Gedachten

2006-12-10T05:59:00.000+01:00

Notice

The work continues on a joint socialist blog.

2006-04-30T00:22:00.000+02:00

Ten Theses on the Future of the Left

1. There are some points that need to be understood before any revival of true progressive leftism on the European continent or elsewhere is possible. As things are now, the threat, felt by labor union members and antiglobalist anarchists alike, of liberalism and its adherents is strong. Equally strong seems to be the re-legitimization of ideas such as nationalism, patriotism and conservatism of the 'old school' on the European continent. These are the main challenges to leftism at this moment, and they are serious challenges.

2. What is the problem? The problem is that leftist movements as they exist now are primarily based in the ethics of progressive thinking, that is, in concepts such as equality, solidarity, etc. This is the current basis, one that is the direct foundation of social-democracy in its most reformist incarnation, finding its ultimate production of meaningless leftist platitudes combined with actual liberal policy in Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder's "Third Way". Historically, the masses, as they have become richer and better off due to the opportunities of capitalist accumulation, have abandoned revolutionary thought and practice for revolutionary thought and an increasingly reformist and liberal practice. The fruits of this, which we are now seeing, is the final rejection of the old revolutionary baggage, that is now cast aside on the road as having become irrelevant to the journey. Such is the context in which the lack of core support for the Labour parties and Tony Blair's removal of the last left-wing principles from the New Labour party programme must be understood.

3. This of itself is very understandable and a necessary symptom of capitalist development in history. As the masses feel the class struggle less acutely, their class consciousness fades and the old slogans are reduced to merely that - some relics, pieces to be sung at the appropriate moments, magic words to be occasionally invoked at meetings and speeches to hint at some old ideal, but nothing more. They are the leftists' equivalent of the Hail Marys of the Catholic Church.

4. Meanwhile, however, the rightist forces (both liberal and conservative) are not going to sit and wait until the left has regained its sense of direction. The supposed hegemony of liberalism, which has allied itself with the reactionaries using their dislike of practical policy aimed at redistribution and expropriation for its own ends, is not a hegemony based on mass power but one based on a superior understanding of the present reality. The leftist movement has, in the process of losing its revolutionary ardour, also lost its will and capacity to theorize, and in so doing the masses, who are dependent on it, have lost their knowledge of the present and the tools to analyze it.

5. The result of this simple ignorance is a myopia that results in the dominance of liberal ideology in the sphere of so-called 'political science', that is, in the sphere of the self-understanding of the politicians and their advisors. These ideologies are wrong and are unable to make any materialist, long-term analysis of the world. Nevertheless their capacity to understand the mystical form in which global capitalism appears, a form of whose mysticism they are the high priests and theologians themselves, appears to the masses as a superior capacity to grasp the workings of daily life. In other words, they now control, as they did before the great revolutions of 1848, the "common sense" of the masses.

6. This "common sense" is nothing but a poorly-conceived medley of liberal ideology and the wrong lessons from historical experience. In fact, its core components, such as the neoclassical theory of economics, is not even seriously defended in its "common sense" form at the academic level. But the separation between the academical theories of all stripes, whose proponents possess the analytical tools to craft the most developed and most knowledgeable versions of their ideologies, and the masses has again become so great that the academic version of liberal ideology need not at all be the same or even compatible with the "common sense" version for the latter to hold sway.

7. Leftist theory has fallen into the same trap, by (whether through accident, mistake or force of circumstance) severing the connection between theory and practice. In so doing it has created a very thin stratum of true revolutionary academics who still understand the real nature of the things and not just the "common sense" form in which they now seem to present themselves. On the other hand it has created a broad stratum of politicians and strategic thinkers, i.e. leaders, who have no grasp of what the actual truth is as the revolutionary can discern it, and who have to make do with the "common sense" version of things. Simply because they are inclined to speak in the language the masses understand, since they know that any practice that is to be effective has to be rooted in the experience of the masses, they fall into the trap of thinking in "common sense" terms themselves. This way, the educators are wrongly educated.

8. The result is that the appeals to "equality", "solidarity", "different globalization", "the environment" and so on lack any basis in scientific knowledge or theory to lend them weight. The liberals and now even the conservatives are increasingly beginning to understand this, and are discovering that their enemy has, during the duel, walked into quicksand. But friendly as they are, they are reaching their enemy a helping hand: he needs but accept the "common sense", liberal, scientific theories and he will have a basis to work with. And the masses have accepted this hand, and they have been pulled into the liberals' camp without knowing it. The leaders, now, who cannot but come forth from the same ranks, have by and large done the same. And who can blame them? They have at least the virtue of Socratian Apollo: they know that they do not know. Who would not accept an offer of knowledge under such circumstances?

9. However, here lies the true danger for the very continued existence of the left as a structural power in the international world and as a hope for mankind: the astounding ignorance of many people who start out in the leftist camp, and the complete failure of the revolutionary academicians to properly educate their educators. Only if the real scientific knowledge the left possesses, the actual understanding of crucial subjects like economics, the natural sciences and history, can be conveyed in an intelligible way to the leaders and politicians of the left does the revolutionary practice have any chance of surviving. If we on the other hand, and as so many young leftist people on whom the practice depends have done, leave the scientific understanding of these subjects to the liberals and we try to fight from the quicksand of mere ethics and morality without further basis but our own emotions, we will be utterly destroyed both in the academic battle and in the polls.

10. The courage of our convictions will not be enough to convince anyone or to fight effectively if our convictions themselves are not, in our minds, well-founded. Such a foundaton can only be one in knowledge of the material world and understanding of the processes and interactions of society. No longer can we depend on our formerly well-deserved reputation as guides of the masses only. We must again show that we are worthy of this reputation, and we can only do this if we can prove to the masses that what we say is not merely good, but that it is also true. And that cannot be done as long as all those who wish our cause well are fundamentally ignorant of what is true and what is false in economics, the natural sciences, and history. These subjects will be the battlefield for the coming century's wars: and may the best win.

2006-03-20T03:57:00.000+01:00

Some Points on Methodology and Theory Relating to Marxism

The Applicability of Historical Materialism

Regarding Marxist theory, it is quite clear to Marxists of all stripes that one of the two absolute fundaments of the Marxist conception of the world is the philosophy of history known as historical materialism.¹ The nature of this theory I will not now explain, since I have done so in the article I posted on this blog last month, which should be clear enough for anyone to grasp the basics tenets of this philosophy and the meaning of its various terms (or if not, then I can do no better). But one question regarding the theory has been left unanswered: what is the coverage of the theory? Or, in other words, what exactly can it explain, and what can it not explain? This is an important question. Discussing the subject with my father, a cultural historian of some reknown, I became aware of a discrepancy in what the theory is presumed to explain and what it in fact gives answers to. I felt that it had not often enough been stressed exactly what kind of matters the theory is meant to cover; which in turn can prevent the application, or abuse, of the philosophy to subjects it is not suited to cover, which serve only to discredit its standing among serious historians.

Historical materialism is a philosophy of history, that is, it gives answers to questions relating the nature of history and the way it develops. History itself, here, is meant to be the history of man, and in particular the history of civilization, though that term should be used as broadly as possible. The crucial point here is that it is not history itself. The difference lies in that the philosophy of history can ultimately answer questions whose main subject is why things happened as they did, whereas history ponders the matters whose main subject is what happened in the first place. Certainly neither can do without the other: applying a philosophy of history to a subject of which no serious knowledge exists is groping in the dark, and doing historical research without a philosophy of history leads to incoherent jumbles of facts. But they are not the same, and do not fully overlap.

Why does this observation matter? Take the issue of art, the matter my father raised in the discussion I mentioned above. There are various questions one can raise, as someone thinking in historical terms, with regard to art. But necessarily only a section of those can be actually answered by historical materialism. Because that theory engages in the question of how historical developments came to be as they were, it is very much suited to answering a question like "how, historically, did the social structure develop in such a way as to allow painters like Jacques-Louis David to become prominent in the cultural life of the time"? It could, presumably, also answer with some authority a question phrased similar to "why was neoclassicist painting popular in the late 18th/early 19th century, and not in the Middle Ages?". But take the question of "what explains the difference in aesthetic or 'technical' approach between J.L. David, J.A.D. Ingres and C.W. Eckersberg?" or even worse, "what is the most pleasing aspect of the painting The Lictors bringing to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons"?
The point here is that the latter questions belong rather in the field of what particular aspects are of some political, legal or cultural 'fragment of history'², whereas historical materialism by definition deals with the development of such fragments, and even then only in the form of explaining those developments in terms of their structural cause. Such explanations are accepted by many, Marxist and non-Marxist, in the field of social, economic and political history to be crucial to understanding, but that by no means should be conceived as to be the only questions that can be asked in history. The questions historical materialism and its competing theories deal with are, as I started out by saying above, essentially philosophical questions, aimed at structure and abstraction, and they leave all matters of specific content largely open, and are unqualified to deal with aesthetic, moral or legal comparisons when those are immanent to the 'fragment of history' involved. It follows, then, that historical materialism is not disproven by its inability to answer such questions, but that followers of historical materialism should find in that theory no reason to reject the importance or relevance of such questions either. Matters of art, law and ethics can be quite important to discuss, more so perhaps to many than the philosophical matters of structure and form, but the Marxists should find in this neither an attack on veracity of Marxism nor should they deride those as mere pretenses for ideological posturing (as some modern Western Marxists have tended to do), but they should simply consider that historical materialism is neither meant nor fit to answer such issues.

The Problems of Methodological Individualism

Another charge laid often at the feet of Marxism has been that of 'collectivism'. What this presumably means is that Marxism takes collectives, such as a 'class' or 'society', to be the legitimate subject of analysis, as opposed to individual humans. The latter view is then considered methodological individualism, often considered a cornerstone of analytical philosophy³, and equally a cornerstone of orthodox economic theory, in particularly the Austrian school, in this context philosophically represented by Ludwig von Mises⁴. This methodological individualism states that "social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors".⁵ This foundation has often been considered so fundamental to rigorous thought, in particular appealing to materialists who tend like rejecting emergent properties and metaphysical constructs already, that it has shown up even in Marxism: a group of Western Marxist thinkers have attempted to create a theory called 'analytical Marxism', seeking to found Marxist thought on this basis.

Because of this attempt, it becomes relevant for Marxism to emphasize the necessity of the social (or collectivist if you will) methodology in historical and economic science.⁶ It boils down to the following problems. To start with, there's a mistaking of subjects. Marxism need not be opposed (in fact probably shouldn't be) to speaking of human actions in terms of intentionality, when we are talking about a specific 'fragment of history'. But the Marxist analysis as such, as we have seen above, is applicable only to the developments of history, and to those only an explanation in terms of what Marcus Roberts calls 'social types' can be given, i.e. 'revolution', 'religion', 'science' etc. One can indeed try to describe those by referring to what an individual might choose or want, leading in interaction with other such individuals to the occurence and meaning of the above phrases. But that leads to the following two critical points.

First, that to describe any such social type by referring to the role of an individual with regard to that type necessarily must make use of an abstract concept of the historically determined individual, that is an idealized individual as he would be positioned towards or within the social type at his point in history; this renders the individualist methodology no less abstract than the collectivist, thereby negating the advances claimed in precision and realism, particularly since this makes it entirely dependent on any individualist's concept of the individual. This, in turn, is a matter of philosophy, leading us back to Marxism.

The second critical point appears when one tries to avoid the trap of the first. Constituting the individual as being not historically determined (in his position and part of, if not necessarily all of, his intentionality) in the final analysis, but instead being independent rational agents whose intentionality does not derive from any other cause and is not influenced by any other cause⁷ leads to the insurmountable problem of aggregates. Since we can only describe the individualists' individual and his intentionality in terms of his choosing a particular way to achieve optimal utility (i.e., choosing means to an end), we must somehow place those utilist decisions in a quantitative priority order to discern exactly which end he is choosing at any moment. These can only be described in ordinal relations, not cardinal relations, since we do not know any exact 'value' attached to a particular end in a particular choice, but only its immanent relations. Comes the problem: it is impossible to make aggregates of individual ordinal relations to form a larger, 'societal' utility. Why does this matter? Because the axiom is that man can only be understood by virtue of his rationality, and rationality is described as consisting of fitting means to an end in a logical manner.⁸ Therefore, if we cannot reason from man's individual rationality to the 'point' or 'meaning' of social types (always an aggregate of multiple individuals after all), we cannot understand such structures as products of rationality, which means we cannot understand them at all.

As a way of explaining social types, then, the individualist methodology is either a mistaking of subjects, or a circle reasoning, or an explanatory dead end. I submit it should be rejected, and replaced by historical materialism as understood in the way I described in my prior article on the subject.

¹ The other being the discovery of the meaning of surplus value.
² What I mean here by this phrase is a definite historical occurrence of some limited size, understood in terms of its content, not of its form. So for example a particular king, a particular period in art history, a particular civil code, a particular work of philosophy.
³ Taking this on the authority of the likes of Gilbert Ryle and Max Weber.
⁴ I hope to refute the general theory of Von Mises, as defended in his major work Human Action, in detail in a later article. Suffice for the moment that the criticism of methodological individualism I describe here applies to his so-called "praxeology" as much as to any other theory.
⁵ Joseph Heath, Methodological Individualism, publ. in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005).
⁶ A good criticism of the application of the individualist methodology to Marxism can be found in Marcus Roberts' work. I take some of my points from his book: Marcus Roberts, Analytical Marxism: A Critique (London 1996).
⁷ Or we acknowledge that he may well be, but ignore this because we (apparently) do not know exactly how, like Von Mises.
⁸ Variations on this statement appear in the works of Von Mises, Von Hayek, Popper, etc.

2006-02-16T00:32:00.000+01:00

The Common Critiques of Philosophical Marxism revisited

The most damaging contribution to the dismal state of Marxist theory and politics today is not, as the right would have it, the irrelevance of Marxist thought and analysis to current-day problems (or even any problems at all), nor is it the collapse or gradual 'bourgeoisification' of the Marxist-Leninist states. No, it is the tendency among young people and intellectuals in particular, occasionally (whenever it is opportunistically useful to do so) joined by labour union leaders and leftist politicians, to speak of "socialism" or even "Marxism" when addressing political opponents, without actually knowing what socialism or Marxism stand for. For far too many people these days Marxism simply stands for "old theory that strives for equality" and socialism means " being nice to the poor/weak". But that would be just a minor issue if these same people did not constantly insist on the necessity of "socialist" critiques of or answers to capitalist and liberal developments on the international stage, while at the same time not actually giving the socialist answer, but instead a vague, often ill-supported and ill-informed social-democrat one. This in turn causes many not on the radical left (and even some on the radical left), not of themselves acquainted with Marx et al. either, to consider Marxism either hopelessly stupid or hopelessly misinformed and outdated or both. And no wonder; if Marxism were really what they are told it is, their view of socialism would be entirely correct. Obviously, though, this view cannot hold. Marxism in fact does not consist of either "eat the rich" or "let's not ignore the poor", but it is a theory and a method, both utopian and scientific.¹ I hope to be able to give a general overview of both aspects of Marxism here and at the same time address some common critiques and responses, in a manner that should satisfy the interested intellectual reader.

First, what is the origin of Marxism? To understand the application of Marxism as well as the way in which it was developed by Marx and Engels, it is necessary to understand the philosophical background from which it departed. The 19th Century German philosophy was essentially both idealist and universalist in nature; that is, aimed at developing a grand theory that could apply to all of human history, based on the assumption that ideas (or Geist or God or similar metaphysics) were the prime moving powers of developments in the world, in the final analysis. The main and best proponent of this theory was G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), who developed a theory of history that saw all human development in social forms as a gradually improving state of the human 'world spirit', whose final aim is to fully understand its own position within history. In this sense the Hegelian theory of history is (perhaps to the surprise of liberals) strongly relativist, seeing history not as a gradual insight into Truth, as the Enlightenment thinkers had done, but as an improving understanding of the individual's subjective historical position. Only such an understanding of "where you stand" within history could be considered actual freedom, actual development of man.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), a follower of Hegel belonging to the so-called "Left Hegelians", further developed this theory of history, but within a more (though not fully) materialist framework. Feurbach analyzed the historical development of religion and the role religion plays in the experience of man, concluding that the Godhood is no more than man's projection of his own nature. Now this is of itself of secondary importance to what I am expounding, so I will not delve further into the subject of Feuerbach but to note that he applied a materialist analysis of subjects such as religion and reduced it to "human nature", but did not go beyond it. There rested the last remnant of idealism in philosophy before Marx undertook his work: in the question of what "human nature" exactly is and how it relates to the material circumstances (to be understood quite literally) of the world. Incidentally, much modern debate also seems stuck on this point - take for example the libertarians, who follow Adam Smith in presuming man's "nature" as his rational application of greed. Or the discussions about cultural and moral relativism, such as whether it is fair to apply Western moral standards to, say, Arab culture since perhaps their "human nature" is really different from ours? Such debate rarely gets beyond 'gut feelings' about the subject.

