Category Archives: Politics

Gossip, Rumor and the Arts of Domination

“Anti-Semitism is the rumor about the Jews.”
— Theodor W. Adorno

Once I was passed over for a newsroom position I very much wanted. “We needed a woman,” an editor told me. I said nothing, although I seethed. In short order, I was made a columnist, so I didn’t even get a chance to cry. But the instant rush of utter unfairness lingers. The woman chosen was qualified, but her qualification had nothing to do with her sex. I was told she was just a needed statistic.
— Richard Cohen, “Privilege is real. But being a white man shouldn’t disqualify me.”

A senior philosopher elsewhere writes: Just wanted to tell you that your latest CHE piece really resonated with me. Back when I was first on the job market I had an APA interview with my undergrad alma mater [University X]. Of course, I felt confident going in—I knew the school, the culture, the students, the area. As the end of the interview, the (sole) interviewer said, “Well, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. But I have to be honest. The Dean said we are hiring a woman or the position won’t exist. This was a courtesy interview because you are an alum.” They hired some woman whose name I now forget, although I know she left [University X].
–Brian Leiter, “Academic job searches with ‘hidden’ search criteria”

One of the things that keeps shocking me over and over is the number of interviews Amanda and TT Lady announce having. NINE first round interviews? Jesus. I’ve had fewer than that in three years on the market… I’ve had zero this year so far. None. Not a single first-round interview.The response I expect is ‘Well, Tim (no, not my real name), you really need to reexamine your materials then, or publish more or..’ Here’s the thing: I hired Kelsky to help with my materials. And I did some of the job-mentoring stuff offered elsewhere. And I (literally) have published almost twice the amount that is required for tenure at the institution where I currently have a temporary position. And no, not all of them are epicycle pubs. And there are several areas where I’m one of the `go to’ people to ask. Yet I’ve had zero first-round interviews. My application is not being taken seriously, it seems. I would love to explain this (this fact, the general one) by anything other than my being a white male. But it’s hard to come up with anything nearly as plausible.
–“Tim,” philosophy job-market candidate

With these perceptions of unfairness and with the social baggage we grew up with, University life was characterized by a clear boundary between Savarnas and Dalits. I remember with great regret referring to Dalit students with derogatory terms because of the perceived injustice that my own friends were unable to get into the university while less qualified Dalits were given “an easy route in. “ No doubt there were Dalits from well-to-do families who were able to avail of the Reservation system to get in, but what large social system doesn’t have such cases? The rich and privileged use “the system” to their advantage every day but when someone else uses the very system in the very same way, we blanch and invoke morality! In a curious inversion, we declared ourselves victims!
–Prashant Nema, “Upper Caste Privilege: From Catharsis To Change”

Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but scores of eager retailers who can claim they are just passing on the news. Should the gossip—and here I have in mind malicious gossip—be challenged, everyone can disavow responsibility for having originated it. The Malay term for gossip and rumor, khabar angin (news on the wind), captures the diffuse quality of responsibility that makes such aggression possible.
— James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 142–43.

“What theorem out of Africa?”: What George Steiner’s Racist Rage Teaches Us About Conservative Ideology

There’s a certain kind of academic who likes to cite George Steiner to the effect that knowledge of Goethe, or a delight in Rilke doesn’t make a person any less likely to be barbaric. And yet the strongest argument for that position has always been Steiner himself, not least because his visceral racism and palpable misogyny have flourished in a historical milieu when the humanities have produced some of the most far-reaching, stringent inquiries into the relationship of high culture to moral sadism. In that sense, Steiner’s skepticism is no different from the gushing encomiums to intellectual supremacy espoused by most of his academic colleagues – “philosophers are skeptical and dangerous to the status quo!” “Those who graduate with English degrees are empathetic and cosmopolitan!” – for, despite their varying affective registers, they function as roundabout ways by which the speaker transitively, insidiously congratulates himself.

Consider, for example, Steiner’s space clearing remarks as he launches into his study of the rhetoric of philosophy in his book, The Poetry of Thought:

The incandescence of intellectual and poetic creativity in mainland Greece, Asia Minor and Sicily during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. remains unique in human history. In some respects, the life of the mind thereafter is a copious footnote. So much has long been obvious. Yet the causes of this sunburst, the motives which brought it about in that time and place remain unclear. The penitential “political correctness” now prevalent, the remorse of postcolonialism make it awkward even to pose what may be the pertinent questions, to ask why the ardent wonder that is pure thought prevailed almost nowhere else (what theorem out of Africa?).

