Month: September 2011

Join Joseph W.H. Lough, Professor of Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, in this brand new course offered at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley.

Political Theology builds upon the writings of Jeffrey Sharlett, author of the run-away bestsellers C Street and The Family. Both studies examine the emergence of a new virulent political theology at the beginning of the 20th century along with its rapid proliferation over the last half century.

Along with Jeff Sharlett’s writings, we will view and discuss Jesus Camp, a documentary that examines right wing political theology’s targeting of American youth.

Where: Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley (meet outside the Church Library)

When: Wednesday Evening, beginning October 5, at 6:00 pm

Contact Information: joseph.lough@gmail.com

(I use the term republican throughout this article in its original Latin sense, res publica, or, in English, commonwealth; i.e., the wealth we hold in common and the political institutions that protect that shared wealth.)

As the framers of the U.S. Constitution were only all too aware, while republics brashly assert the good society as their goal, democracy is only as good as those by whom it is composed (see my Aristotle in America). It is a formal procedure, not a set of values. Or, if you like, democracy—popular rule—is itself the value.

Which may help to explain why democracy is so important to those who do not have it, but often seems of little value to those who do. Individuals who are locked out of decision-making want to be heard. But, there is nothing in the formal procedure of democracy that guarantees that your deepest values or ideals will at the end of the day (or end of the election) prevail. More often than not, what prevails is a compromise among values that satisfies no one and alienates all. What individuals want is not only for their values and ideals to be registered, but for them to be implemented and realized.

And, yet, might there not be a path that leads either from republicanism to democracy, from democracy to republicanism, or from some other third location to the realization of both? Can we not realize both the republican and the democratic ideals?

Carl Schmitt, the Max Weber student turned Nazi jurist, thought not. Leo Strauss, Schmitt’s celebrated student and University of Chicago political philosopher, agreed with his mentor.

Yet, the exercise of thinking our way from one side to the other (or from some third point to both) need not be entirely without value. Let us consider, first, what I think is the easiest path, the path from republicanism to democracy.

Republicanism holds the good society—or society composed of the best individuals—as its highest ideal. It embraces this ideal because, according to republican theory, only those individuals who are not coerced (by need, lack, work, necessity, illness, ignorance, thoughtlessness, sorrow) are able to think and make decisions freely on behalf of res publica. That is to say, only the best individuals who have no need are able to reflect and act selflessly for the sake of those things that we hold in common. Thus the frequent English translation of the Latin res publica: commonwealth, or the wealth we hold in common.

Clearly, two things are most likely to jeopardize the republic. The first, according to Aristotle, of course, is oikonomia or “private enterprise.” Private enterprise is most likely to jeopardize the republic because it arises out of and functions most smoothly when each of its unequal elements is limited to its unique place and function within an overall hierarchy of tasks and functions. And, while the aim of the private enterprise in a republic is only to sustain both itself and the republic, even Aristotle recognized that the masters of most private enterprises would find it difficult to limit themselves to this aim. They would, Aristotle thought, inevitably be tempted to accumulate unending wealth and, with it, unchecked power, overshadowing and overpowering res publica.

The second threat to republic were those who, on account of their poverty, sorrow, ignorance, or poor health were not fully equipped to make and execute decisions without respect for their own private need. And this meant that they would not be able to decide and act exclusively on behalf of the republic. Yet act they might, establishing a “democracy”—in fact a tyranny—of those in need at the expense of the few, independently wealthy and virtuous.

Yet, there is a relatively easy path from republicanism to democracy. And it is a path with which we are already familiar. In order to prevent private enterprise, oikonomia, from overshadowing and overpowering res publica, the republic needs to establish strict rules and limits within which private enterprise is obligated to conduct its business. In Aristotle’s language politeia needs to maintain strict control over oikonomia, not to prevent oikonomia from functioning as it must function, on the basis of unequal, hierarchical relationships of competence, power, and submission, but in order to prevent this manner of life from infecting and becoming the norm of political life as well.

To solve the threat posed by the ignorant and needy, the politeia then needs to do all in its power to eliminate the constraints that prevent individuals from realizing their full potential. To this end, the politeia must endeavor to grant ever more leisure to ever more individuals, to make sure that these individuals are healthy and well educated, and thereby lay the groundwork for their full emancipation as citizens who will themselves think and act not out of a condition of personal need, but think and act as they should on behalf of the wealth that all of them share: the commonwealth.