This is where Marx started revolutionizing the worldview. He (together with Engels, at an equal level!) for the first and only time consistently removed the last vestiges of idealism from the theory of history as developed by Feuerbach, by positioning the 'content' of "human nature" in history. As the Theses on Feuerbach put it: "Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. (...) All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice."
To put it more clearly, Marx' answer to the question of what human nature is, the most basic question that is necessary to analyze what is possible (in turn the basis of all politics), is to understand human nature as determined by the social relations of man. Human nature then is not something of itself, eternal and determinant, but the 'social content' it has (as opposed to its evolutionary biological content) is determined by the place any individual has within his social relations.

So far so good. We first need to determine then what the social relations are in any given period. This, Marx tells us in the Critique of the Hegelian philosophy of right, is the "sum-total" of the "material conditions of life", also called the "civil society". But to analyze the civil society we must be able to find out what its anatomy is, of what parts and what processes this civil society consists. And this, Marx crucially explains, is the political economy.

Why the political economy? I will try to avoid getting bogged in the details (as given for the specific political economy of bourgeois capitalism in Capital), so I will simply follow the rationale as it stands. We start, when examining human social relations, with the individual. How does the individual live? He lives in nature, at once dependent on nature for his food and shelter and master over nature in being capable of using tools. How does he survive in nature? He cooperates with others in order to enhance his chances of survival (few animals live purely on their own, and no primates do). What then happens? A group is formed, in which each undertakes tasks to enhance mutual survival. This, then, is a group with social relations, since each within the group is no longer an individual qua individual as he was before joining it; he has become a member of the group and therefore of the group's 'framework', the social relations. What then determines who does what in the group (the division of labour)? The social relations, since it is only in the form of a network of social relations that the group operates as a group. This way we can conclude, without needing any kind of idealism (or any moral judgements for that matter!), that the social relations determine the political economy. Because what is the political economy? It is way in which individuals produce within the framework of their social relations. What is to produce, in this context? It is simply to ensure the means of survival, either directly or indirectly. Why indirectly? Because it is more efficient to distribute tasks within a group (later a society) than to have each individual do everything for his survival on his own. Does any of this contradict our economic intuition? No.

To recapitulate, an overview of what we have so far concluded. The philosophy of Marxism has a theory, namely the materialist conception of history (often called historical materialism). This is nothing else than analyzing history based on the insight that it is not any idealist form of itself (God, human nature, Reason) that determines things, but at the most 'bottom level' only the social relations of man that does so, and that this in turn generates a specific economic structure, and that this economic structure then enables (and requires) a "superstructure" of law, science and philosophy, as well as culture, where the latter is understood as being things like aesthetics and sports etc.
On the other hand we have the method, which is called dialectic materialism. This is nothing else than applying the insights of materialism consistently:
1) That no circumstance of culture or society etc. is immutable;
2) That any such circumstance or arrangement can be shown to have a material basis;
3) That since nature operates as a whole, and abhors a vacuum, all such material bases should be found in nature and man's control over nature;
4) That man has control over nature and uses this to produce for his own survival and advancement, at the same time being determined by nature in his being, that is in what you might call his 'natural aspects' (i.e. his body);
5) That all human thought and action is dependent on the state of these natural aspects of man;
6) That, finally and crucially, it follows from this that the way man changes nature in the process of production also changes his own being, which in turn changes both nature (due to man's power over nature) and the superstructure (due to it being dependent on the forces of production), through a dialectical exchange.

Now to address the first common critique of Marxism, now properly understood. The question is: does this mean that the Marxist theory of history reduces it to economism, that is that the economy can be said to be the sole or at least determinant factor in explaining historical developments?
The answer is no, in fact, historical materialism does not even apply "factor" thinking in its analysis at all. I will rely in my answer on G.V. Plekhanov's excellent explanation of this subject.² We start with the observation that in trying to analyze historical developments in terms of factors, it is never quite clear which factor is predominant, and which influences which. In fact there is such an intricate web of mutual influences of factors in any kind of historical development that any such effort will be utterly fruitless, unless there were to be one specific "factor" that pre-influences all others. This, we have seen above, already exists: it is the development of the social productive forces (as Plekhanov summarizes it). Can we then say that the economic theory or economic process of any given period is its final 'cause'? Not at all! For it is impossible to say that any one economic process (bourgeois capitalism, feudal trade, ancient slavery-based economies, etc.) is more 'in line' with the social productive forces than another. Yet changes occur and walking through history, one goes from one economic structure to another. It follows from this that such changes occur as soon as the economic structure is no longer 'correct' for the state of the social productive forces. (I will explain what this means below.)
So to come to the point, you cannot, when applying historical materialism, say that any this or that aspect of the internal rules of an economic system or even the system as a whole determine any given historical development. No, because these "factors" are themselves, as are via it all other things, determined by the state of the social productive forces. Remember the rationale? One always needs to produce, that is, to survive, and this is done within a network of social relations. This is the one underlying reality, the one underlying cause that never changes: you have to eat, drink and get shelter to survive, and you must produce to satisfy this need.

Then we arrive at the second common critique. How does society change at all then? Certainly we need to survive at a basic level just as much as we did in the time of Julius Caesar. If this is the underlying 'cause' of all development, how come there is any development?
To answer this, I will summarize a part of the young Habermas' insightful analysis of the subject, namely the part that answers this question.³ To put it short: the answer is what is commonly understood as 'technology'. To understand how this works, you have to recall again the rationale of the political economy as "anatomy" of the social productive forces as explained above. What we have seen is that man has power over nature, simply put by using tools to extract food, to build shelter, to construct new tools, and so on. In so doing as we have seen there is a dialectical exchange between nature and man, in that man changes "the face of nature" by application of these tools and techniques, and the state of nature in turn determines man because of the natural aspects of his being, namely his whole being residing in nothing but the body. To get what this effectively means, simply consider: if the local water source is so polluted by application of technology that it cannot be used, and because of it the human body dies, it is the exchange that has caused this to happen: the application did not kill the person, but the fact that man is part of nature did.
As man produces and exchanges production within his network of social relations, the ideas and insights he has with regard to this production also change. Here one can simply picture the infamous caveman Oorg, who invented the wheel while rolling logs of a hilltop. Or imagine Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods if you will. In any case, technological progress enhances (at least changes) the productive forces. Because of this, the economic structure also changes along with it. As we have seen in the rationale above, this will cause a discrepancy with what has been called the "superstructure", beginning with 'fundamentals' like law and science, and eventually even entering the domain of art and philosophy and other forms of super-reflection. What then occurs? A tendency will appear within society to change the old superstructure (still in the state it was before the new technology came into being) in such a way that it becomes in accordance with the new state of the productive forces, since it is those that determine all development. If the productive forces are hindered in their full efficiency and application by the old superstructure, it is the superstructure that will be torn asunder: people need the production to survive, and the more effective the production, the better the survival. Therefore, the old superstructure will be changed, and changed in such a way as to fit the new productive forces. This will then appear to many to be an "internal" change so to speak, a change that was the work of political parties or individual genius or cultural decay or whatever; but those applying the method of dialectic materialism will know better: it was made necessary by the social productive forces changing.⁴

Then we come to the third common critique of Marxism. Often it is asked in response to the understanding of dialectic materialism as a method: what to think of individual brilliance? Does it play no role in the developments of society at all? Does it not matter what I do? Is this determinist, or even fatalist? And finally, why be revolutionary if it depends on social productive forces changing anyway?
To answer this, one needs but understand one basic principle that eliminates misconceptions about the above theorizing. It is emphatically not the case that these dialectic exchanges between man's needs and his activities (nature and the social productive forces respectively) or between those and the civil society are consciously effected. Men do as they do, you might say, without necessarily knowing why it is determined that they do it in that particular way or because of that particular reason and not another. We can turn again to Plekhanov here.⁵ It can indeed be said that some specific aspects of specific developments in history are "accidental", in the sense that their exact content is not directly determined by the social productive forces. Plekhanov mentions the example of Cleopatra's nose being shorter, but many other 'alternative histories' can be construed. Yet such accident should not be misunderstood: it has two definite aspects. The first is that it is relative. What is accidental to one historical research question is not necessarily accidental to another, nor is the one thing accidental to People X necessarily also accidental to People Y in their understanding of their position in history. Quoting Plekhanov: "For the inhabitants of Mexico and Peru, the appearance of Europeans in America was accidental in the sense that it did not follow from the social development of these countries. But the passion for navigation which possessed Western Europe at the end of the Middle Ages was not accidental; nor was the fact that the European forces easily overcame the resistance of the natives. The consequences of the conquest (...) was also not accidental; in the last analysis, these consequences were determined by the resultant of two forces: the economic position of the conquered countries on the one hand, and the economic position of the conquerors on the other. And these forces, like their resultant, can fully serve as objects of scientific investigation." (By the last sentence is meant that they can be fully explained from the development of the social productive forces.)
The second aspect of the accident is that it is not really contingent itself either. Certainly Napoleon could have died of typhus before age five, and then he would never have conquered Europe. Certainly France might not have been able to conquer quite as much of Europe without him at its head. But nevertheless it was the state of the social relations that destroyed the French Republic, because the bourgeoisie demanded order; it was also this development which caused the Directoire to look for a dictatorial general to lead the nation (in fact Bonaparte was not quite the first choice either); and finally, the technological state of the French army at the time was such that it could defeat any enemy either way.
What it is necessary to grasp is that it is the state of civil society that enables the genius, whether artistic, military, political or otherwise. Certainly a movement with genius has more success than one without, at least faster success. But such genius cannot show itself if there is no opportunity for exploiting it in the first place. Von Manstein cannot work without tanks; Michelangelo cannot work without orders from a maecenas; Gandhi cannot apply pacifist strategy without an enemy under domestic moral pressure; Luther cannot reform the church without a political rift between German princes. Individual aspects (positive or negative, but I'll call it "genius" for simplicity) can show themselves only when civil society enables them to, and as we can explain with dialectic materialism, civil society is formed by the social productive forces. So to answer the questions, all but one: Yes there is individual genius, but yes, this is still determined by the state of the social productive forces.

This leaves the final question, which is that of revolutionary activity and fatalism. One could easily conclude from all the above that individual activity is useless, that revolution is nonsense. After all, it happens when society is "ready for it", and when it is, it will happen anyway, right? So why should I bother?
Yet this obviously mistakes the true Reason in history. It is exactly to counter such thinking that Marx wrote the last and best known of the Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
Why? For the simple reason that history is made by humans. It is about humans. This means that you cannot wait for some force of history to act on your behalf while you were sleeping: such would be the utmost in idealism! There is no "ghost in the machine" of history. No, for a change in social relations to occur, it is the humans in those social relations that must do that; for technology to be developed, it is the humans that must do so; for the economy to be adapted and innovation to take place, it is the humans that must undertake it; and for society as a whole to be overhauled, it is humans that must see it done. That is the message of philosophical Marxism: it is both utopian (in that it shows how nothing is immutable) and scientific (in that it takes as basis the undeniable facts of survival in nature, and reasons purely materialistically). It is, in short, socialism.

¹For the origin of this phrase, see Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (London 1880)
²See: G.V. Plekhanov, The Materialist Conception of History (Petrograd 1897), publ. in Novoye Slovo (Engl. transl. J. Katzer, London 1969)
³See: Jürgen Habermas, Zwischen Philosophie und Wissenschaft: Marxismus als Kritik, in Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt 1963)
⁴It is essential at this point to note that technology is not necessarily the only way that the social productive forces can change: geographical, biological and climate aspects can do this too. But as Marx pointed out, the more developed the productive forces, the less this plays a role. Mountains and seas are great inhibitions for ancient peoples, but hardly so for peoples who can build airplanes and carrier groups! Except when you're playing Sid Meier's Civilization, that is.
⁵See: G.V. Plekhanov, The Role of the Individual in History (Petrograd 1898), publ. in Nauchnoye Obozrenie (Engl. transl. J. Katzer, London 1969)

PS: I hope to be able to further address the aspects of economic Marxism in another essay. These two should not be considered separate in content but are two sides of the same coin; yet it would take too much space and cause too much confusion to address that subject too at this time.

2006-01-17T20:41:00.000+01:00

The Dialectics of Religion

Much has been said the last few years about the supposed rise of fundamentalist religion and its influence on world opinion. This goes particularly for the Third World as well as the Arab dictatorships, where widespread oppression and poverty give rise to a need for escapism and religious purity that works wonders for the fundamentalist movements' popularity in those nations, even if the actual theology of the fundamentalists is not particularly popular.¹

Yet the idea that fundamentalism, or even more generally the radicalized, principled forms of each major religion, is gaining "ideological ground" in the historical sense is based upon a mistake, though one that is easily made. It certainly seems to be true that more radical forms of Christianity and Islam are gaining members at the expense of the more moderate versions. Witness the slow bleeding to death of the Catholic Church as opposed to the explosion of popular support for Evangelical Christianity, especially in the United States. But to draw from this the conclusion that the future belongs to 'strong' religion, or that such movements can even historically challenge the many varieties of the secular, betrays a lack of historical sense.

What the 'strong' religions (or tendencies within religion, more accurately) have in common is that they apply a very simple, crude view of the workings of theological ethics. The world is not only directly run or supervised by God, but its rules are also very simple and applied by God in a tit-for-tat manner. If the believer does what God commands, he will be blessed; if he does not, he will be punished; and all this within the normal span of a human lifetime. The balance then has to be in the positive for a given believer to obtain heaven, otherwise their destination is hell. Non-believers, of course, always follow the latter course.
Nevertheless this form of religion immediately runs into a dialectical paradox, as Bernard Williams has accurately pointed out.² This is the following. We must, as believers in such 'strong' religion, assume that the world really is run like that, for our view of God (and with it our God) to be correct. That means that necessarily the view of interpersonal ethics must be based on the premise that good deeds will be rewarded in life and bad deeds punished in life. However, it will of course soon enough turn out that this does not hold. The expression "no good deed ever goes unpunished" is more than a mere cynicism: it is a wry acknowledgment of the way that conforming to cultural standards or being of a benevolent disposition in no way precludes future personal disaster, and that being altogether evil or nonconformist in no way means that no fortune will befall you.

Religions, of course, have a strong tendency to maintain themselves. So instead of rejecting the God assumption, the ethical side and its theological counterpart will, in time, develop. 'Sophisticated' or 'modern' believers of the tendency will come to see God not as an all-powerful law enforcer but as a sort of personification of the divine ethics, a representation of the Good, since this is the only way to apply God's existence to the life of man without the divine standard being either all to clearly rejected by experience or by its own irrelevance to human dealings. However, here the dialectical catch comes in. Since the believers have made a development in their view of the meaning of God in the world and their relation to it, they must come to see their former religious ethics as crude or wrong or mistaken. Since such misguidance cannot come from a God that is the Good (since refusing to show the good way of things to humanity can't even be considered a "noble lie"), it must have been a human construction for an understanding of God, whose limitations have since become apparent.

This, of course, must destroy religion. If one takes prior religious views to be a human misunderstanding of God, that must mean that current views might also fall into that category. No amount of religious repression or conformism will be able to suppress that doubt. That of itself would be bad enough, if it weren't for the fact that religions are supposed to say something about the world as it is; that is, that God actually does exist and that God does actually have or give meaning and that God actually does represent an ethical standard of some sort. Understanding this, one cannot help but conclude, as a believer, that the prior view of how the world was was wrong, and that the God as he was understood to actually exist at the time did not as such exist, and was a human construction, as we established above. Once this conclusion is made, there's no escaping the creeping doubt that this may actually apply in general, that the God-proposition within reality itself is no more than a human construct. This, of course, is atheism.

What then to make of the continued existence of both forms of religion, 'strong' tendencies and 'modernist' tendencies? Supposing that, after thousands of years of exhaustive theology, no-one has come up with the above reasoning just yet is ridiculous, and belied by the increasing numbers of nonbelievers. The only answer, then, can be that religions have given up the reality claim in general: that they have in fact developed beyond the doubt stage above and that they have reconstituted themselves as ethics with a divine claim. The difference here is that whereas pre-modern religion actually makes a reality claim, that is, tries to establish the reality of God and the divine within the framework of the normal understanding of the world's properties, the post-modern divine ethics does not do this, but merely makes a claim about the Good, albeit one that is 'placed into' the mould of religion.