Manifold and complex factors must have been interactive, “implosive” to borrow a crucial concept from the packed collisions in atomic physics. Among these were a more or less benign climate and ease of maritime communication. Argument traveled fast; it was, in the ancient and figural sense, “Mercurial.” The availability of protein, cruelly denied to so much of the sub-Saharan world, may have been pivotal. Nutritionists speak of protein as “brain food.” Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit. There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, concerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility. It is, however, evident that for the privileged, and they were relatively numerous, the ownership of slaves comported leisure and dispensation from manual and domestic tasks. It bestowed time and space for the free play of intellect. This is an immense license. Neither Parmenides nor Plato needed to earn a living. Under temperate skies, a nourished man could proceed to argue or to listen in the agora, in the groves of the Academy.

The third element is the most difficult to evaluate. With stellar exceptions, women played a housebound, often subservient part in the affairs, certainly in the philosophic-rhetorical affairs of the polis. Some may have had access to higher education. But there is little evidence prior to Plotinus. Did this (enforced, traditional?) abstention contribute to the luxury and even arrogance of the speculative? Does it reach, via the arrestingly modest contribution to mathematics and metaphysics made by women, into our own, now metamorphic day? Protein, slavery, male prepotence: what was their cumulative causation in the Greek miracle? For let us be clear: a miracle it was.
— George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought

What is notable here, I think, isn’t the vulgarity of the racism and sexism. As pointed out above, it shouldn’t by now be news to us (though it is no less appalling, of course) that the racism of intellectuals like Steiner proves to be the usual banal fare available from Fox News and the Daily Mail, a coagulation of folk science, modern myths and legends about ancient Greece, and a “Great Books + Classical Music” cultural fetish.

Rather, what I find striking here is how strenuously Steiner strives to pack in as many “politically incorrect” slurs as he can manage in two paragraphs. One would almost be forgiven for thinking this a Sokal-like, reverse hoax of what a cultural studies type imagines conservative thought to be like; so determined is he to check off every space in his bingo checklist of imagined “intersectional” foes of conservative thought. Racism: “what theorem out of Africa?” no doubt a deliberate echo of Saul Bellow’s “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” Ableism: “Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit.” Class domination and brutality: “There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, concerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility.” Misogyny: “With stellar exceptions, women played a housebound, often subservient part in the affairs, certainly in the philosophic-rhetorical affairs of the polis.”

It is this breathless, flailing litany of invective that I think may tell us something useful about conservative thought. I mean here, specifically, not only the white rage that it bespeaks, the desperation and rancid resentment simmering to a boil just beneath Steiner’s rococo prose, but also how that rage is constituted by phantasms, visions, nightmares summoned precisely by their very telling. In other words, the phantasms generative of conservative rage and resentment are constitutive of – rather than only or primarily reactions to – observations made about an “objective,” “external” reality.

This carries certain implications not only for a hermeneutic adequate to understanding conservative thought, but also a praxis attentive to its energies. The political theorist Corey Robin has offered one of the most penetrating accounts of how we ought to understand conservativism’s unifying vision. And yet if what I have argued above is correct, one of the implications he has been at pains to draw out and elaborate about the Trump era increasingly appears questionable. In a review of Robin’s book in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lily Geismer offers a particularly helpful distillation of this dimension of Robin’s thesis:

“In a somewhat counterintuitive argument, Robin argues that the weaknesses and instability of the Trump administration and the Republicans on Capitol Hill are a result of conservatism’s past successes, and proof that that it is on the decline. The decline of conservatism as an intellectual tradition — its increasing instability, incoherence, and irresponsibility — has occurred, in Robin’s opinion, less because of Trump’s furious tweet storms and doctrinal sloppiness and more because the right does not have a credible left to borrow from and react against. Over the last half-century, he argues, conservatives have been so successful at thwarting emancipatory movements that now it has nothing to unify it. Although Robin does acknowledge the achievements of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders campaign, he believes that none of these movements are strong enough to truly galvanize and discipline the right.”

What Robin’s argument appears to presuppose is that the right is animated by a more or less realistic judgment of the balance of forces arrayed against it; that conservativism gains its coherence and discipline from the pressure exerted by an actually existing vibrant, credible left. This fails to account for the fantastical visions that have often galvanized and unified the right – terrors of conspiracy plotting by the enslaved, moral panics around sexuality and gender, Islamophobic fever dreams of Dhimmitude and Sharia. Even more crucially, Robin’s account does not register the extent to which the very marrow of “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” really, the very marrow of politics, economics, and culture, are significantly – though of course not completely – constituted by fantasy and myth (“witchcraft” and “racecraft”).

Following the Argument Where It Leads, Or What does Conservative Ideology Have to do with Professional Philosophy?