It is, of course, much more difficult to carve a path in the opposite direction, from democracy to republican rule. This is not only because democrats are much less likely to embrace republican values and institutions, but also because the democratic ideal is by definition empty of content; it is a formal procedure and not a set of values. And it is precisely for this reason that Carl Schmitt and his intellectual heirs have despaired over the possibility of realizing the good society beginning from democracy. With interests scattered across the spectrum, with the inevitability that individuals will be swayed by their own need and will thus make decisions not because they are good but because they are expedient, it seemed impossible to Schmitt and his admirers that republican values and institutions would ever arise from democracy.

Although strictly speaking, there may in fact be no path from democracy to a republic, history is full of examples of how democratic or democratically inspired movements, such as the French or American or South African revolutions, were eventually contained and channeled into institutions and laws by republicans. Here we need only recall how thoroughly the anti-federalists (radical democrats) were locked out of the American Constitutional Convention, enabling the federalists (radical republicans) to dictate the terms of the final document.

Some might here claim evidence in support of Schmitt’s concept of the political insofar as the federalists (in the U.S.) or the ANC (in South Africa) were only able to succeed by unilaterally taking control and asserting their authority at a moment of crisis. Yet, a far stronger case could be made for the argument that the republicans were always more or less in charge and that they allied themselves with the people or demos only so long as they needed in order to establish republican institutions.

The natural conclusion is that it is difficult to move from democracy to republicanism except under extraordinary circumstances.

Finally, we can conceptualize paths from third locations, neither republican nor democratic, toward government that is both democratic and republican. In fact, this was the case all across western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and throughout much of the world in the twentieth century, where state-makers in formerly non-republican and non-democratic nations recognized the indispensible value of combining democracy as a formal procedure with republican values and institutions such as universal health care, free or nearly free education through post-secondary instruction, and an overall freedom from want. Such state-makers were already thinking beyond the classic opposition between democracy and republicanism. Herein they recognized the more recent dictum that democrats who live beyond necessity make good republicans; that is, they make good defenders of the wealth we hold in common.

Which brings us back to Carl Schmitt and his incapacity to square democracy and the social with the political. Under what circumstances would Schmitt be right? Clearly, Schmitt would be right and his analysis would be correct only under the condition that the demos—the people—lived and acted from a position of extreme want. Under such circumstances they could not help but represent their own private interests instead of the interests of res publica. And under such circumstances the state could not help but be fragmented and ever on the verge of civil war, in fact if not in name. Under such extreme circumstances, the state can only be preserved through an act of political assertion—in the case of Germany, Spain, and Italy, through an act of fascist closure.

This does not speak well for possibilities establishing, much less preserving, republican values and institutions in the United States where inequality, poverty, and need are so great on the one hand and where the pursuit of unending wealth is so deeply engrained in our national psyche that they very conditions Carl Schmitt spoke to seem unavoidable. And with such conditions, the seeming inevitability of fascist closure.

Yet, as participants in the European resistance of the last century would be the first to assure us, this does not render militant advancement of republican values and institutions unnecessary or worthless. To the contrary, if anything it means that we must redouble our efforts to affirm their value and necessity in the face of daunting odds.

In an article titled “The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism” (Public Culture 15:2 2003), University of Michigan Sociologist George Steinmetz shows how the contingent events of George Bush’s election and the terrorist attacks of 9-11 offered an opportunity for lawmakers to bring the U.S. regime of regulation into line with a foreign policy that had for some time been informed by a post-democratic rationale. As the ultra-conservative Project for a New American Century had already pointed out in September 2000, a full year before 9-11, the U.S. had been losing ground to European, Middle Eastern, Russian, Asian, African and Latin American interests for some time. And, yet, even with George Bush in the White House and many of its authors in the President’s Cabinet and the Departments of State and Defense, PNAC’s September 2000 report had a hard time gaining traction with a public eager to address domestic economic ills. The massive increase in military spending envisioned by PNAC’s report was simply nowhere on the horizon.

To capture the import of Steinmetz’s thesis, we need to imagine the U.S. as it might have appeared had the Supreme Court not preempted the 2000 presidential election, a U.S. where Al Gore was President, and not George Bush, and therefore a U.S. where massive U.S. mis-retaliation against the wrong target was nowhere on the table. No lies about weapons of mass destruction. No lies about fissile material. No secret White House within the White House. And we need to imagine a defense establishment sufficiently focused on domestic security (instead of a public relations campaign for larger defense spending) to pay attention to the stream of memos and alerts that warned of an immanent threat.