The religious aspect of this ethical view is not so much one that is really about God, as that it is an ethics that makes use of the cultural and sociological framework of religion as it already exists. In a certain sense you might say that it wears this divine coat that it has inherited from religion, but that does not originally belong to it. That is also why even the claims of the fundamentalists are still ones that engage the post-modern ethical views on an equal level, no matter how odd to the nonbelievers (and even to many believers) the claims may be. When Jews and Christians and Muslims fight over the way the Holy Land must be run and controlled, it is because of a heart-felt ethical obligation to the Holy Land, not because of a reality-based claim that God actually will reward them, in the face of the nonbelievers, for obtaining control over it, or punish them for not doing so.

The same goes for the necessity of forming an islamic ummah, long an obsession of Sunnis and Shiites alike ever since the days of the ruin of the Caliphate of Baghdad: the necessity to do this is to achieve the unity of the muslims, to give islam standing in the community of religions, and to show islam's power. But it is crucial to note that this means that even islam, perhaps the least post-modern of the major religions, is seen to be a force of its own on the world stage, rather an ethical identity. Despite the insistence on the part of fundamentalist and moderate muslims alike on the historical religious foundations of their claim to an ummah, this view would most likely be utterly incomprehensible to the muslims of the first few centuries of Islam. For them, the necessity to an ummah would be because that is the order of the world, it is as necessary for the ummah to be constituted as it is for water to flow down and not up, and both of them are equal claims about the nature of the world and both are, crucially, equally subject to the whims of God.

Because of this dialectical aspect of the reality claim of religion versus its ethical claim, the fundamentalist movements of religion cannot really recover the ground they lost to modernity during the centuries between the High Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. They will apply the old terms and go through the old rituals: but their claims itself, the content of their religion in its cultural and political significance, is irretrievably post-modern, and this will rob them of a God-fearing future for the world even as they attempt to construe it.

¹What might be worth remembering here is that what makes Hamas popular is its charity hospitals, not its view of Islam.
²Sir Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1985)

2005-12-04T17:21:00.000+01:00

The Malaise of European Social-Democracy

In 1938, war threatened the then relatively new republican Austria. Its large northern neighbour Germany, in recent years reconstituted as a world power, had been appealing to the Austrians to join their nation as part of a larger ethnically German superstate, and it was working. The Austrian government, under the fascist leadership of Von Schusnigg, had an increasingly tough time resisting this pressure. So it decided to organize a referendum, in order to determine (as a show for the Germans) what the Austrians really wanted. The question of the referendum was subsequently to be arranged as the following: "Do you want a social Austria, a Christian Austria, a free and united Austria?" Obviously the intent of this was to associate as many hollow phrases with Austrian independence as possible, so that absolutely nobody could realistically answer no to the question.¹ Hitler obviously did not accept this, and caused the referendum to be cancelled; Austria may have had the words, but the reality was in favor of the Germans. Almost immediately afterwards, Von Schusnigg resigned and Germany annexed the country.
The moral of the story is: do not rely on phrases alone for political success, but think always of the reality 'on the ground', or you may wake up one day and find yourself marginalized.

This is a lesson the European social-democratic parties would do well to remember. Ever since the end of the 1970s, resentment against the (almost always ruling) social-democrat parties of the various European nations has been increasing, leading to a series of sudden electoral upsets in the 1990s which saw the social-democrats lose enormous political ground to a medley of rightist populist movements. The shock of these ignominious defeats, both electorally and in the public debate, sent the old guard reeling, and the newer social-democrat politicians have been wondering how to proceed ever since.

There are two definite reasons for the massive losses suffered by the social-democrats in recent years (and the issues remain even there where the populists have lost ground, such as in the Netherlands). First is the immigration problem, second is the anti-establishment feeling. And the second is usually considered the less important factor. However, I would argue that in fact it is the second reason that is crucial, because it is directly related to the first in a way that reflects the changed nature of the social-democratic parties of modern Europe compared to their historical role.

The issue here is the following. Failures in effective immigration policy have caused concentrations of non-Western immigrants in the urban areas of Europe, and especially in those urban areas that were lower class neighbourhoods to begin with. These neighbourhoods have subsequently turned into a sort of pseudo-ghettos, with rampant crime and non-integration on the immigrant side, and an increasing feeling of alienation from what used to be "their own" country on the side of the original lower class population. Now the problem and the effects of the failed immigration policy in Western Europe are by now well-known, in the news and debate constantly, and I will not further describe them. Instead, I will point to a much-overlooked consequence of this structural change: the fact that it is the lower classes in Europe who bear the burden of immigration the most, combined with the fact that the social-democratic parties of these countries have largely been identified with the failed policies in the first place, and usually with justification, since in many nations they have been constant rulers or shadow rulers for all of the post-war history.

This leads to an interesting contradiction. The social-democrats always rely on the support of the lower classes for their numerical power, and claim to act in the name of those classes, invoking themes like "solidarity" and "welfare" to appeal to the less fortunate and those lacking in adequate opportunities in society. But the immigration problem and its results, namely crime and culture shock, bear disproportionately on this group. It is the people in the bad neighbourhoods who suffer by far the most from the crime prevalent in those neigbourhoods. It is the people who have saved money for years to buy a car just to have it broken into or stolen that suffer more than the manager whose leased Lexus is remunerated by his company. It is the labourer who has finally realized his dream of being a home-owner who suffers disproportionately from burglaries in bad neighbourhoods, whereas those in gated communities only pretend they do.

The net result is that the social-democratic parties have lost the support of the pillar of their party, the labouring classes, because they have ignored this issue for too long, or else inadequately addressed it. With a baffling arrogance, politicians who lived in large houses and had private drivers and dined with heads of labour unions in expensive restaurants would tell the labourers from the bad neighbourhoods that they would just have to live with the results of the failed immigration policies, and that whoever complained was racist or right-wing or otherwise disqualified from any further opinion. It is obviously easy to compliment yourself on your progressive and humanist views when you live in an area with less than 5% non-Western immigrants, and most of those university educated too.

The policies the social-democrat leaders came up with where as a result the policies favored by those living in such neighbourhoods: the policies of the independent middle class, high-educated, progressive, environmentally sensitive, people with great societal potential and usually an income at least twice the mean. Because those leaders assumed that they could pacify the lower classes by mentioning "solidarity" and opposing "neoliberalism" and whatever catchphrase was popular at the time, all the 'meat' of the actual policies of such parties was aimed at gaining the middle class vote: since the labourers' vote was assumed, all that was needed was the middle class vote to gain a majority to rule. And ruling came quite easy to the social-democrats.

Leaving the labourers in the cold cost them dearly. The rightist populist parties sprung up like mushrooms everywhere, and often led by disappointed and disillusioned social-democrats themselves, who turned rightist to salvage what was left of the old ideals of the Western European countries, ideals that used to be defended by the left but had now been so submerged in all the middle class appeal that it was scarcely mentioned at all by the traditional politicians: the interests of the lower classes and of the socialist view. Interestingly, many of these rightists turned away from leftism altogether not so much out of a feeling that it had been wrong all the time, but that leftism had abandoned them: an experience similar to the one suggested by Reagan to the Democrat voters in the 1980s, who were told that they had not swung right, but the Democrats had swung left. Only now it was the reverse, with the social-democrats going to the center so much that the labourers, who really experienced what the politicians merely dabbled in, felt abandoned and preferred a radical alternative on whatever side to the misery they were in. This last point is also reflected by polls held among the voters who used to be social-democrat but switched parties: a lot went to the rightist populists, yes, but a significant group also went to the radical left, something that is not often talked about by political analysts, but which becomes clearer when you consider the background.

How could the social-democrats have made this error? How could they have betrayed the interests of the working classes like this? It is because of the folly of empty words, the result of narrow thinking and narrow acting. As the French political scientist Jean-Yves Camus has described it, the social-democrats have essentially adopted the liberal worldview, under the pressure of wanting to achieve broad democratic (electoral) success. As he explains: "They talk of inevitabilities: globalization is inevitable, the market economy is inevitable, liberalism is inevitable, individualism is inevitable, centrism is inevitable. If you keep telling people that everything they experience is inevitable, they will want to revolt against that inevitability". Now it used to be the case that such revolts against false inevitabilities were in favor of those parties, but the social-democrats have so thoroughly adopted all liberal points of view that they have become part of the "inevitable" establishment; and as a result, the labourers revolt against them.

The same pattern can be seen in so-called socialist (and this all too often also includes the other leftist parties) programmes for political economic policy. They feel no need to explain their policies on a global scale beyond saying they are for "solidarity" or a "social Europe" or similar phrases. But what this means in reality is never explained. The reason is that they couldn't possibly explain it: since they have totally adapted the liberal, capitalist framework, they have no real way of explaining why they should oppose the workings of that capitalism on a global scale. In fact, soon enough they will find out they cannot explain why they should support a social welfare system either. After all, if capitalism etc. is inevitable, then what use is creating inefficiencies in it?

And this can also explain the so-called crisis of European identity. Most 'Europeans' by far are theoretically in favor of a united and peaceful Europe. At the same time, there's an increasing current of nationalism and resentment against the European Union, a resentment that is again aimed at the establishment. What has happened here is that the only thing the labouring classes have left, after having been told that their economic misfortune and their experiences of unsafety and constant fear and their increasingly uncertain position in a changing world are all "inevitable", is their national identity. Even when unemployed and living among Moroccan thugs and having no political recourse but resentment parties on the right, they still can identify as French or Dutch or Danish or whatever, and so assume something of the dignity that is inherent in that title. But the social-democrat politicians, in their infallible wisdom, have decided that this is also not the way to go: after all, the middle class, which sees its economic success increasingly rely on international opportunities and trade, is all in favor of all these processes. So they tell the labourers that it's their way or the highway, either Europe or nothing. And then they are surprised that whenever they actually deign to hold a referendum, their pet projects are massively rejected among the labourers, whom they are supposed to represent.

In the end, the populist right will not have any structural lasting power on the political stage. The votes for those parties, unlike in the US, are not based on actual political views but on the double resentment mentioned above. But as long as hollow words is all the social-democrats can offer to the lower classes, they may get their votes now and then, but they will never again have their trust, and the malaise of social-democracy in Europe will continue even if the electoral cycles go on as they always have.

Not that this has not been foreseen, of course. The Marxists already resisted the forming of social-democratic or "reformist" socialist parties at the end of the 19th century, as is shown convincingly in Marx' Kritik der Gothaer Programm. The whole idea of social-democracy is based on the idea of using parliamentary methods to appease the workers by giving them improved labour conditions, better housing, safety codes, etc. This would in turn 'soften' the effects of capitalism and so prevent revolutions and structural clashes.

But what was pointed out to them, and has been happening ever since, is that the project is self-defeating: as soon as the labourers have all these improved conditions, they will have no reason to oppose capitalism, since the capitalism they know is presumed to include these good conditions. Then in turn they will have no reason to support socialism, since it has nothing to offer to them that their 'capitalism' doesn't also provide. And that in turn will immensely strengthen the position of the capitalist and rightist movements, since they will be able to make the labourers think in the framework of capitalism, i.e. present it as a reality without alternatives (the dreaded "inevitability"). Then, in turn, the socialists must also adopt this framework if they are to maintain electoral power. So in the end, it merely causes the defeat of socialism and has gained nothing on a structural level.²

¹ Something that was confirmed when some villages held the referendum anyway as the Wehrmacht had not arrived yet, and an average of 95% of the vote went in favor of Yes.
²One might ask: aren't the condition improvements a structural improvement? The Marxist answer is that capitalism by its very nature seeks to be efficient above all, and the social-democrat appeasements are inefficient. They therefore will not be maintained or will be maintained in such a way that it will not be anything beyond a way to keep the masses happy, so to speak. What victory is that? Eventually, capitalism will then globalize and globalize, remove all inefficiencies and cultural restrictions in its path to efficiency, and expand to its maximum point, after which its internal contradictions will cause its collapse. And voilà, we are exactly where we started: the original socialism. It will turn out everything else has been nothing but hollow words, though popular devoid of reality, just like the pretended "inevitability" of the Austrians' independence. It would go too far to explain this working within the text: but for the Marxist understanding of the "laws" of capitalism and the workings of its globalizing power (and why softening it cannot prevent this), I suggest reading the Communist Manifesto including Engels' 1888 English edition preface, as well as the Critique of the Political Economy.

2005-10-23T06:53:00.000+02:00

A Short Attempt at an Atheist Teleology

One of the most persistently recurring questions aimed at atheists by religious of all kinds is how it is possible to reconcile the moral teleology of the world, which the religious hold for self-evident, with the absence of a divine rule to compare behavior to and control behavior with. The religious ask: how is it possible for you to be in any way morally constrained, since for you there is no divine teleology to give an imprimatur to your behavior, beforehand or afterwards? What purpose has your life and what guides behavior when there is no beacon and no horizon?

These are legitimate questions, and perhaps the least easily answered critique of atheism, or at least with the least easily convincing answer, since all disagree on the correct answer to this. After all, secular philosophies are manifold and even formerly religious philosophies can sometimes be applied in secularized form, not to mention the general eclecticism of the average man, be he religious or not. Obviously I would not pretend to know the ultimate answer to this question, and not only because its very nature seems to prevent a definitive answer. But I can give an outline of a theory of practical teleology that I find valuable.

First it must be established that such a teleology cannot come from nature. The idea that one can get an ought from an is, also known as the natural fallacy, has been often enough refuted now to need no further consideration. Additionally, the material circumstances of nature give no indication of any teleology at all, not even a Darwinist one; natural sciences cannot give it to us, since they can merely describe, not prescribe. In fact any such prescriptive content would immediately rule it out as scientific in nature. Since the atheist position applies this reasoning to the 'supernatural' also, any source of teleology from that kind must obviously also be discarded. From what, then, can the teleology come? The only source that is left to us is humanity itself.

Now in humanity we must make the distinction between humanity as a whole, i.e. the collective of human societies and the social rules that bind them, and humanity as a merely collective term for the aggregate of individuals that make up our species. The question is which of these is better suited to provide us the teleology. Taking the societal level seems to provide us with a very unstable basis for a practical teleology, since it makes us in the first place dependent on the actions and ideals of others to constitute a teleology for ourselves. How can what I must practically consider my ideal goal be determined by what others consider it? Not even a radical altruism can lead to such an outcome, since it would merely make that altruism my own teleology which is then in my lifestyle applied to others.

A different objection is the historical nature of society. Society as a concept is basically a way of together-living of a given people, country or population group of any kind, as described in terms of their position in the grand aggregate history of the various sub-histories of all aspects of human life and knowledge. To make this clearer: we describe a society in terms of its own scientific level, of its culture, of its mode of production, of its politics, of its military-strategic position in the world even, and so on. But how can we describe each of those things in terms that are more than just a tautological summing-up of their component parts? We do so by describing what their history was, how they came into being, because this description grants understanding of the meaning and potency of their current composition, and it implies the direction in which each of the component parts is heading.
But this necessarily leads to the problem that any described society is essentially a freeze-frame of the reality of that society, since history does not ever stop. Time goes on even as I am typing this, even as you are reading this, and each of the component parts is already on the move again. This fundamental perpetual change in the nature of things, already so impressively observed by Heraclitus, makes it impossible to give us a firm footing for personal teleology. It's hard to even know your own position in history in light of such constant change, let alone that the whole of that aggregate history can give you at this moment the definite practical ideal you need.

Therefore, having eliminated the large scale (nature and God) as well as the medium scale (society and history), we must turn to the individual level for our teleology. To a certain extent this would seem to modern Western man something begging the question: what I want to know is a personal, individual possible life-goal. Modern man has little patience with determinist ideas of fulfilling pre-set roles in society, history, God's law or whatever after all. So, we must look at what our main problem is in establishing a teleology of our own of a secular nature: mortality.
The thing that seems to demoralize people most about modern secular life is not so much the evils of the world per se, or the absence of things to give pleasure and fulfillment, but rather the idea that there is a fixed limit to the amount of experience of and personal contribution to the world that man has. In other words: the idea that bad guys often get away with misdeeds wouldn't be such an issue if you were around for five hundred years to see them get their just deserts at some point in time at least. The necessary temporal limits to all individual pleasant and fulfilling experiences wouldn't be an issue if man had endless time to undertake new attempts at such experiences over and over again. And so on. Traditionally, this demoralization was fundamentally negated by the ideas of religion, namely the promise of eternal life and/or the idea that there was some vast power that controls everything giving purpose even to such a limited and essentially puny thing as a human life. But since our atheist position rules out such mystifications, we have no more possibilities to avoid this problem: we must confront it.