It is striking – in light of the claimed inevitability of fatalities from rogue trolleys and the like – the extent to which the analytic philosopher constructs his moral decision-making as a performance of toughness. The ultimate moral test, we are made to understand, comes down to the fortitudo moralis of opting for the unpalatable. “McMahan,” Eva Feder Kittay notes in her critique of the book, The Ethics of Killing, “eventually concludes that we have to bite the bullet and accept that those with the same cognitive functioning and psychological capacities should be given the same moral status regardless of their species.” In the circle of analytic moral philosophy, Stephen Mulhall observes in a critique of the same book, “being a fearless thinker matters more, it seems, than avoiding morally fearful thoughts.”
— Omedi Ochieng, “Analytic Moral Philosophy and the Affect of Masculine Reason”

Scalia has spent the better part of his career as a lawyer, professor, and jurist telling us that the Constitution is an absolute, in which we must believe, even when — particularly when — it tells us something we do not want to hear. Scalia’s Constitution is not a warming statement of benevolent purpose, easily adapted to our changing needs. His Constitution is cold and dead, its prohibitions and injunctions frozen in time. Phrases like “cruel and unusual punishment” mean what they meant when they were written into the Constitution. If that produces objectionable results—say, the execution of children and the mentally retarded — too bad. “I do not think,” Scalia writes in Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, that “the avoidance of unhappy consequences is adequate basis for interpreting a text.”

Scalia takes special pleasure in unhappy consequences. He relishes difficulty and dislikes anyone who would diminish or deny it… A Scalia opinion, to borrow a phrase from New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, is “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar on stage.” Scalia may have once declared the rule of law the law of rules — leading some to mistake him for a stereotypical conservative — but rules and laws have a particular frisson for him. Where others look to them for stabilizing checks or reassuring supports, Scalia looks for exhilarating impediments and vertiginous barriers. Where others seek security, Scalia seeks sublimity. Rules and laws make life harder, and harder is everything. “Being tough and traditional is a heavy cross to bear,” he tells one reporter. “Duresse oblige.”

That, and not fidelity to the text or conservatism as it is conventionally understood, is the idée fixe of Scalia’s jurisprudence — and the source of his apparent man-crush on Jack Bauer. Bauer never makes things easy for himself; indeed, he goes out of his way to make things as hard as possible. He volunteers for a suicide mission when someone else would do (and probably do it better); he turns himself into a junkie as part of an impossibly baroque plan to stop an act of bioterrorism; he puts his wife and daughter at risk, not once but many times, and then beats himself up for doing so. He loathes what he does but does it anyway. That is his nobility — some might say masochism — and why he warms Scalia’s heart.

— Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind

I’ve long admired Williamson’s writing, if not his ideas, for the way he’s internalized Michael Kinsley’s warning that if you’re afraid to go too far, you won’t go far enough. Williamson almost always goes too far, taking his arguments to thought frontiers where there are no roads, no mobile phone service and sometimes barely enough air to breathe. For examples of the Williamson oeuvre, see these National Review pieces arguing against reparations, decrying the mainstreaming of transgender rights, critiquing the “white working class” and dismissing the idea of “white supremacy.”

Every Williamson article contains strong meat, which has led his detractors to dismiss him as a troll. But that’s not who he is. He’s really more of an ogre who loves to take arguments to the breaking point in hopes of shocking readers with his cold, unbound logic. Where other writers might serve 7 percent alcohol in their brew, Williamson likes to up his percentage to 20. Where other writers might stop at mean, Williamson keeps going all the way to cruel.

I never read Williamson in hopes of seeking agreement. And on that score, he has almost never failed me. He’s not interested in building consensus or in gentle persuasion. He reduces all the grays to their black-and-white components. He pushes boundaries and doesn’t stop until he’s gone too far. In a 2014 piece about transgender actress Laverne Cox, for example, he dropped bombs when a sling-shot would have sufficed: “Regardless of the question of whether he has had his genitals amputated, Cox is not a woman, but an effigy of a woman. Sex is a biological reality, and it is not subordinate to subjective impressions, no matter how intense those impressions are, how sincerely they are held, or how painful they make facing the biological facts of life. No hormone injection or surgical mutilation is sufficient to change that.”

— Jack Shafer, “Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson,” Politico Magazine, April 06, 2018

Street Smarts

Martin Luther King, Jr. taught a senior seminar in social and political philosophy at Morehouse circa 1962. Below is an exam from his course:

Martin Luther King, Jr-Social and Political Philosophy

“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” Gustave Flaubert is reputed to have said. It appears Martin Luther King, Jr. was regular and orderly in his teaching like a bourgeois, so that he could be nonviolent and original on the streets.