Would a Gore presidency have avoided the economic downturn the sent Bush’s polling numbers into the netherworld? Would President Gore have continued President Clinton’s multilateralism, both economically and militarily, and thus both promoted more trade and less hostility?

It is impossible to say. What we do know is that there is nothing “in the stars” in November 2000 that says either that George Bush had to be crowned by the Supreme Court or that terrorists had to successfully bomb the Twin Towers in New York. Since neither of these contingent events could have been adequately theorized in November 2000, this means that all post-9/11 theorizing that claims to detect the steady rise of post-democratic values and policies prior to 9/11 must be somewhat suspect. Either George Bush’s accidental presidency and 9/11 are critical links in the chain that led to a post-democratic America or they are incidental.

There is, however, a third (and probably fourth and fifth and sixth . . .) possibility. This possibility invites us to view systemic changes and trends together with these contingent events. This possibility relieves us of having to advance the untenable supposition that George Bush’s accidental presidency and 9/11 were necessary (rather than contingent). But, therefore, it also invites us to view the subsequent rise of authoritarian post-Fordism as itself contingent.

Steinmetz then invites us to explore how the accidental president makes use of the contingent event of 9/11 to solve the problems raised by the September 2000 PNAC report. For example, the lack of wage elasticity prior to 9/11, added to the costs ascribed to government regulation of private industries, has led to declining rates of capital accumulation. Clearly this lack of elasticity and declining rates of capital accumulation are unrelated to the accidental presidency and to 9/11. And, yet, it was possible for the President after 9/11 to argue that he needed greater extra-parliamentary and extra-judicial authority to keep America safe. This same extra-parliamentary and extra-judicial authority could then be used to shift the weight of economic authority away from public oversight of private institutions and away from the legal right of public authorities to regulate private institutions guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution toward private self-regulation of private industry and toward relieving private industry of its obligation to the public, which formerly enjoyed the authority of granting corporations their charters. In other words, 9/11 can become the occasion for resolving the otherwise intractable problem of flagging rates of profit.

More generally, however, the accidental presidency and 9/11 can become the occasion for advancing a vision of government more in line with the post-democratic values and ideals of PNAC and its sister organizations.

In the language of Regulation Theory, the accidental presidency and 9/11 are necessary but not sufficient contingencies that allowed the United States to bring its already post-democratic policy of capital accumulation back into line with a now post-democratic regime of regulation at home. (Consistent with the language of Regulation Theory, “regulation” here is understood not as government regulation, but as the combination of laws, cultural understandings, values, and practices that individuals and groups use to guide their decisions and actions. Thus, for example, the increasingly widespread belief that private decisions and interests are to be favored over public institutions and policies helps regulate our decisions and actions.) Together, this coordination of regimes of capital accumulation and domestic regulation (including self-regulation), helps to promote greater productivity by giving private employers a stronger hand in, e.g., breaking collective bargaining units, driving down wages and benefits, shirking their responsibilities for “neighborhood effects” such as air pollution, degraded transportation systems, water pollution, global warning, tax avoidance, etc.

If prior to 9/11 there was a disparity between foreign policy and domestic, where private companies actively promote anti-democratic policies in regions where they extract wealth and labor, the post-9/11 domestic regulatory regime grants private companies greater freedom to adopt and promote post-democratic practices without fear of a domestic backlash in the U.S.

There are, however, two other interesting side-products generated by authoritarian Post-Fordism. The first comes to light once we recognize how President Obama has pursued a foreign policy not dissimilar from that adopted by President Bush. Yet, instead of receiving support from post-democratic forces in Congress, these forces have doubled their efforts. Why?

The answer could be that President Obama’s rhetoric of greater public oversight and government responsibility is recognized as inconsistent with the authoritarian cultural regulatory regime inaugurated by President Bush and his post-democratic allies. Should citizens come to believe that they need to take their public institutions back from private corporations, or should they come to believe that public institutions are paramount under a republican form of government, these beliefs could seriously jeopardize the gains enjoyed by post-democratic republicans and democrats. Their hostility toward President Obama is utterly inconsistent with his overwhelmingly conservative and militarist economic and military policies; policies which they should fully support. Yet, since the President’s rhetoric serves to weaken authoritarian post-Fordism, they recognize that opposing the President may be their best tool for restoring and strengthening the post-democratic consensus.