Mortality then, is the key issue, and that is what the teleology must address. The only thing that will give satisfaction is some sort of negation of immortality or a way to effectively sideline it. There is perhaps the possibility that a medical means of achieving immortality will be discovered within our lifetimes, but that is unlikely and to put it bluntly, not even Pascal would bet on it. So then it seems to me that the most reasonable approach to the matter is to seek a form of pseudo-immortality, one that does not maintain the immortality of the physical body (which would be effectively the cure as just described) but 'transplants' the idea of immortality into our timeframe. What I mean by this is that the only possibility of perceived immortality for ourselves rests not in our physical immortality but in the immortality of the production of our lives, something that we do have control over to a certain extent. That is to say, there are some things of a person that linger after that person's demise (besides ashes and bones), and those are generally the offspring, the person's reputation or fame, and the person's material works.

Which then of these to choose? Whether or not to procreate is both an emotional and a practical issue, depending on many factors, but it does not seem well-suited to a personal teleology. After all, there are too many people unwilling or unable to procreate, and the period in one's life where the possibility for that exists is even in the optimal case only a rather limited one. And finally, the offspring will turn out to be persons of their own, and it is a dubious undertaking to invest into other individuals your personal teleology, lest you become a spectre haunting your children beyond the grave.
Better then, is fame or the material works. And it happens to be that these are closely linked together. The pseudo-immortality of artists such as Van Gogh, Mozart and Rodin is because of the fame their material works have earned over history. The same can be said of Plato, Kant and Locke, or of Napoleon, Hitler and Lenin for that matter. And those were all things of their lives they themselves did; there is not one iota of anything anyone else did that is directly attributable to the personal pseudo-immortality of these people, except the remembrance of their name and deeds.

And there's the point where the link with a personal teleology becomes clear then. It is only effectively possible to create a simulated negation of your personal mortality by creating works (of whatever kind) that cause others, living after your death, to remember your name and those works, and so cause you to live on in the world of humans, which is the only materially relevant one to the human perception in the atheist view. Vicariously through the remembrance and historical sense of others can your pseudo-immortality be maintained, if you have seized the chance in your own life to achieve such a "life insurance" if you will. That life insurance is your practical teleology, gaining it your goal. And how you do that is entirely up to you.

2005-10-01T03:10:00.000+02:00

Some Cases of Western Post-War Censorship

Freedom of expression, the greatest good known to modern society and the bedrock of all fruitful discourse, is now all but guaranteed in the United States. The other Western nations are lagging somewhat behind still, prohibiting opinions deemed "offensive" (which is never defined) against minorities or parts of the population, or even in general. Another deviation occurs in the different ways of treating obscenity laws, which can occasionally lead to some half-hearted attempts at prosecuting producers of extreme pornography, an effort that is almost always swiftly abandoned. However, this was not always the case. One need not go back to the days of the Salem witch trials and the Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams to find censorship alive and kicking; even in the post-war years, there was plenty of suppression of the vulnerable, the unpopular and the downright rebellious in society. Unfortunately, this goes for the United States as much as for other Western nations; it seems that as with many things, the continental European states are quicker to change laws, but slower to believe in their spirit. As such, there is still a lot of vague censorship remaining in those countries (and in the Commonwealth as well), with Germany being the obvious leader, and the United States now has a vigorous civic culture of freedom of expression as if that had been present from the start.

Most infamous for the reputation of the American courts in this field should be the prosecution of the leadership of the American Communist Party in 1951. Based on the Smith Act, which prohibited not only advocating the violent overthrow of the American government or system, but also prohibited all organizations under whose banner such words were uttered as well as membership of such organizations, the highest echelon of the Communist Party organization was charged with unlawful sedition. As expected the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Dennis vs. United States that the convictions were valid, despite the wording of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Argument for this (by opinion of Chief Justice Vinson) was the "clear and present danger" posed by the medley bunch of radicals and Stalin apologists among the party leadership: the world was deemed to be "in an explosive situation", and communists were just like fascists, by definition not to be trusted.¹ Hugo Black's angry decrying of the result as "contrary to all constitutional ideas of fair criminal procedure" was of no avail during those days, the height of McCarthyism in America. Despite the temporary setback against such prosecutions found in Yates vs. United States the Internal Security Act, effectively forcing communist organizations to self-incrimination by making them publish their membership lists and the like, was ruled constitutional. Prosecutions based on those (a nice catch-22) were subsequently affirmed in Scales vs. United States.

It was only during the 1960s that the Supreme Court basically invented for the Americans the full right to free expression as it is known today. It was in a series of cases, most notably Keyishian vs. Board of Regents and Whitehill vs. Elkins, that went directly against the will of Congress in consistently ruling their anti-communist measures unconstitutional. Despite the calls against "judicial activism" and whatnot even from libertarian sides, there might well still be things as forced membership publishing, berufsverbote and forced oaths against leftist ideology today.

It took other nations even longer to allow some radical or "subversive" activity. The infamous British case of National Viewers' and Listeners' Association vs. Gay News is a good example. The Gay News magazine, edited by a certain Denis Lemon, had published in 1976 an illustrated edition of a poem by Professor Kirkup about a Roman centurion who takes Jesus from the cross and subsequently fucks him, and some apostles besides. The poem itself rather lacks all aesthetic qualities (which the author was very willing to admit), and the illustrator called his work "the worst I have ever done". Nevertheless this was obviously not what the case was about - a certain Mary Whitehouse, a fervent Christian, was the sole brain behind the so-called "National Viewers' and Listeners' Association", and used every opportunity to litigate on behalf of the viewers and listeners of Britain against offensive and subversive material.² So the common-law blasphemy charge, which had long been dormant (no prosecution in fifty years, and the statute law had been repealed years before), was used by her to silence the Professor and the editor of Gay News. Subsequently, under the guidance of Justice King-Hamilton QC, who disallowed all expert witnesses à decharge but two, the Old Bailey jury took little time to return a guilty verdict. Lemon was sentenced to a nine months suspended sentence and a five hundred pound fine, and to pay Whitehouse's court costs. Appeals to the Royal Courts of Justice and afterwards the House of Lords and even the European Court of Justice were ineffective - the prison sentence was quashed, but the poem remains to this day a prohibited work in England and Wales. The fact that the ECJ managed in 1982, during the years of Thatcher, Reagan and "tear down this wall", to deny relief to the appellants stating that in fact Whitehouse's human rights had been violated by publishing the poem in the first place, merely adds insult to injury.

The continent is no better in this matter, though, and going forward in time does not remove the specter of oppression and censorship. Later Presidential hopeful Jean-Marie Le Pen called the gas chambers in an interview with Le Grand Jury-RTL dated September 1987: "A point of detail of the second world war". This was actually in the context of whether the holocaust revisionism on this point was significant enough to care about, but that did not prevent prosecution on the charge of holocaust denial. The French Fabius-Gayssot law of 1990 outlaws all revisionism about crimes against humanity (definition based on the Nürnberg trials). Le Pen was charged ex post facto, convicted and fined a very hefty sum to the equivalent of $233.000. Appeal to the European Court of Human Rights led to nothing. A real Holocaust denier such as Faurisson was also charged under this law, to the great support of all major newspapers and even self-proclaimed human rights organizations such as B'nai Brith.

Similar cases happen in other Western countries too, though. One need but point at the Dutch prosecution of the radical imam El-Moumni for calling gays "pigs" and similar language (though this led to acquittal), or the Canadian prosecution of wannabe neonazi Ernst Zundel for holocaust denial and other charges. In none of these cases was the idea freedom of expression being an absolute human right, comparable to say the right not to be enslaved physically, even considered. More striking is that prosecution against Zundel was brought under Canada's Human Rights Act, which apparently applies exclusively to those the majority agrees with!

Down under, things are just as bad as everywhere. The Australian government seems to be especially good at suppressing movies of shocking or controversial content, banning Pasolini's Salo in 1998, Breillat's Romance in 2000 and Baise-Moi in 2002, despite public outcry. The next year, only two years ago now, saw the general prohibition of the American shock flick Ken Park, a ban which was widely subverted by illegal public screenings and internet reproduction.
Similar things occur with the Australian state legislatures' favorite pastime, which is apparently the passing of internet censorship laws, particularly in South Australia. Additionally, "category 1 restricted" texts are still off-limits even to consenting adults in Queensland and similar jurisdictions, which includes an article on female genital surgery in the women's lifestyle magazine Australian Women's Forum.³ Comparable to such puritanism with regard to women is the Republic of Ireland's Regulation of Information Act, which actively bars women from availing themselves of information that "advocates or promotes the termination of pregnancy" outside the State.

That modern censorship cases, of which these are but a few rather arbitrarily picked examples, persist in this age baffles the mind. All legal fallacies and all well-meant paternalistic tendencies aside, not to mention the suspicious influence of the religious right all over the Western world, it is inconceivable that more than 135 years after the publication of J.S. Mill's compelling appeal for free speech and free expression the most advanced of the advanced insist on proscribing radical ideas and shocking movies. Can they not read? For all must realize

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

¹ Interesting detail: the case for the petitioners was argued by famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
² This same mrs. Whitehouse would later bankrupt herself by unsuccesfully suing the Independent Broadcasting Authority over the movie Scum as well as a theatre director for the play The Romans in Britain. The NVLA is now called Mediawatch UK.
³See here.

2005-08-28T01:19:00.000+02:00

Willem Frederik Hermans: Writer against the grain

One of the misfortunes of life in a relatively small country, at least as far as the reach of the national language goes, is the lack of international allure to local cultural productions, in particular in the field of literature. It has been said by some Latvian critics that Janis Rainis (1865-1929), that country's greatest playwright, could have been competing in historical fame and fortune with Shakespeare, had he not written in a language that is spoken by not even three million people. Even in countries that traditionally have had more international cultural exchange, such as the Netherlands, this remains an issue that can be sometimes pleasant (allowing for an almost provincial hoarding of national cultural treasures in the "I know something you don't" way), but is more often frustrating and demotivating, not in the least for the authors themselves. Sure, translations are not entirely one-way and the recently increasing popularity of Dutch modern literature in Germany proves that it can depend on moods and fashions in foreign nations as well; but nevertheless, a brilliant book written in Dutch will just never have the same international reputation as a book of equal quality would have when written in English, French or German, or even Russian.

Despite this, moreover since this blog is not read by anyone in the first place and so provides me this opportunity, I shall try to introduce to the Anglo-Saxon world the best Dutch writer of the post-war era (perhaps even of the 20th Century) and one of my personal favorites: Willem Frederik Hermans. He was a novelist, but above all a satirical author, using novels and essays to assail what he considered injustices or irrationalities in Dutch society and politics during all of the post-war period.

Willem Frederik Hermans was born on the first of September, 1921 in Amsterdam, as the youngest of two (he had a sister, Corry). Both his parents were teachers, and he grew up in a mostly academic environment. Having finished his education at the upper class Barlaeus-Gymnasium, where he wrote for the school paper Suum Cuique and won a short story competition in the newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad with his tale Uitvinder ("Inventor"), he started his studies in social geography at the University of Amsterdam. His plans, however, were thrown into disarray when the Germans invaded the country in 1940 and his sister and cousin committed suicide after a failed affair, a theme that would return in his works. He changed course and wanted to start doing geology instead, but his father insisted on him choosing a study that would allow him a teaching job at the university, so Hermans instead went with physical geography, closest to his real interest. He finished this in 1950 without playing any significant role in World War II (not to say that the War played no significant role in his life, though) and assumed a job as an assistant teacher at the University of Groningen in 1952, got his PhD in 1955, and became a university teacher in 1958. From this period on, the post-war period, his real life as a writer also commenced.

His first published work was already in 1944, a collection of his early poetry under the title Kussen door een rag van woorden ("Kissing through a web of words"). This marked his ascent in the Dutch literary scene. In 1946 he became editor of the literary magazine Criterium, in which he pre-published some excerpts of stories which were later to become part of his more famous works. During this period his first novel was published as Conserve ("Preserve"). This work set the trend in what would be his writing philosophy for the books about the War, in describing people who try to create order in the chaos before them but irrevokably fail at doing so, because for Hermans any such attempt is necessarily bound to fail. His War books are cynical-realistic, using the all too human failings of hardly sympathetic protagonists to show the fundamental irrationality of all human political systems and the irrationality above all of the pretense that it is possible for individuals to change society for the better by their own doings. In this Hermans was strongly motivated by his hatred of rightist (fascists of all sorts) and leftist (Marxists, Social-Democrats) progressives alike, whom in his view had an untenably and destructively naive view of the possibility for human improvement and he detested the dogmatic approach to reality both these ideologies followed. His stylistic approach in this period combines the highly personal critique of Multatuli with the general deterministic chaos of Kafka.

Hermans married in 1950 (to Emmy Meurs, a therapist) and having quit his position as editor in 1948, he took up a similar job at the magazine Podium in 1950, soon after publishing his first major work, Tranen der acacia's ("Tears of the acacias"). This work (the second to be prohibited by the Dutch catholic literary board IDIL) was rejected by the first publisher for being uncouth, but when published by the second became an instant success. It describes the young Arthur Muttah and his experiences during the War, where despite all his efforts the chaos of reality seems to block all his movements. His relations with his parents are troubled, his political efforts (resistance and betrayal) seem to lead nowhere, and altogether the opacity of life during the war is displayed with (at the time) unparallelled cynicism. The war here illustrates an extreme form of the general Hermansian truth that politics and ideology, as attempts to change the ways of man, are utterly invalid, and that in the end life is nothing else than the war of all against all. The book received scathing reviews especially from the newspapers of the various Christian denominations, which found it "unbearably vile" and "an assault on civic life". Even more controversial was the inclusion of the character Oscar Ossegal, a failed magician who doubles as a member of the Dutch resistance movement and is as incompetent at the latter as at the former. This attack on the idea directly after the war that the Dutch people had generally done their best at effective resistance against the Germans during the War led to a historical reconsideration of Dutch activities during the period.

His second major work (1952) was Ik heb altijd gelijk ("I am always right"), which was perhaps to be the most controversial of all, at least when measured by its effect on society. The infamous rant of the protagonist against the Catholics of the southern Netherlands caused Hermans to be sued for defamation; the defense however prevailed with the argument that it was the speaker in the novel, not Hermans himself, who did the defaming, and Hermans was acquitted. Ik heb altijd gelijk also combines political War issues with the protagonist's personal struggles, in this case using the Dutch attempt at suppressing the independence movement in Indonesia, the so-called "politional actions", as a background for the main character's attempts to gain personal power. The protagonist, a certain Lodewijk Stegman, is a Sergeant who just returned to the Netherlands after his participation in the politional actions, where he was demoted from Lieutenant because of a shady affair (some sort of "corruption"). He thinks he is always right and knows the truth about all things (and his worldview is close, though not equal, to that of Hermans), but all his efforts to have his superior insight come to fruition lead nowhere. Stegman acts with the drastic, impulsive style of Hermans' early protagonists, which at its best moments can compete with Céline in its expression of the illogicality of "ordened" life and the frustration of the main character at his constant inability to cope with this.

Hermans' only son Ruprecht was born in 1955. Besides those mentioned above, the first half of the 1950s was especially productive for Hermans despite the changes in his family life and his career (it seems the more he had to do, the more he wrote). He published one novella and a short story collection, all following the theme of the impossibility for humans to distinguish between reality and irreality and truth and untruth in life, before embarking on his third in 1957. The third one is the best known of them, dubbed Een landingspoging op Newfoundland ("An attempt to land on Newfoundland"), in which the short stories mostly explore the difficulty of individuals to break through the limitations their life circumstances set to them, especially the limitation of the inevitable loneliness of each individual. From this point on, the predominant theme of Hermans' major works switched from the impossibility to change the world to the impossibility for humans to know their own world and its rules, you might say in fact a deepening of the prior subject by exploring its causes. It is in this context that one should also place his grotesque De God Denkbaar, Denkbaar de God ("The God Thinkable, Thinkable the God"), published in 1956, a bizarre surreal tale of a man by the name of Thinkable who becomes a God, only to lose his divinity to a competitor, an all-powerful baby. The whole story (as well as its later successor, the novel Het Evangelie van O. Dapper Dapper ("The Gospel of O. Dapper Dapper") written almost twenty years later) seems to lack all structure and works mainly by way of associations and playing with words. Its main theme, the relationship between language and human thought, is at once a critique of the non-exact sciences and their claims to knowledge and a parody on religious thought. Hermans himself said of this book in an interview that he removed, on purpose, all explanations; he wanted to present it as a cartoon in the form of a novel.

