk with him about Marx. His first question to me was: "What was Marx like, as a person?" He was happy to hear that Marx was also gregarious and blustery.

What does honesty mean?

In their story about the Hallmark Packing Plant in California, the Washington Post quotes the incredulity of management:

In an interview, Mendell expressed disbelief that employees used stun guns to get sick or injured animals on their feet for inspection.

"That's impossible," he said, adding that "electrical prods are not allowed on the property."

Asked whether his employees use fork lifts to get moribund animals off the ground, he said: "I can't imagine that."

Asked whether water was sprayed up animals' noses to get them to stand up, he said: "That's absolutely not true."

"We have a massive humane treatment program here that we follow to the nth degree, so this doesn't even sound possible," Mendell said. "I don't stand out there all day, but to me it would be next to impossible."

Now it goes without saying that this schlump is lying repeatedly and obviously. To be confronted with video evidence and then to say that what the video shows is impossible takes gumption (or desperation).

Still, what bothers me about the coverage of this admittedly disgusting episode is the way in which two factors are consistently left out of the frame:

1. The media scrutiny is focused on the employees--those shown in the video and managers like Mr. Mendell. Now, I have no great love for managers, but they are, ultimately, just mediators. They are paid to do what is necessary to please the people with the capital. How would the stockholders respond to the video? Why was it shown to the manager, but not to the owners? Aren't the owners responsible for what happens on their property and at their behest? (This is not to excuse the fork-lift operators, the line bosses, or Mr. Mendell, but shouldn't the accounting be a bit wider, and trace things back to the first cause?)
2. Also, there is this ridiculous statement included in the story, made by the president of the Humane Society: "To sneak downers past inspectors, Pacelle said, is 'penny-wise and pound-foolish.'" As rhetoric aimed at the owners of meat-packing operations, that's all well and good, I suppose, but the problem here is not one of fiscal irresponsibility!! The future that is destroyed by the factory-farm system is not reducible to future returns on our investments.
   

Kolakowski is NOT a legitimate source on Marxism

John Derbyshire at NRO, wondering about Obama's intellectual curiosity, displays his own lack of same:

Modern American conservatism is a huge and various body of thought, with many mansions. Has Obama explored it? I'll lend him my Nash if he wants to make a start. Heck, I have read Kolakowski all the way through, all three volumes; has Obama read Hayek? Buckley? Kirk?

Kolakowski was an ideological anti-Marxist, and Main Currents is a faux-intellectual hatchet-job. An anti-Marxist who reads Kolakowski will find all of their prejudices bolstered, and that's about it. One might as well say: "Heck, I've read Liberal Fascism all the way through; has Obama read Hayek? Buckley? Kirk?"

UPDATE: And, just to be clear, this is not a problem because silly people at National Review read Kolakowski. I'd expect no less from them.

The number of supposed scholars who cite Kolakowski as some sort of authority is what bugs me. I just finished reading a supposedly serious, academic article about the Marxist theory of revolution that based its interpretation of Marx on Kolakowski, and claimed that Althusser's thesis about the break between early and late Marx was refuted by Main Currents.

This is just dishonest; one of the fundamental and unquestioned premises of Kolakowski's whole approach is that there is an essential Marxism underlying everything in the Marxist tradition, and that the main currents of Marxism are all corrupted indifferently by this essential character. This thesis is not demonstrated, but presupposed. To say that such a presupposition "refutes" anything is to mistake a catechism for an argument.

Kolakowski doesn't read the texts of the Marxist tradition; he uses them as screens onto which he projects his catechism. There is nothing honest about Main Currents except the author's open avowal of his antipathy to Marxism.

UPDATE 2: Here is a useful rundown of Kolakowski's modus operandi:

Kolakowski, we are assured, has first-hand experience of the consequences of Marx's malign doctrine, and is thus in a better position than privileged and protected Western intellectuals to appreciate the flaws in that doctrine. Kolakowski's exposure to 'actually existing socialism' did influence his understanding of Marxism, but not in the way that Judt imagines. Despite his political changes of heart, Kolakowski has never shaken off the habits of thought he learned from doctrinaire Stalinists in the frosty first decade of the Cold War. In his early twenties Kolakowski made a name for himself as the Communist Party's most energetic critic of Catholicism, that traditional enemy of the Polish left.

The young Kolakowski's criticisms of the Catholic tradition betray the classical intellectual method of Stalinism. In essay after essay, Kolakowski essentialises a complex body of ideas, reducing it to a few crude formulations, links these formulations to discredited political positions, and gives the ideas a teleological quality, in an effort to undercut any future attempt to revise or otherwise rehabilitate them. Under the guise of intellectual history, the young Stalinist pursues the crudest political polemic.

The same procedure can be observed in My Correct Views on Everything and Main Currents of Marxism. Marx wrote millions of words in an extraordinary range of genres, from political journalism to poetry to history to 'pure' economics. This immense oeuvre is filled with change and contradiction. It is the record of a political and intellectual quest, not a set of commandments. Yet Kolakowski is able to reduce Marx's life's work to a few hackneyed formulations:

The idea that the whole theory of communism may be summed up by the single phrase 'abolition of private property' was not invented by Stalin...The point is that Marx really did consistently believe that human society would not be 'liberated' without achieving unity. And there is no known technique apart from despotism whereby the unity of society can be achieved...

A good example of the poverty of Kolakowski's method is his treatment of Marx's view of the likelihood and likely location of a future socialist revolution. Referencing a handful of texts, Kolakowski claims that Marx believed that socialist revolution would break out in the 'advanced' countries of the West, and that it was well-nigh inevitable. Marx's careful reassessment of the prospects for socialist revolution in the West after the destruction of the Paris Commune in 1871, and the growing interest he showed in Russia and other 'undeveloped' societies in the last decade of his life are ignored by Kolakowski, lest they disturb his smug attribution of failure to Marx's 'prophecies', and his claim that the Bolshevik revolution could never have been forseen by the author of Capital. (Kolakowski's claim that Marx could never have anticipated the October revolution looks rather uncomfortable beside his attempt to make Marx responsible for the degeneration of that revolution and the depredations of Stalin.)

Worse than Kolakowski's misuse of Marx's ouevre is his misunderstanding of Marx's method. Kolakowski treats Marx as a curious cross between a second-rate bourgeois social scientist and a wild-eyed prophet. Marx's use of the dialectic is treated either as a rhetorical affectation or as evidence of an appetitie for feverish pseudo-Hegelian speculation about 'destiny'. Determined to ridicule his subject as a dogmatic false prophet, Kolakowski is incapable of appreciating the way that the dialectical method informed all of Marx's thinking, making his concepts nuanced and contextual and open to continual refinement. Marx had no time for the static categories of bourgeois economics, just as he had no time for the dogmatism inherent in all prophecy. All of Marx's concepts, even concepts as fundamental as 'proletariat' or 'capital', were dialectical abstractions, slices of an infinitely complex and continually changing reality. Kolakowski, though, insists on freezing the concepts of Marx and his followers, and treating them like the definitions of a dour analytic philosopher or number-crunching sociologist.