The other interesting side-product is what looks to be a self-sustaining and growing cultural consensus among Americans themselves against republican institutions in general (republican in the sense of res publica, common wealth, etc.). It is here that we can see considerable continuity between pre-9/11 and post-9/11. And, yet, it is as though prior to 9/11 the post-democratic advocates of PNAC had a difficult time squaring their own post-democratic policies and values with the inconveniences of democracy at home and abroad. Now, however, there appears to be a solid base, making up as much as 25% of the voting public, who are willing to openly identify themselves as post-democratic. It is highly doubtful that this post-democratic base would have grown so dramatically or would have moved so quickly into the mainstream without 9/11. Now it has become commonplace.

9/11 was a tragedy for its victims and for their families. It was a tragedy for the families of Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a tragedy for Muslims all around the world. But it is a special tragedy for Americans, for whom 9/11 became the occasion for abandoning their highest principles and aspirations.

Americans now view “Obamacare” and corporate deregulation and getting rid of the Fed and getting rid of taxes as one single cultural war, an American jihad. This is the real tragedy of 9/11.

1. Labor Day was Invented by Soviet Communists in order to promote their brand of Marxism around the globe.

In fact Labor Day was born right here in the United States of America in order to promote working families by permitting working Moms and Dads to spend more time with their children. It all started in May 1886 when working families in Chicago organized for a shorter working day—an eight hour day. They packed picnics, brought kites, and created what everyone later recounted as a festive event. The management at McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., however, wasn’t in a festive mood. They might be pro-family and all that, but not to the point of permitting their workers four more hours a day to spend with their families. The Company called in the police to disperse the dangerous crowds of picnickers.

Among the picnickers, however, was a small contingent of individuals who wanted to make a show of it. And make a show they did. One of them tossed what might have been a bomb, but was probably no more than a firework brought for the festival, in the direction of the police. The armed police opened fire on the unarmed picnickers, killing at least a dozen of them.

The police rounded up those whom they counted ring leaders, a group that almost certainly did not include the individual who originally tossed the firework. But rather than trying them for reckless endangerment, which would have made sense, the ring leaders were instead tried for their support of working families and the eight hour day.

And so Labor Day was born, right here in the United States, in 1886.

2. The Communists shifted the date Labor Day is celebrated to May.

To the contrary. All around the world, working families have celebrated Labor Day on May 1 to honor the fallen Chicago workers, to celebrate the eight hour working day, and to organize for additional reforms that benefit workers and their families.

But in the 1950s private corporations and anti-communists successfully organized to, literally, paint Labor Day red. By painting May 1 as a Communist holiday, private corporations and anti-communists were also able to call into question its support for working families. In 1958, Congress changed the name of Labor Day, May 1, to Loyalty Day, a day on which Americans were to declare their loyalty to their leaders, even if those leaders were opposed to working families. And they shifted Labor Day to the First Monday in September.

3. Working Families in the United States enjoy better health than working families anywhere else in the world.

As a matter of fact, according to the World Health Organization, the United States ranks sixty-second in the world for life expectancy. Of course, there is no secret to the United States ranking well behind every other developed country. The surprise may be that the U.S. also ranks behind such countries as Bangladesh, Columbia, Cambodia, and Bahrain.

4. Working Families in the United States enjoy a better standard of living than working families elsewhere in the world.

The Human Development Report indexes such crucial factors for working families as life expectancy, years of education, and gross national income per capita. On this index, unadjusted for inequality (e.g., cost of living, etc.), families in the United States ranks fourth. But when we adjust for cost of living, the average working family in the United States ranks behind families in eleven other nations, all of them except for Canada located in western Europe.

5. Organizations such as the AFL-CIO that lobby Congress on behalf of working families simply take workers money and give nothing back.

Here are just some of the accomplishments of organizations that lobby on behalf of working families:

1. The Eight Hour Working Day (and, in California, the Forty Hour Week).

2. End of Child Labor

3. Social Security

4. Occupational Health and Safety

5. Civil Rights Act

The decline of working families in the United States has paralleled the declining influence of organizations such as the AFL-CIO that lobby on behalf of working families.

This Labor Day, think about how working families elsewhere in the world are improving their condition by organizing for better education, housing, health care, retirement, and a shorter working day. Think about how you might help families in the United States might do the same.