His next major work however would be another novel, perhaps his most famous of all: De donkere kamer van Damocles ("Damocles' darkroom"). This work combines the issues of the War and its state of exception with the failure of all individual attempts at improving the world or yourself in a highly exciting novel, which at times seems a detective story and at times more a satirical thriller. The main character is a certain Osewoudt, who owns a small-time Tabacceria and feels he is a failure at all things. He longs to be a resistance hero but is too cowardly and naive to actually do it. All this changes when Dorbeck, who looks exactly like him physically but is his opposite psychologically, shows up at his door and orders him to develop some photos for the resistance. Though this fails, Osewoudt is subsequently swept up in a complex intrigue where none of the people he meets seem to really know what they are doing, but all are motivated by their own drive to change simultaneously their personal situation as well as the world. Osewoudt spends most of the book running errands for Dorbeck, who gives him increasingly odd and mysterious orders but never leaves a trace of himself anywhere, to Osewoudt's increasing frustration. This Freudian theme of the superego-doppelganger in the end leads to Osewoudt's downfall, as no one believes that Dorbeck actually exists, something that he never expected and yet can do nothing to avail. Many answers to the questions of what is real and what imagination in the book are left to the reader, though Hermans skilfully closes all avenues for a Deus ex machina or external explanation. Another important facet of the work is the recurring theme of photography, as a means of displaying reality but also its comparison to writing as a way to highlight particular aspects of the perceived reality, as Hermans saw it; this is the theme the title refers to. The work has been interpreted as a psychological story about human identity, a philosophical story about the impossibility of knowing yourself or others, or just a thrilling war mystery; whatever it is, it is one of the best Dutch novels of the past century.

During the 1960s Hermans increasingly changed his theme, as said before, from the question of reality to the question of knowledge and its political and philosophical ramifications. In 1966 he published the famous Nooit meer slapen ("Never sleep again"), which is also considered one of his best works. In it the young geologist (Hermans' own field) Alfred Issendorf is sent on a scientific expedition to the remote area of Norwegian Lappland to surpass his dominating father in his area of study. Searching for meteor impacts in the barren wasteland of northern Norway, he is obstructed and blocked by all kinds of impediments along the way: by the Norwegian academics, by his colleagues in the expedition, by the harsh surroundings, by his own doubts and internal struggles. It has been called a "reversed Bildungsroman", in the sense that it describes a young man who goes on a quest to find a scientific truth, and is forced in the end to admit that the truth is unknowable, and that scientific success and prestige is mostly determined by nepotism and sheer good luck. Hermans tells the tale by way of a tapestry of small and telling details, starting from the one-armed hotel porter at the start of the book to the cynical end, where Issendorf sees a meteor strike on the plane-ride back and is given a pair of manchet buttons with the stone fragments in them as a sort of prize. The book also is infused with Scandinavian mythology from the Edda and the Norse sagas, which had inspired Hermans during his periods in Sweden and Norway (on scientific expedition himself) in the early 1960s.

In this period (roughly 1960 to 1975), Hermans additionally wrote three plays, none of which were well-received, to his great annoyance. His next great novel, Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder ("Memoirs of a guardian angel") followed the set path in describing the way human actions are based on and fail because of human error and general confusion, illustrated by its subtitle "a cloud of not-knowing". It was however less of a smashing success than his former two major works, which was another setback for Hermans. His satirical works, however, as opposed to his literary ones, were much more effective and played a significant role in the politics of those days, although its impact has been largely forgotten now.
The infamous Mandarijnen op zwavelzuur ("Mandarins on sulfuric acid") was a collection of satirical and accusatory essays, aimed at the éminences grises of the Dutch literary criticism, Ter Braak and Du Perron, as well as destroying the falsely created reputation of the Jewish con-man Fryderyk Weinreb, who had built a support and fame for himself in the highest and most powerful cultural circles in the country by pretending to have been a major war hero; Hermans, however, convincingly accused him of having made up almost all his stories and defrauding or slandering the witnesses of this into silence, which included several Holocaust survivors. A 1976 report of the RIOD, the Dutch WWII information service, completely supported Hermans' claims, proving Weinreb to be a liar on a grand scale and thereby greatly embarassing the cultural elite of the Netherlands at the time, many of which had supported Weinreb against Hermans. (It is of interest to note that one of the main Weinreb defenders at the time, Aad Nuis, later became a State Secretary, a Dutch office comparable to a vice-Minister or US undersecretary.) However, this strong polemic against the injustices and undeserved fame Hermans perceived caused him so much effort and constant battles in the public arena that he abandoned his attempts at writing a sequel to the Herinneringen van een engelbewaarder. Instead he did publish a few collections of essays of literary and general content, most importantly Het sadistische universum ("The sadist universe") mostly arguing against naturalist and psychological novels, and in the political field satirizing Marxism and religion and casting doubt on the uses of the democratizations of those years.

It may have been because of this that the conflict he had with the academic establishment at the University of Groningen, still known for its rigid and authoritarian professorial structure, made him decide to give up his professorship (which he had by then achieved) altogether and leave the Netherlands for Paris, a city he had always liked as a true francophile and which provides a good base for an established writer. As a parting shot he then published two novels mocking and denouncing the ways of academia, namely Onder Professoren ("Among Professors") in 1975 and Uit talloos veel miljoenen ("From countless millions") in 1981. Another controversial issue in his life became the famous refusal of the Dutch literary P.C. Hooft prize, granted by the Ministry of Culture. In the letter Hermans received he was awarded 18.000 gulden for the award, but he soon after received another letter saying this had been a typing error and that the real prize was 8.000. Hermans, ever a difficult man to please, felt offended by this and curtly wrote back that he "did not intend to receive anything from a Minister whose signature is so quickly devalued". He had refused several literary prizes before as well: the prize of the Artists' Resistance in 1957 because he disapproved of the literary establishment, and the Vijverbergprize for the novel Nooit meer slapen, where he had the prize money sent to a charity for Africa (in his own words, the first charity that he thought of). This serves as another illustration of Hermans' quarrelsome nature and his constant battle with the Dutch establishment, both cultural and political, fought on all sorts of battlefields.

The 1980s marked the slow descent of Hermans' literary importance. Being in Paris, away from the center of Dutch literary life, surely will not have helped, but the several novellas he wrote during this period where not that succesful either, at least not relatively. He continued his polemic essays but was never as venomous as in the Mandarijnen op zwavelzuur, instead concentrating on, as he himself called it, "warnings and observations". His two novels from this period, Een heilige in de horlogerie ("A saint in the watch-makery") from 1987 and Au Pair in 1989 still described the familiar Hermans themes of incapacity and misunderstanding, but its tone is much more melancholy and rather more sad than cynical, mainly applying a style that rests between realism and his earlier Célinesque pseudo-realism, a rather dream-like world which consists of "constant mirrorings and contradictions", to quote biographers Janssen and Otterspeer. His 1982 trip to South Africa caused some controversy still, among other things leading to the city council of Amsterdam to boycott him, as did the failed attempt to assassinate him by a madman on Sinterklaas day in 1988.

In 1991 Hermans moved from Paris to Bruxelles, having always preferred the Belgian cultural establishment to the Dutch one (he did accept the one Belgian prize he was awarded). Here he started working on publishing some old, unfinished stories as well as some more autobiographical works, where he himself figures as the protagonist Richard Simillion. In 1992 he was given the honor of writing the Literary Week gift, a long-standing Dutch tradition where each year, during a national Literary Week, an established author writes a short story which is then freely distributed with every book purchase in all book stores. For this he reconstituted an old story of his into a modern short story, published as Madelon in de mist van het schimmenrijk ("Madelon in the mist of the realm of spirits"), which harkens back to his war satire days. His last novel (1995) was Ruisend gruis ("Rushing gravel"), which seems to combine elements from his entire oeuvre into one strongly condensed whole. Its main protagonist, Fahrenkrog (though he denied this, Hermans had an odd love for using weird names in his books), is a professor in minerology. He dreams of once being able to use a pin to make a hole in a vacuum-packaged bag of coffee, but as the story develops this turns into a plan to make a "leak" in large buildings as well. When he one day tries to make a hole in his wall to fasten a barometer, an unstoppable stream of gravel pours out. Despite all his attempts, nobody is able to help him with this problem, due to a series of unfortunate coincidences and misunderstandings. The gravel meanwhile threatens to cover all of the land around Groningen and even derails a train, strange vegetation appears in the university buildings and his colleague Birra is killed in a freak volcanic accident. His daughter meanwhile seems to have a solution: the handplant. This is a parasitic plant that grows in people's hands, and only lets go when it feels another handpalm. This plant appears to be able to save him, but it is too late: Fahrenkrog dies and his daughter remains, to be overgrown by the parasitic plant.
In this bizarre story, Hermans makes one last attempt at illustrating the futility of many human pretenses and the incorrect way that human thought perceives reality as being logical and in order, when in reality it is chaos and confusion. He himself considered his works a form of "creative nihilism", a way to show the unreality of order without being destructive, but by means of illustrating it in literary form. His works are inspired by great writers as Céline, Freud, Wittgenstein (whom he greatly admired) and H. Von Kleist, but above all it is his own peculiarity that makes them brilliant: the peculiarity of a pessimistic conservative in a generally optimistic and progressive country, and the peculiarity of a writer with an eye for human weakness and wit to spare.

Willem Frederik Hermans died on April 27, 1995, in Utrecht.

2005-06-16T03:22:00.000+02:00

Statement on Stalinism

When people in the Western nations think of communism, their mental images seem forever associated with a totalitarian system of mass murder, Kafkaesque repression and massive industrialization, combining to form what some American politicians have called an "Evil Empire". Such serves in the common Western mind as an adequate summary of the history of the USSR, which in turn serves as the communist state par exemple. But the latter is more justified than the former.

Not, as some (mostly young) left-wing people in the West would argue, because the USSR wasn't "real communism" and somehow "real communism" is a state of ideal politics which can be completely separated from history and philosophy, and which essentially means whatever the person speaking thinks the world utopia is like. Such is merely a classic example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, and a rather poorly reasoned one at that. But the real reason is because that atmosphere, and even simply those historical circumstances, were unique to the USSR under Stalin (and mostly in the 1930s), and because Stalinism is not actually Communism. The latter can be maintained as historical reality without reverting to the fallacy mentioned above, because we can avoid the "real communism" argument by simply pointing out the differences between the USSR under Marxist-Leninist policy, such as it was under every other ruler or group of rulers than Stalin, and the Stalinist period and ideology.

And despite the efforts to assert the contrary by Stalinists, those differences are manifold and clear. To see how and what, we have to go back to the period directly after the October Revolution in Russia in 1917.

J.V. Dzugashvili, genannt Stalin, was among the leadership of the Communist Party in those days about the only real proletarian, having been born to exceedingly poor parents in Gori in Georgia. Contrary to most of the Bolshevik leaders, he had never been to any other country, and was not as interested in political analysis as they were, having had a far worse education. In 1919 he became a member of the Politburo at its founding and immediately started surrounding himself with supporters, such as Voroshilov, Budennij, Mikoyan, Molotov and Ordzhonikidze. He was subsequently appointed People's Commissar for the Nationalities, a position which concerned itself with the policy towards non-Russian minorities within the USSR (though it was not yet named that at the time). Here, almost immediately, he came into a severe conflict with Lenin, the manifest leader of the Bolshevik revolution and the most skilful communist thinker and politician among the leadership, but who was unfortunately suffering from a severe illness that would for years strongly limit his capacity to make policy.

Lenin's policy on this consisted of a Soviet federation in which the minority peoples would be granted relative autonomy within communist frameworks, which fit in with the communist political thought that the labourers of one people should not fight the labourers of another, and that nationalism was a harmful "deviation" that merely served as a tool for dividing and so ruling the proletariat. Stalin, however, conceived of the new state differently: he proposed a federation in which a strong centralized government would rule all the other nationalities, a so-called derzhava or "super-state"¹. When in 1922 the Politburo appointed a commission to research the matter of the nationalities question, Stalin immediately proposed a drastic plan. Under the name "autonomization", he proposed to merge all the republics' own commissariats on domestic affairs as well as foreign policy with those of Russia proper, and also to merge their own political police with the Russian GPU, in order to basically make them a formal part of the Russian Federation. This policy was to be implemented in all autonomous regions with the exception of Bukhara, Qhorezm and the Far Eastern Republic, the most unimportant and outlying areas of the Union.
This policy was vigourously opposed by the communists in the autonomous regions, as well as by the Leninists in the Russian Soviets. Most importantly, Lenin himself opposed the idea. He met with Stalin, indicating that Stalin rushed things too much and that he wanted some serious amendments to the proposal, most importantly to maintain the independence of the republics over their own affairs. Stalin rejected these, calling them "absurd" and "pointless".

In the end Lenin won out, of course, and a more decentralized system was set up that opposed the Stalinist Russian nationalism, among other reasons because of the strong support of Christian Rakovsky, secretary-general of the Ukraine SSR, for the Leninist version of the plan. What is not so much important is the matter of the nationalities itself, as to make clear that from the start on, Stalin opposed Lenin in essential matters of policy, and always in such a way as to increase his own influence and to increase the centralized power of the Russian state and the leaders of the Russian state (such as himself), against everything else. This decidedly non-communist pattern of chauvinism was already recognized by Lenin in an early stage, but (partially due to his illness) he had trouble doing anything about it. In a letter to Kamenev on the 6th of October, Lenin wrote: "I am declaring war on great-Russian chauvinism: it is necessary to insist absolutely that the Union's Central Executive Committee be chaired in turn by a Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, etc. (...)". Lenin subsequently wrote a larger work in which he railed against the totalitarianism of some of those calling for "unity of the apparatus", and compared it with the way the Tsarists had always run the bureaucracy, full of oppression for the people in general and minorities especially, and which was of old used to serve the "Russian bully" (ot istinno Russkogo derzhimordy).² He also stressed that Stalin "played a fatal role" in the chauvinism of the nationalities issue, and remarked that he had been decidedly acerbic, and that "Animosity (ozloblenie) was the worst thing in politics".³ And, finally and most importantly, Lenin decided to take measures against Stalin and his right hand, Ordzhonikidze, for going against clear communist policy and trying to subvert the communist leadership into increasing Russian national power. He planned to do these things at the next Congress of the Soviets, and in the meanwhile, contented himself with writing to Trotsky and the anti-Stalinist Georgians Makharadze and Mdivani voicing his support for the autonomy policy in the case.

But then Lenin had a severe stroke, on March 9, 1923. The whole rest of the year he was virtually incapable of movement or speech. On January 21, 1924, he had another stroke, and died immediately. Trotsky had in the meanwhile supported his policy against Stalin's, calling the centralization plan "imperialist and anti-proletarian". But due to the uncertainty over Lenin's situation, he fatally hesitated to take real measures against Stalin himself (or Ordzhonikidze), whom had been marked for exile from the party, or even execution. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev all failed to perceive Stalin's desire for centralized power and for himself to be at the head of that centralized power, and so they contented themselves with asking Stalin in a resolution to show more loyalty, which had no effect. The plans to restore the de-centralized system of united independent socialist republics at the next meeting of the Supreme Soviet was postponed indefinitely.

This gave Stalin the opportunity to seize the power. He immediately went out stating his policy plans and finding a way to use this opportunity to cement his power base. Still of course calling himself a communist, he nevertheless claimed the following:
"For us, objective difficulties do not exist. The only problem is cadres. If things are not progressing, or they go wrong, the cause is not to be sought in any objective conditions: it is the fault of the cadres."⁴ It may be a ridiculous statement for a professed Marxist to state that there are "no objective difficulties", but it is altogether more fitting in the role of a totalitarian ruler, ever exhorting his subjects to do his bidding more and better. So he revealed himself, though, quite like Hitler's Mein Kampf, it was not recognized at the time as such. In this, Moshe Lewin has convincingly argued that he basically followed a policy such as a warlord like Genghis Khan would do, conceiving of the state only as a conglomerate of military and polical power which can be brought to bear against any and all opponents, both within and outside the country, but which has no further justification than the presumed existence of such opponents.

Immediately at Lenin's burial he swore a so-called "oath to Lenin", which was a listing by Stalin of Lenin's purported commandments to the party and his demand that he and all others fully obey them. Furthermore, he started working on eliminating the power of the Bolshevik leaders within the state, to the benefit of his personal power and of those that indeed did blindly obey him. As general secretary, he had total power over the Secretariat, which assimilated and distributed the cadres over the various departments and institutions. As such, it could also determine the delegations to party congresses and conferences, and any other forum where a vote could be taken on policy. In this way, he ensured that his wishes would be done on all fronts. The Central Committee continued as the only remnant of the old system, and was still elected by the party members and took votes; but its real power had irretrievably gone over to the Secretariat, with Stalin at its head.

The consequences of this were immediately clear. The bureaucracy was centralized, and also forced to function fully as a tool for Stalin to implement his policies. This "bureaucratization" had a profoundly negative effect on the experience of the lower party members and the workers within the party, and complaints began to increase during the 1920s, until they became so numerous that I.A. Iakovlev, one of the few remaining Bolsheviks, wrote as head of the Central Control Committee of the party that "democratization" was the only real option to fix the rigidity of the system and make it socialist again.⁵ During this period, the only real political opposition came from the "Left Opposition" of people like Rakovsky and Trotsky, and both had been exiled and stripped of power, and would later be murdered. So the bureaucratization policy continued basically unopposed, ever increasing the hold Stalin had over the party and the state, while even vague supporters such as the head of the Inspectorate, Kuybyshev, stated that "nothing in our new state so much resembles the old Tsarist regime as our administration".⁶

Stalin then set out to dismantle the old socialist aspects of the party and state administration. He removed the "party maximum", a rule whereby no member in any part of the hierarchy could earn more than the highest obtainable salary of an educated worker. He also removed the tradition of fraternization and addressing each other as equals (the famous "comrade" remained, but had no real meaning any more), contemptuously calling it "nivellation" (uranilovka). Instead, the leaders of organizations, whom Stalin tellingly called "commanders", would form a ruling class (nachalstvo), which would be continuously rotated to prevent any power other than Stalin's to become entrenched.
With the mysterious assassination of the popular Leningrad secretary Kirov and the fortuitous death of Kuybyshev, the Politburo was filled with supporters of Stalin, who then arranged for the distribution of all important Commissar's offices between a few trusted people, namely Andreev, Yezhov and Kaganovich.⁷ Yezhov became the party inspector of the new NKVD, the Stalinist secret police, and as such arranged the show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev, where both were tortured into 'confessions' and then executed. Yet they were not to pretend to have equal status to Stalin: always the letters from these trusted ones to Stalin were full of hailing and grovelling phrases, indicating the degree of power Stalin now had over even the highest officers of the USSR. In 1936, Yagoda, the then head of the NKVD, was executed after a mock trial, basically for not being ruthless enough in hunting the "Trotskist conspirators" and other phantom opponents of the regime. Yezhov immediately replaced him, and with him came the purges of the Yezhovschina in 1937-1938, where a veritable witch-hunt for opponents of the regime, whether real or imaginary, led to the arrest of about one and a half million Soviet citizens for "counter-revolutionary activity", about seven hundred thousand of which were executed, high and low.⁸

As with any system where one man holds absolute power over all of the country and all of the administration, the personal oddities and insanities of that man will be reflected in the state's behavior. The Secretariat and the Orgburo, main agencies of the Central Committee, micromanaged all decisions and all policies by local governments and officials to an absurd degree, egged on by the hypercentralization that Stalin demanded. In this system, where according to Stalin "no man was irreplaceable"⁹, Stalin's power and also his paranoia took the proportions of an omnipotent, omniscient God-King, whose word was law and whose personal security was the security of the state. Essentially, Stalin copied the ruling tactic of the French King Louis XIV, whose notoriety in stating "l'État, c'est moi" was only rivalled by his skill in eliminating the power of all his noblemen. All Stalin's demands of local governments took the form of ultimata, and desire for total mastery made him involve himself in spheres which Lenin had explicitly left alone. Since an omniscient ruler is necessarily always right, he considered himself an expert on fields such as theatre, writing, history, sciences and even warfare, even going so far as to accredit to himself the victorious defense of Petrograd in 1917 (which in reality had been done by Trotsky). He appointed the crooked biologist Lysenko as head of the Academy of Sciences, but insisted on personally editing his lectures for publication. He also eliminated the brilliant Field Marshal Tukhachevsky, who had in his military tactics already predicted the shape of "mobile warfare" that WWII would assume, and had proposed measures to ensure the Red Army's superiority in such cases. But Stalin's trusted man in the military, Klement Voroshilov, opposed any changes to military planning, and this was exacerbated by the fact that the Marshal of Cavalry, Budennij, was an old friend of Stalin's, and of course would become entirely obsolete in any modernization of military functioning. So Tukhachevsky and several other Marshals, as well as about half of all higher officers, were sacrificed to Stalin's personal power interests, again substituting the interests of Stalin for the interests of the Soviet Union.

I will not go into the Ukraine famine, the de-kulakization or World War II, since those do not concern the matter of Stalinist policy being opposed to actual communism. What does perhaps deserve notice in this context is that Stalin's dislike of the kulaks, allegedly rich privately operating peasants, may stem from his personal hatred of decadence and excesses of wealth. He hatred drunkenness, debauchery and public displays of opulence, something which may also explain why he joined the Bolshevik party in the first place when it wasn't so likely to succeed in any kind of revolution. But this is speculation, and should be regarded as such.

The purges, however, do deserve some extra attention. Most notable here besides the purge of the military is the execution of Bukharin, the "philosopher" of the Bolsheviks and though never very powerful, certainly intellectually superior to Stalin or his direct associates. Bukharin was first publicly discredited in Pravda as "Rightist scoundrel" who would have sought to undermine the Party. In confusion, he sent letters to Voroshilov and Stalin asking for an explanation and appealing to them for help. Instead, Stalin layed a trap. He let the matter be voted upon in the Central Committee, giving them three options: either direct execution, or an NKVD investigation, or acquittal. Nobody, of course, dared vote for the third option; but all who voted for the second option, and there were few left, were also executed. Such was Stalin's policy towards internal dissent and discussion, which had always been an important part of the dealings of the Central Committee in Lenin's time (and again would be after Stalin's death). The same subsequently happened to the delegates at the Seventeenth Congress of 1934 (nicknamed the "Congress of the Victors"): of them, a majority of 1.108 were later arrested, and of those 848 were executed. In reward for the purging, the NKVD leaders were given increased salaries, dachas and free medical care.

Only around the onset of the war did Stalin relent, having Yezhov and some of his associates executed in a "rectification" and subsequently appointing the cruel Beria, but decreasing the scale and degree of terror. Nevertheless, the GULAG camp system had reached unparallelled massiveness, with about 1.6 million deaths in various camps and settlements in hostile climates, and another 2.4 million who remained imprisoned, many of them political prisoners.¹⁰ Yet after World War II, which saw the deaths of another twenty-six million people, some of the policies were reduced in scale, and the de-kulakization was abandoned after Stalin lost interest in it. There was no political or ideological foundation for any of this though, merely the need to constantly find new opponents for the war machine of the Stalinist state to act against.

Yet the political idiocy was not yet over with the bloody end of the Second World War. Influenced by the nationalist Russian Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo in replacement of the mysteriously assassinated Kirov in 1934 and Party secretary, the so-called "Zhdanovism" was implemented nationwide. Its main target were the "cosmopolitans" (a fancy way of referring to Jewish intellectuals) and those "fawning over the West", which could mean anything at all. Zhdanovism absolutely opposed all forms of nationalism in the minority regions, but fervently supported the all-Russian ideal, absolutely ignoring Leninist policy. It also saw the introduction of courts of honor, an archaic institution hearkening back to Tsarist days, which was mainly aimed at forcing a nationalist patriotism in all spheres of government, and those found wanting would be fired (though not killed this time). Under the guise of "spiritual independence", Alexis Kuznetsov, recently installed as Politburo member, paranoia and vigilance again became the main weapons of the state and its officials, and references were purposely made to the great purges to incite fear among the subjects. This reactionary (and historically quite Tsarist) policy would continue until 1950, when Stalin organized the last great purge before his death. Kuznetsov as well as the head of Gosplan, Voznesensky, were executed, as well as many intellectuals and Jewish leaders.

Stalin died in 1953, and Stalinism with him. It should historically be obvious that the policies implemented by Stalin and his followers in no way follow the Marxist-Leninist ideology (for good or for ill), and that Stalin purposely sought to conceal this by organizing purges against all of the leading Bolsheviks that had not already died of natural causes, including such star figures as Kamenev, Trotsky and Bukharin. His absolute over-centralization and the religiously inspired 'personality cult' fit far more in the Tsarist picture of the supreme ruler ruling the land in God's name, destroying the enemies within and without and protecting the land in exchange for his subjects' absolute obedience. Consider for example the title he gave himself, "generalissimo"; Tsars before him had called themselves "prince", "sovereign", even "Imperator", but none had yet called themselves that, and so Stalin 'crowned' himself. Equally telling is his re-implementation of the old Tsarist uniforms for the officers and military, and the renewed use of Peter the Great's "table of ranks and uniforms" as well as the references to "The Great and Holy Russia", the removal of the Internationale as anthem in favor of the old Russian anthem, and the so-called "socialism in one country", basically an abandonment of the Marxist requirement for internationalism. This pattern also fits the agricultural nature of the country in the Tsarist period and up to the 1950s, where most Russians were poor farmers who looked up in a similar way to their landowner (khoziain), who was to them both tyrant and protector. This system had reached its apex under Nicholas II, and subsequently led to the October Revolution. It should therefore be considered one of history's great ironies that a self-professed follower of that revolution would so severely betray it, that he undid all its works and ruled as the veritable successor of the despot that his fellow revolutionaries had so hated.

¹ The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin (London 2005)
² K voprosu o natsianalnostiakh ili ob "avtonomizatsii", V.I. Ulyanov (Moscow 1922)
³ The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin (London 2005)
⁴ Speech at the Sverdlov Party University.
⁵ RGASPI (Russian State Archive for Socio-Political Research), f. 613.
⁶ Speech to the Workers Party Inspectorate, 1929.
⁷ Politbiuro - Mekhanizm Politicheskoi Vlasti v 1930-ye gody, Oleg Khlevniuk (Moscow 1990).
⁸ KGB Records under Chrushchov. The precise figures were slightly revised, and are now given as 1.372.392 arrests and of those, 681.692 executions.
⁹ The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin (London 2005)
¹⁰ Istoricheskaia Logika Stalinizma, B.P. Kurashvili (Moscow 1996)

2005-05-28T03:45:00.000+02:00

Against Libertarianism II: Consumption and Choice

Capitalism's ever-intensifying imposition of alienation at all levels makes it increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment, and eventually puts them in the position of having either to reject it in its totality or to do nothing at all...

Guy Debord - La Société du Spectacle (Paris 1967)

Much ado is often made within libertarian circles, and generally among liberals in the capitalist nations, of how the choices of private citizens in their consumption patterns reflect not only an economical decision, but also a moral imprimatur. The reasoning is that when for example a given corporation uses unethical labor methods in Third World nations to make its products cheaper for consumers on the Western markets, people would stop buying those products if they really considered those methods evil. In this way, the ideologues of the laissez-faire argue, even issues such as morality can be left to market forces, with each choosing for themselves the transactions he or she feels are morally acceptable.

This reasoning, however, when confronted with the real functioning of capitalist systems in the Western nations, falls flat on its face. Primarily, the argument that the products of given corporations and the methods and identity of those corporations can be conflated is erroneous. We all know that people like to own things, and that in the modern society services and things are exchangeable among each other, so people also like to own services in that sense. And within the capitalist system the private corporations provide those products and services. But the generalization can go no further than that: when the people buy a given product, it is because they like that product and because that particular seller has that product on offer in a way that makes for a good economic transaction. This does not mean, logically, that the people involved need say anything about the way the product got there or what kind of corporation it is, or even why they bought the product. All that happens during such a transaction is that people indicate a liking of a particular good at a particular price. Anything else is illusion.

A different argument that is used is that people would use the market process in the capitalist system in a way analogous to voting in a liberal democracy, the so-called "voting with your wallet". Unfortunately this analogy is false. The core difference between the buying of a product and the voting for a candidate (or party) rests in the kind of statement it makes. During election times, the people vote on specific platforms, without this entailing anything else than an indication of which platform they like more than the other. In that sense, it is a quintessentially political decision. But when people buy goods, they do not make such a decision, since they are not giving a yes-or-no approval nor a choice between independent platforms, but instead they are making an exchange, a transaction. That is the essential difference: when you vote, you make an independent moral statement. When you buy, you give something and get something in return, and you decide whether or not you consider it a good deal. The one is a political choice, the other is an economic one.

What makes this analogy so dangerous is that it has all kinds of political implications. When people are inclined to believe that their political system is free (or at least free enough to their liking), and the capitalist market choice is associated with this freedom, they will be inclined to favor it despite the fact that they do not necessarily approve of the process or its results. After all, this is what one sees in indirect democracies as well: you vote, but that does not seem to have any substantial effect on the policies made. Since the citizens get used to this, they will develop a blasé tolerance for the system's disfunctionality and continue to participate in it, much like the citizens of the USSR in its last years. When this participatory apathy is extended to the market system of the capitalist country, and the market process is associated with that stance, the people's resistance to disfunctionality in that part of the experience of life and of the nation will be reduced, to the detriment of the citizens' influence on what happens to them and around them.

Even worse, those who would follow this reasoning with more enthousiasm will be even more misled. Believing that approval of a product at a certain price is equal to, or inherently means, approval of a particular mode of production or sales, will lead one to consider the consumers basically supporters of the current system due to their consumption. And since consumption is to a high degree manipulable (consider marketing, price competition, public relations and so on), this would entail assuming a popular support for whatever economic group or product is powerful or desired at any given moment within the market system. It is necessary to reason that if buying is approving, then a consumption is the equivalent of a vote (as we just saw); and when the demand can be manipulated, then effectively the people's voting patterns can be manipulated, in a similar way as with politicians campaigning; and when that has the desired effect and people indeed do buy a product more when they are pressured or enticed into doing so, they apparently approve also of that pressurizing and that enticement. And, finally, that means that the voting itself as a way of expressing approval is entirely subject to the manipulations process which determines what the people will approve of. As anyone can see, this is a vicious cycle of affecting the popular economic demand and then considering that effect an approval of the methods used to affect it and of its result, completely eradicating the normal meaning of "choice".

In this way do the libertarians seek to mislead themselves and the public. They claim that removing the chains on the corporations' methods and procedures in affecting demand would increase freedom, that is freedom as understood to mean "individual unfettered choice". But the very process that would create an increase of choice for the citizen, which the libertarian removal of regulation surely will, also makes that same choice meaningless, as we have seen above. Where the libertarians increase quantity of choice, they degrade its quality, and where they increase economic freedom, they make it evil: it is a disruptive process that is based on the false assumption that consumption is unfettered choice, and it relies on changes in product demand, the most volatile of all aggregates of individual decisions, to reflect the popular will on issues of ethics, the least volatile of aggregates of individual decisions. Such is a foolishness that would merit no more than an article like this to dismiss, were it not so pervasive.

2005-04-18T14:51:00.000+02:00

Dionysos over Apollo: The Fundaments of Fascism

Wozu "der Mensch" da ist, soll uns gar nicht kümmern: aber wozu Du da bist, das frage dich: und wenn Du es nicht erfahren kannst, nun so stecke Dir selber Ziele, hohe und edle Ziele und gehe an ihnen zu Grunde! Ich weiss keinen besseren Lebenszweck als am Grossen und Unmöglichen zu Grunde zu gehen... - Friedrich Nietzsche (1873)

When does one live the most, the sincerest, the happiest? Thrill-seekers know the answer. From the middle-aged mother who takes her kids to the theme park for a ride on the rollercoaster to the university student who goes bungee-jumping in the summer holidays, it is clear that in modern times, people seek thrills and adrenalin rushes more than ever. In fact, some would say that the more free time we have and the more leisure, the more we find ourselves unfulfilled and searching for meaning in our lives.

This fundamental dissatisfaction seems to be hard to answer politically. After all, in a democratic capitalist state, the choice of the individual over what affects their lives and what they want and do seems optimal. Yet everywhere we see problems stemming from political apathy, we see people frustrated with lack of control over their destinies, we see young people resorting to vandalism and petty crime for want of anything better to do, we see routine and lack of excitement eat away at the happiness and even the sanity of the average worker, and so on. How come we do not live? How come we feel we have no choice, no influence, no power to control our senses?

For the politically moderate citizen in a capitalist, democratic state, this has been a worrying question for quite some time, and the answer has not eased their doubt. How can thrills and "living life on the edge" still be seen as a true fulfillment when all that should have been replaced by the happiness that wealth and freedom from oppression bring? Interestingly enough, the only ideology to really address this apparently fundamental need of humans is one entirely opposed to capitalist democracy, and which rejects it based on this question: fascism.

What is fascism then? To most, it has a reputation as black as some of its history, a reputation of being the last refuge of the violently stupid. In some cases, this is entirely deserved, and indeed, it is known for attracting the people from the lower middle class without much hope for improvement in their social status, and who feel disenchanted and disfranchised with the current system and are seeking to destroy it. But the same can be said of anarchism and of many more ideologies besides.
Other people, such as Vichy specialist Robert Paxton, have tried to identify it with militant nationalism. Yet this is equally unable to satisfy, since militant nationalism can also come in the form of radical leftist thought, and even as a subsidiary ideology for religious fundamentalists. Moreover, there is no idea that can be said is shared between these varied groups, making such an identification rather self-defeating. None of this is what fascism is about. I will in the next paragraphs try to give an overview of the meaning of fascism as a movement and especially as an intellectual inspiration.