The decline effect and the scientific method : The New Yorker

I urge you to read Jonah Lehrer’s interesting article, not as a window into the seamier side of scientific research, but as a window into the seamier side of popular speculation on the same. Since my own earliest days conducing scientific experiments in high school and reading, yes, pop science books, I have always been struck by how wildly different scientists views of what they do are from popular views. Popular readers of science (and very smart non-scientists), such as I admit that I am, tend to place much more weight on scientific results than scientists themselves do.

I am not suggesting that scientists do not believe that their results are valid, important, even true. Rather, I am suggesting that scientists are much more eager to be proven wrong than most of us will allow. We picture them pulling out their hair or standing on the ledge of Golden Gate Bridge should their conclusions prove mistaken. In matter of fact, based upon conversations I have had with the rather large number of scientists I know, real scientists welcome news that another scientist has expanded upon, revised, or even disproven their results.

Yet, here are Mr. Lehrer’s conclusions:

The decline effect [which is what Mr. Lehrer calls the declining provability of prior research] is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1X162fLTO

Is this a mere matter of semantics? Do we need to quibble over what the words “prove” or “truth” or “believe” mean? I do not think so. The scientific method, subject to confirmation, is the best that we have. There is really no other way to talk intelligibly about scientific proof. Does the “truth” embraced broadly by scientists change over time? Of course it does. And no scientist would tell you otherwise. But this does not reduce science to mere belief.

Another way to cast Mr. Lehrer’s argument is to say, we don’t know what we don’t know. Happily scientists are constantly discovering variables that did not come to light under earlier premises and given earlier research designs. This is not because these earlier premises or research designs were bad, or that the scientists were irresponsible. We don’t know what we don’t know. Nor does it mean we need to abandon the scientific method. (What other method do you suggest?) Nor does it really mean that scientists need to display greater modesty. (I really know of no single group better supplied with modesty.)

Rather, I would suggest, we need to do far better talking about why the scientific method—notwithstanding the snail’s pace at which it moves, and notwithstanding the many (perhaps preponderance of) conclusions it has been forced to recant—is still far superior to the alternative.

Here I would simply note that all of Mr. Lehrer’s proofs throughout his article presume the reliability of the scientific method. Which leads me to my final point, it is sheer irresponsible nonsense for Mr. Lehrer to suggest that “we still have to choose what we believe.” Either his remark is trivial—of course we choose—or it is unintelligible—what we choose is arbitrary.

Perhaps I choose that the earthquake produced crack in the Washington Monument is a sign of God’s wrath against a profligate, atheistic, science-crazed, humanistic nation? My choice has just as much science behind it as yours. Or does it?

While JA Schumpeter is among the least ideological of the economists, it is well for us to remember his pedigree. Schumpeter was a student of Eugene Bohm-Bawerk, who was in turn a student of Carl Menger. This is significant because it helps to explain why Schumpeter never appreciated what all the fuss was about.

Yet, note, this does not imply that he is ready to acknowledge the validity of the criticism leveled against the Austrian School of Economics by members of the German Historical School. At best, he says, it was simply a misunderstanding.

And, yet, when we look closely at Henry Sedgwick’s way of handling the problem of value judgment (in 1883, actually before the controversy arose), it solves this problem less than ignores it.

The problem of “what is” and “what ought to be” is not the problem of value judgment. First, the problem of value judgment is that there is nothing in the scientific method per se that dictates to what I should apply this method, i.e., what I should find interesting or valuable or necessary to study. Yet, at the very beginning, it is this interest (of an individual, a department, an economic sector, an elected official) that dictates the research program.

But, second, when I delimit the research problem—and choose what should and should not be included—such judgments are rarely if ever driven by the integrity of the problem. To the contrary, a researcher will often exclude variables because a) their relationship to other variables is less well understood and would therefore risk jeopardizing the research; b) the variable, while not random, is not entirely predictable and therefore, again, would introduce uncertainty into the outcome and validity of the results.

It is true that more often than not a community of researchers can agree upon which variables should be laid aside and which should be included and therefore that practically speaking the remaining issues are technical and not a matter of value judgments.

But the mere fact that an entire community shares a prejudice does not under any circumstances obviate the need to theorize the bearing a variable may have on the outcome of research. Sedgwick’s argument (and Schumpeter’s) simply ignores the problem raised by the Historical School and, by ignoring it, counts it solved.