Primarily, and before all other things, fascism is about movement. It recognizes the fact that, as with the bungee-jumping example, humanity is wired in such a way that a human feels alive most and has the greatest sense of power and control when he is moving forward in some dramatic way, to some dramatic goal. This can be anything from finally speaking up against something that has been bothering you for ages to actually organizing an armed insurrection against an evil government, and anything in between. Additionally, fascism recognizes that the more dangerous and reckless this movement is, the more thrill it gives: hence the need for "extreme sports", for travels to outer space, for explorations in the jungle, and so on. Even though most people never do or experience any of these things, all of them have an interest in at least one or more of these or similar things, and if they cannot experience them themselves, try to experience them by vicariously living the life of some star, hero or intrepid explorer.

Combined with, and springing forth from this observation on human nature, is the fundamental importance of 'historical movement', that is to say, the way that the great myths, great acts, great people and great cultures of the past have inspired and changed the world and the people that live in it. From the ancient works of the Egyptians to the wars of Napoleon, from the fabled wisdom of the Greeks to the infamous destruction of the Mongol hordes, from the insight of Jefferson to the cruelty of Nero: all of these serve to illustrate, inspire and above all else move the hearts of the people who read about them. Such an inspiration is essentially morally neutral in its nature: after all, the awe one feels when considering the endless carnage that the Second World War entailed is no less real or true to man than the awe one feels when reading the famous words "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

However, the critic might inquire, how does one combine such things in a political manner? Surely there is no politics to any of this? But there is, and fascism can explain how. What this basically entails is that for great movement, great things must happen, and for great things to happen, great people are necessary. Such can be seen again in the example of the American founding fathers, especially Washington, who is very much revered for his combination of military strategic prowess and power of political wisdom: i.e., for being a great man. For the greatest of men make great movement in all spheres of the world, in the arts, in politics, in war, in society, in morality, in divinity; in all do they extend their grasp, in all do they move mountains by putting their great shoulder to the stone. Compare this with Heidegger, one of the most important fascist philosophers: you are not a spectator at a passing show. Your world, your life, all the things before you, are within your own power. The Dasein of your existence has the infinite possibilities of "being free for the freedom of choosing and grasping [yourself]".

Nietzsche, one of the most profound inspirers of the intellectual side of fascism, explained it best in his idea of Der Wille zur Macht. For great men to come forth and do great deeds, one must first create the circumstances in such a way, that the wish to power is cultivated. For, according to Nietzsche, this is the most primeval and the most grand of all urges of man: it needs no justification but its continued existence, and by the exchange of wills to power between great men (and women for that matter, even had Nietzsche not much cared about that), all that is of importance in the world is done. Why would some good man enter politics? Because he has the will to the power of doing good in his country. Why would some intelligent man enter science? Because he has the will to the power of gaining new insights and unlocking new fields of knowledge. Why would some strong and trustworthy man enter the army? Because he has the will to the power of defeating his nation's enemies.
So the essential duty of a fascist state is to enable such greatness to come forth, and to let the people of that state rise beyond their normal ken, beyond mediocrity.

For why is fascism then so against our modern liberal democracy, if it is so representative of the good and strong urges in man? After all, democracy is working rather well, isn't it?

The answer is that fascism rejects democracy not because it gives a voice to the people, but because it speaks in their name and in their stead, and pretending to give the people power, it weakens them, and instead of giving them freedom, it chains them, and instead of giving them wealth of spirit, it gives them wealth of matter. In essence, democracy is the idealization of mediocrity, and of powerlessness: its prime values are peace and tranquility. Whereas in essence, fascism is the idealization of superiority and of brilliance: its prime values are movement and change. For these reasons and no other are the two incompatible.
As Nietzsche wrote: "I point to something new: certainly for such a democratic type there exists the danger of the barbarian, but one has looked for it only in the depths. There exists also another type of barbarian, who comes from the heights: a species of conquering and ruling natures in search of material to mold. Prometheus was this kind of barbarian." Prometheus, who rebelled against the Gods to bring fire to the world, is the ideal of fascism, an ideal that you or me can achieve: he is the one who goes against the status quo, who radically rejects all that chains him, to bring forth his true person, his gift to the world.

This allows us to come to the inevitable issue of how fascism can be considered in relation to our lives within the framework of our current societies. Our current society, as it is now, can be identified with Apollo, the Greek God of peace, music, harmony. He is a god who gives tranquility, who rests the mind, and who provides for the harmony of nature: but he is a cool god, who can give not only peace but also boredom, and not only harmony, but also apathy. Such is the nature of the democratic (capitalist) state; it can give wealth, but not inspiration, it can give peace, but not vitality, it can give freedom, but not happiness, it can give legality, but not legitimacy.
Opposed to this allegory we find the personification of fascism: Dionysos. He is the god of wine, of revelry, but also of theater, exuberance, change, breaking of old orders and forever seeking new; a god both of vitality and death.
It is written in Euripides' The Bacchai that when Dionysos first came as a God upon the earth of the Greeks, the young and bright people, especially the females, were struck with a mad feeling of freedom, and broke all chains and social rules to dance and feast upon the mountaintop. And when Pentheus, the King of Thebes, representing the old tranquil order, opposed the God, he was struck down by the power of Dionysos, and was rent apart by the mad power of the revelling women. Yet there is more to the story than just this: for Pentheus' death represents the dramatic destruction of the old conservative order and the moving towards new rules and new worlds, and so his death is an honorable and important role for the Dionysian legend. Therefore, the later Dionysia festival re-enacted his death, so symbolizing the necessity of moving from old to new, from chains to freedom in its most pure sense.

Such is the ideal of fascism in our current society also: we must forever seek to greatness, forever try and destroy the old order to replace it by the endless possibilities a new world can bring, forever strike down the old gods and symbols to replace them with those of our own making and our own feelings. One should feel alive and in control of one's fate, and whatever stands against this is a threat to one's humanity, a threat to one's true freedom. That is the waking call of fascism in our times, a waking call to all those who feel frustrated in their ambitions, in their talents, in their potential, in the whole of their lives by the status quo and its maze of unhappiness and unfulfillment: regardless of whether the obstacles come from socialists or from capitalists, whether from the rich or from the poor, whether from the black or from the white, whether from the laws or from the religions, one must destroy all that makes it impossible to be a free human being.

2005-03-06T06:34:00.000+01:00

Against Libertarianism: A Critique of Property as the ground for all Rights

Debased creature! Galvanized corpse! How can I hope to convince you, if you cannot tell robbery when it happens before your eyes.

P.J. Proudhon - Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (Besançon 1840)

Libertarianism, referring to the ideology of progressive capitalism based on the dual principles of negative rights and individualism, can well be said to be a uniquely North American phenomenon. Whereas libertarian thought and political influence, despite the lack of support for the actual Libertarian Party, is an ever-present concept of liberty and justice in American political discourse up to the highest level, no such background and framework exists anywhere in Europe (nor in Asia or any other part of the world, for that matter). Why is this? The most logical explanation seems to be linked to the American love of individualism of a kind as unfettered as possible, which we might call the "pioneer spirit". Where the idea of a region of disorder and relative lawlessness would remind Europeans of the manifold Revolutions, uprisings and wars that have plagued that subcontinent, in the United States it is fondly, perhaps even longingly, known as the "Wild West". Where almost all continental European nations nowadays operate on the basis of malleability of society by the government, Americans regardless of original ethnic background seem to have an almost instinctive distrust of this idea, instead placing their faith in the capacity of the individual above all to shape the world to his wishes and the benefits this can bring for all.

Within libertarian doctrine (as I understand it) in particular, the whole of this rugged individualism creating good for all based on individual needs and desires is based on the primacy of property rights. Indeed, libertarians are known to state - in my experience loving rhetoric and hyperbole almost as much as left-wing radicals - that property rights are the supreme right, the very fons et origo of all concepts of rights and of morality. The preservation of the self against external threats, they argue, is basically nothing more than the property right of the body; and equally, the preservation of the liberty of the individual against external meddling and regulation is nothing more than the property right of the works, ideas and goods gained by the individual's own work and effort.
This, of course, also implies defending individual rights against nearly all, if not actually all (for the self-styled 'anarcho-capitalists') claims of the collective. And this in turn means that the role of government in the libertarian concept is of necessity very limited, and that its power over the actions of the population is small indeed. After all, even taxation for public works can be considered a form of violation of property rights, since it robs the individual of his wealth and/or income without prior consent, and without direct guarantees that the works will be of use to him; and if such can be said of providing for the public works, of old considered one of the most primary tasks, yes even raisons d'être, of government, then what to think of the host of other tasks and purposes modern governments undertake? In this way the primacy of property rights as source of all (earthly) justice necessarily forces a small government.

Yet lovers of liberty as they are - and this one credit I would not deny them, that contrary to many ideologies of left and right, one can at least of libertarianism say that it does not wish to impose upon others - their ideas about property right being the most supreme of all rights are strongly misguided. So much in fact, that it reverses the real situation: property right, if there even be such a thing, is least of all rights, and when at the core of society, inhibits the equality of opportunity that is required for the justice it promises.

To see how this functions, we must go back to the 'state of nature' as John Locke describes it, him being the greatest intellectual defender of the primacy of property rights, and an inspiration to libertarianism even if such would not have been his intent. In The Second Treatise on Government, the wise Locke describes this as the following: "a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man", but also as "a state also of equality wherin all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another". Now it will be manifestly clear that neither the society we now live in, nor the one the libertarians would envision, comes even close to this original state; for it indicates an utter lack of government altogether, and experience would show us that such a state does not exist for long, and libertarian ideology perceives this and avoids it by allowing for government to provide for defense, administer justice, create civil law, protect intellectual property, and so on. Nevertheless they would call such a state just. How then, do we come from this Lockean state of nature to the libertarian ideal, in a just manner? How does one create property and maintain it fairly where there was none before? For for the result to be just and acceptable, the means of getting there also have to be; a poisoned tree bears no edible fruit.

Locke, then, has a method of creating property, namely, the labor of each man and the increase in value of the belabored natural resources this entails. Such labor, Locke and the libertarians say, entitles him to the goods he has worked on, the value increase of which is to be his reward for his work; and the good is to be his property henceforth. To quote the Treatise, Chapter V: "The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others."

The wise Locke here makes comparisons to the Indian who hunts deer, and so gains the property of them, and also to the man who collects acorns in the forest, or apples in the wild, and so gains them for his use. Now this is no mere coincidence, for the reasoning of Locke is entirely based upon the presumption of a society whose heart is agriculture, and the labour-intensive agriculture of before the industrialisation at that. It also presupposes a world where there is no alternative to this situation; one goes from a state of nature, where before labor all goods are 'free', to a state of intensive agriculture and perhaps some handicraft, where personal labor is at the core of the division of wealth. But in modern times, the situation has quite reversed.

Not only is subsistence agriculture less and less the basis of society, it having been replaced first by mass industry and subsequently by intangible services and mechanisation; but also has the division of wealth become the inverse of that which Locke assumes natural as following from the state of nature. Those who work in the fields themselves, those who mine for ores, those who cut wood and those who cure leather are instead of the most rewarded, now the lower class of all modern societies. What's more, this work is increasinly exported to less modern societies that in effect are functioning as the lower class within the world; furthermore reinforcing the incompatibility with reality of the idea that society moves based on expenditure of labor as the title to property. Were it so that labor, and labor alone, at the core creates increase of value, and were it just that this increase of value be given to the laborer as reward for his work, the West, indeed all of the developed societies would have a hard time being just indeed, for the whole of the Third World, billions altogether, would have an immense claim upon the disproportionate wealth of the modern nations, a wealth that is based rather on working as little as possible instead of as much as possible, and relying on machines and automation for far more efficient production. Yet such is quite the opposite of what the libertarians intend: they would have it so that the capital to invest with is created in the Third World itself, and that it follows the course that the Western nations have: first industrialisation, then automatisation and services-based economy. Simply put: they want to reduce labor as much as possible to increase wealth, defined as possession of property.

The internal contradiction here, to use that Marxist phrase, is not just that. The fact that property rights are meant to be maintained against claims from others naturally makes them obsolete. Because all would agree that one should be protected against unwarranted aggression, and the same people would agree that assault upon one's livelihood falls under that name. But what does this negative right actually confer? A right to possession, as long as it is used by an individual for his own benefit, of his own making. This, however, is something entirely separate from a right to property, which entails a permanent right even when unused, and also gives the ability to keep control over it despite its current owner and location, by force of intent alone (one can legally only lose property by abandonment if one intends to give up property of it). The former protects one against assaults upon one's liberty; the latter is a force against others, as it presumes a right to some good based upon occupation in the legal sense; a form of prescription, and that is something that can only be done at the cost of others, since prescription takes away from the common property that which you claim, based on your claim of occupation only: and that is in fact no better than seizing something by force. Therefore, claiming to protect against unwarranted aggression and accepting property as opposed to possession is contradictory.

Having established this, we can follow the reasoning to its logical conclusion: the current social inequality, visible everywhere in society, between people, is based on the current law of property. And since property claims are in fact claims originally based on aggression, and since the property claim cannot be said to be validly based on labor either, there is a moral unjustness in this division of wealth. Since libertarians assume the current law of property to be the basis of all rights, they are in effect defending a status quo which is, following their own moral logic of nonaggression and noninterference with others in the form of claims, absolutely unjust. And how can something unjust be the basis of all rights, the core of society, the most supreme of all laws? It is nonsense, and it befits a self-interested conservative instead of a lover of liberty. For this kind of conservatism, as Proudhon states, is "prescriptions against reason, prescriptions against facts, prescriptions against all previously unknown truth; such is the sum total of all the philosophy of the status quo and the banner of conservatives of all ages." Let us do away with this barbarism, and reject the notion of property rights as the fata morgana it is.

2005-02-02T15:59:00.000+01:00

Homosexuality in Christianity: Sins and Contradictions

In the context of the cultural debate about homosexuality, which has of late flared up again in the United States because of the gay marriage debate there, the religious aspect is not to be overlooked. The traditional Christian opposition against homosexuality in general and homosexual sex in particular plays an important part in the 'anti-gay camp' of the public debate, placing the moral sides of the issue in the Biblical framework. Progressive Christians, however, are increasingly arguing against this, stating that the dictum of "love thy neighbour as thyself", considered the most important law by Jesus himself, argues for a tolerance or acceptance of homosexuality and the accompanying erotic side rather than a moral opposition.

But is this 'modern' version actually intellectually honest? The Bible being what it is, many if not all of the passages in the Old and the New Testament allow for multiple interpretations, and the many translations and retranslations from and into various languages makes this even more complex. Nevertheless, one can use the ancient Greek meanings for the New Testament rather well (as ancient Greek is a well-known language, as millennia old languages go). Also, one does not even need the Old Testament, considered by many to be laws only applicable to the Jewish people and no longer to other nations since Jesus formed a new Biblical law, to find references fordbidding homosexuality, most specifically in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and Romans 1:26-27.

The Corinthians reference of St. Paul, usually translated more or less as "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, 10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God" (King James Version), contains the phrase 'abusers of themselves with mankind', which is commonly considered to mean 'homosexuals'. The word in Greek used here is arsenokoite, which literally means 'man who beds men'. Some people oppose interpreting this word as meaning homosexual, however, because Paul construed this word himself and did not use any of the already existing words for homosexual; others that the phrase is supposed to refer to male prostitutes, which were a well-known scene in public (and religious) life at the time.

However, this argument will not hold. The obvious reason why Paul uses this new word instead of an existing one is because it directly refers to the related moral rule of Leviticus 18:22 concerning homosexuals: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." The words in Greek used here are meta arsenos ou koimethese koiten gyniakos, in which you will recognize the very same combination of arsenos and koite. So the fact that he coined a new phrase here is because he wants to remind the reader, presumably, of the rule against such behavior as mentioned before.

The idea that he is actually mentioning male prostitution is equally unlikely. This is commonly presented in the context of the "idolatry" referred to, but even though this is certainly an important theme of his, it is not the same thing here. The word for male prostitution in Greek is pornos, from which incidentally the word 'porn' is derived. The koite (sex, eroticism) part of arsenokoite however is exclusively used in the Bible in the context of personal sexual immorality, not anything like prostitution (compare the occurrences of the word in Romans 13:13 and Hebrews 13:4).

As for the reference to gay sex in Romans 1:26-27, King James translates it so: "Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion". This seems to clearly indicate homosexual acts, the 'inflamed in lust for one another' indicating that we are dealing with actual gay people as opposed to the explorative straight or bicurious, so to speak. This is again reinforced by Paul's choice of words: he uses for the "men" and "women" involved the Greek words arsenes and theleias, which are words used to specifically stress the gender of the persons involved, as opposed to more neutral words. Clearly, both the Romans and the Corinthians reference establish that in the New Testament, and so presumably under Jesus' new covenant, homosexual sex is considered a grave sin.

With that out of the way, the progressive Christian view of this is that the act may be a sin, but the homosexuality itself is not. So this can be reconciled with Christianity because one can still love a homosexual as he is (loving one's neighbour), even if the act itself is not to be supported. Yet this is a false construct. One cannot, in actually homosexual people (leaving the swingers, bisexual, etc. out of this) separate the act from the nature in any moral view of the whole. After all, the desire to have gay sex is instinctively present in a homosexual man, as is the eroticism of the idea; and this is so essential to the concept of 'homosexuality', that any separation of the two as unrelated or disconnectable is artificial and silly. Just as one cannot separate the average straight guy's view of sexuality from erotic associations with women, one cannot separate the average gay guy's view of sexuality from erotic associations with men. Pretending the two are fundamentally of a different nature is harmful both to understanding of Christianity and understanding of homosexuality, and goes against common sense. So one cannot say that one disapproves of the act but approves or accepts the urge that causes the act, as both are irrevokably linked in the concept of homosexuality itself.

Well, the invisible progressive Christian of this dialogue might rejoin, this may be, but nevertheless we are not to judge. After all, is not one of the basic rules of the Bible "judge not, lest ye be judged"? Who are we to say what is good and what is not?
Pleasant as it sounds to the modern ear, it is nevertheless an irrelevant argument. If one is a Christian, then it follows that the Bible is to be considered God's word, whether literal or merely divinely inspired. Most progressive Christians, in fact probably most Christians on the whole, would assume the latter. But since there is no measurable way to separate the non-divinely inspired parts in the Bible from the divinely inspired ones, the only way to follow God's word and will is to assume all of it counts. This means that if something is considered a sin in the Bible, one has to reasonably assume that God himself (or itself, perhaps) considers it a sin, or else the idea of the Bible reflecting God cannot be reasonably maintained. So whether or not one is considered to judge homosexuality as a sin personally or not is not the issue; in either case the Bible's mentioning of it as a sin means it is such, whether one personally follows this rule or not.

One might counter this by saying that though it is divinely inspired, it is written by men, and as such imperfectly reflects God's will, because of cultural influences, misunderstanding and the like. Again this is a modern and sane interpretation of the historical context of Biblical rules, but again this is irrelevant to the matter. If you desire to follow the rules of Christianity, or feel you have to, you have to reasonably consider the Bible accurate enough to follow. After all, if it can be believed within the theology of Christianity that the Bible so imperfectly reflects God's view for whatever reason that it reflects "homosexuality is fine" as "homosexuality is a sin", then the whole foundation of the belief goes right out of the window. Because if such is within the range of human error in the Bible, then how can anything in the Bible at all be assumed to accurately reflect God? One might as well read any other philosophical or ethical book and it would reflect God no worse. So it is impossible to maintain that any form of human error or cultural influence made the rule that homosexuality is a sin without abandoning the religion altogether. At that point it ceases to be Christianity and it is no longer relevant to this discussion.

Then there is the issue of forgiveness. God is by many (modern) Christians considered all-forgiving. Forgiveness following repentance is one of the core concepts of the belief, and has become one of the foundations of the cultural moral code of the West because of it. If God forgives anything, he will also forgive homosexuality, right? So that would seem to make the problem nonexistent.
Unfortunately there is a snag here. For sin to be forgiven, one has to repent. Now repentance, in the cultural context as well as the linguistic one, implies an acceptance of guilt or wrongdoing. One cannot repent something if one does not feel that it was wrong. So for homosexuality to be forgiven, the homosexual involved has to feel that the thing itself, homosexuality, was wrong. And here we are back to stage one: homosexuality does not combine with the Christian moral code.

The aforementioned invisible modern Christian, annoyed at this exposure of bigotry, might finally interject that yes, perhaps it is a sin, but we are all sinners. And since God does not in a very clear way define one sin as worse than another, or make any kind of ranking or categories anywhere in the Bible, saying that Christianity considers homosexuals sinners becomes rather pointless, as if one points out that a particular raindrop is, in fact, wet.
This may be so, but it also clearly shows how incompatible homosexuality and the Christian moral code are; it is an implicit admission of that moral code considering, both in the past and now, homosexuality a sin, even if only a sin among sins. Saying otherwise is therefore clearly intellectually dishonest, and if a Christian is the one saying so, rather unfaithful towards the religion's rules.

Now mind you, this point is not meant to indicate any moral opposition to homosexuality or gay sex whatsoever; quite on the contrary really. But what it does intend to show is that, whether one likes it or not, Christianity and the basics of Christian morality cannot be said to not be opposed to homosexuality without the speaker losing all intellectual honesty and credibility. Were it otherwise, it would have been better, but the two just don't mix. So let's all be honest and not confuse the debate and muddle the issue by pretending they do.

2004-11-21T23:27:00.000+01:00

The Myth of the International Terrorist Conspiracy

Following the terrorist strikes on American assets on the eleventh of September 2001, there has been much ado about the international undermining power of terrorism. In fact, Western nations, both large and small, have been affected by the fear for this phenomenon so much that many of them have decided, in one way or another, to declare a "War on Terrorism", apparently expecting to be able to combat this elusive threat with some form of military power.

At the root of this lies the worldview that the current Western world, and synonymous with it civilization as we know and appreciate it, is under a full-fledged and skilfully executed assault by a network of terrorist movements everywhere across the globe, acting in unison to bring down everything we hold dear. The motivation for this would be their hatred of everything free and democratic, and a sort of juvenile demonic desire to bring down the good of the world because of a strange mixture of religious fervor and "just because we can".

Yet this conspiracy theory, popular as it may be at the moment, is pathetic and unconvincing at best. While the organization dubbed Al Qaeda, led by the wealthy Saudi fanatic Osama Bin Laden and his Jordanian henchman Al-Zarqawi, is most often seen as the real organization behind this purported worldwide terrorist network, the more one thinks about it the less likely this seems.

After all, what use would these terrorists have for such a network? There are very many organizations in the world that can be considered "terrorist", and they all have very differing goals. The Irish Republican Army is considered terrorist by many, yet it does not care about undermining the United States at all. The islamic terrorists in the Philippines desire independence, not revolution. The movement of Amrozi and Imam Samudra in Indonesia, responsible for the Bali bombings, is mainly aimed at the Western (mainly Australian) presence within their nation. The Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka has no global goals whatsoever, but claims a struggle for self-determination. The Hamas and similar movements in Palestine are fighting against Israeli presence on what they deem their land, but do not appear to have any strategic interests beyond the region. And so on and on.

How could a Saudi fundamentalist, waging a private war against the Sunni Wahhabist regime of Saudi-Arabia and the United States, and all whom he thinks supports them, ever unite such varied and localized terrorist movements? They don't care about him and he does not care about them. The same goes for each of the leaders of the respective movements. There simply is no logical reason to assume there would be any kind of cooperation between these movements for a common global strategic goal, let alone the kind of hive mind they are commonly assumed to have by many modern Western politicians and the public.

What's more, there is no proof for such a 'global connection' either. The Taliban in Afghanistan harbored Bin Laden and others of his movement as refugees; but only as long as they would plan to strike at targets the Taliban also disapproved of, and as long as they would stay out of the country's domestic politics. Even a person like Mullah Omar, close enough in ideology to Bin Laden, did not very much feel like sharing any power with him, and certainly would not let himself be led by him in any kind of global movement. This is very much the only pattern that can be discerned about internationalist terrorist movements; they are now and then supported by existing regimes in various nations such as Iran and Iraq, but only under the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" rationale, and not even that for long. In any case such support is usually ineffective in the long term unless such a regime in turn has the support of a Western nation, or formerly of the Soviet Union.

That said, it is not even clear what "terrorism" is. The definitions of it are so vague that anyone can find for any action a position that would allow calling that action "terrorist". Additionally, it has a universal negative appeal, making it rather useful for everyone's purposes. It is by its very nature a propaganda phrase.
All the more shameful for so many people, and even whole nations, in the West today that they allow themselves to have their liberties curtailed and their minds frozen in fear because of a shadowboxing match against a concept that has no real meaning and no real content of itself such as "terrorism". It is time we start paying attention to the real dangers in the West of the moment, and we stop our Don Quixote fight against the windmills of international conspiracies.

2004-11-09T13:36:00.000+01:00

The Myth of "Judicial Activism"

Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States explained its power to declare laws, statutes and state Constitutions invalid under the federal Constitution in Marbury vs Madison¹, there has been much ado about so-called "judicial activism". What is meant by this phrase is the general perception of many citizens and politicians alike that the courts in their role as guardians of the Constitution regularly exceed their authority, striking down statutes here and invalidating state amendments there, all based on the justices' own notion of morality or fair law.

This complaint is not new. Already during the very first years of the Supreme Court's history, the political battle (maybe even a "culture war" to borrow Justice Scalia's phrase²) between federalists and republicans/democrats was waged partially by laws and lawsuits, and the role of the courts in this came under fire. The very issue of Marbury was originally one of these cases. What further aggravates this perception of a structural problem is the fact that the Justices are always appointed by a very politically driven President, with the concurrence of a very politically driven Senate. In this way, such "judicial activism" seems a recurring evil.

Yet when you compare this general perception with the actual cases and which Justices decide them, and for what reasons, the notion of "judicial activism" becomes exceedingly ridiculous. It is important to consider in this context that this notion is (at the moment, at least) mainly railed at from the traditional conservative wing of American politics, and especially the libertarians. What they fear is that their ideal of locally-driven democratic politics with a strong civil rights character is threatened by judicial rulings that go against the grain of the wishes of a given local population.

It is, looking at a general overview of the history of constitutional law in the United States, however the case that more often than not, currently accepted constitutional rules of civil rights and legal procedure had to be 'created' by new interpretations of the Constitution, and by boldly going against what the current public feeling was on a given issue and instead doing what is right in the view of the justices. In short, by the very same "judicial activism".

One example of this is for example the absolute interpretation of freedom of speech. Originally, this right as considered in the common law tradition was seen as protecting the population from prior restraint, i.e. the censure or review of expression by the government before the actual publishing or utterance. Nothing more, however. What's more, the framers of the American Constitution, with the possible exception of Jefferson, were also of this opinion, following the famous common law guidelines of Lord Blackstone.
Nowadays, however, the people who would support allowing the government to ban disfavored speech such as statements of support for imperial Germany³, insults aimed against the current administration in general⁴, or even sexually loaded writings⁵, are few and far between indeed. Yet for every one of these cases it took "judicial activism", and often in several cases too, to establish a constitutional precedent on it.

Another example is the area of equal protection rights. Nowadays one of the most grim and infamous cases in the history of this field in the US is the Dred Scott decision⁶; and such a decision is certainly looked unfavorably upon indeed among the more intellectually honest rightists. But the remarkable thing about this decision is that it actually did follow the Constitution and the cultural feelings of the time, and was not "activist" in any way. The same goes for Plessy vs Ferguson⁷, which established the equally notorious "separate but equal" doctrine, absolutely within the literal (or "constructionist") reading of the Constitution. It took "judicial activism", in the form of Brown vs Topeka Board of Education⁸, to remove this faux equality and intervene on behalf of the oppressed minorities.

And I could go on this way. What is evident is that what is considered unacceptably encroaching "judicial activism" today, stands a good chance of being a historical milestone for the progress of freedom in the United States tomorrow. And the most beneficial and famous cases, reshaping the nation in a freer and better form than it was before and to the pleasure of a vast majority of the citizens of the USA, are exactly those where the justice of the Supreme Court dares go against the current cultural feelings and political notions, and goes in law where no man has gone before. The idea of "judicial activism" as the evil that plagues the courts is no more than a petty excuse for disagreeing with the outcome of a certain case for your own political and moral reasons, and it does a disservice the most to those who would protect the civil liberties of the citizens and uphold the Constitution.

¹ 1 Cranch 137 (1803)
² Lawrence vs Texas; 539 US 558 (2003)
³ North Dakota vs Fontana
⁴ Compare Abrams vs United States; 250 US 616 (1919) to Herndon vs Lowry; 301 US 242 (1937)
⁵ Compare Roth vs United States; 354 US 476 (1957) to American Booksellers Association vs Hudnut; 771 Fed. 2d 323 CA7 (1985)
⁶ Dred Scott vs Sandford; 60 US 393 (1856)
⁷ 163 US 537 (1896)
⁸ 347 US 483 (1954)

2004-10-23T18:42:00.000+02:00

In Defense of the State

As the Presidential elections in the United States draw nearer, the tensions between the two major parties and their avid supporters increase. Yet to many observers less interested in the well-being of any particular party, it seems that regarding many issues the Republicans and the Democrats are interchangeable, and very much comparable in the rest. Since the days of Theodore Roosevelt however, the two parties have had at least one major perceived difference: whereas the Democrats are seen as supporting a large government, the Republicans have for decades pronounced a philosophy of small government and even less government influence on people's daily lives, something which has not unimportantly contributed to the electoral successes of the party, such as there were.

Why is this, that in the United States (and increasingly also in Europe, especially the United Kingdom where Prime Minister Thatcher revitalized the originally strong laissez-faire movement in the country) a large government is seen as the root of, if not all, then at least most evil? Where having a system of government-supported influential institutions is prima facie evidence of leftist corruption, and nothing is a better way to lose an election than proposing more regulation of an issue, any issue, there must be a strong aversion to social-democracy.

Yet that aversion is based on a complete and rather baffling misunderstanding of the fundaments of social-democracy. In order to set right this right, it is important to look at how in a democratic system (dispensing with the semantic issue of "democracy" versus "republic") a strong government can be beneficial to all without decaying into either an authoritarian nightmare or a boundless bureaucracy of surrogate activities.

One of the crucial functions of government in a democratic society, one that is really the core of the system, is the accountability of it by way of politics and its derivative processes, like elections and newspaper editorials, etc.
Now the market as a process is capable of distributing all goods and properties in a manner which is the most economically efficient. Ever since the collapse of the dictated economies of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, not even most communists would dispute this; social-democracy does not do so at all, and is not opposed to free market thought of necessity. But the important aspect is the accountability of the market to function as a means of achieving the public goals desired, and that is where the government comes in.
A market can arrange things according to the optimal economic efficiency, but it can do no more. The democratic government, however, can reflect all the goals that the public deem desirable, and can strive to achieve all of them by the means available. This means, in practical terms, that it can choose not only to support the goal of economic efficiency, but also for example pursue a goal of optimal benefit to the environment, or of making as many people as possible posess a certain good, or making as many people as possible not posess it, or any goal as limited by the human political imagination.

This is not to say that the government in a social-democrat system should supplant the free market. If the goal as declared by the public (by means of public discourse) is indeed economic efficiency, then the free market and a strong government can go hand in hand, and then no social-democrat ideal will restrain it. But leaving everything to just the market unnecessarily limits all the possible goals of a society to just that one goal, and that is where the first major problem lies with laissez-faire. Especially if one considers that in common behavior people's wishes almost always relate to their direct economic desires, but their own priorities for happiness often do not do so at all.

Now we come to the next stage. As such, modern society should (and will) reflect the great variety of goals and wishes of the general populace, and as we have seen, many of those wishes might not be suited for using the market as the process to achieve them, or to give them the necessary free space to pursue them, as a democratic society, tolerant of variety, should. Well if the free market is for some or most of those not suited, then how will this necessary free space come into being? The answer is that the public can facilitate this for themselves, by voting to draw the financial means to create that space from the free market process (which is in any capitalist state by far the largest social process). In other words, the public can vote to create a taxation of some kind to pay for the necessary free space. Repeat this for the great variety of wishes and interests of the public as explained before, and quite a large administration comes into being already.

Added to this come the various regulations and measures that the public can take besides taxation to facilitate this free space by nonfinancial means, such as quality standards, educational purposes, environmental regulation, etc. etc.
Now this large public administration of the public's pursuit of happiness will eventually grow so large, that it will become hard to directly oversee the various functions and systems of administrative law and administrative behavior that guide it. Yet to prevent a true Leviathan of bureaucracy to overwhelm and suffocate the democratic structures of the nation, oversight will be needed. In fact, what will be needed is regulating the regulators.

Now this is where social-democracy does not fail the society it claims to support, contrary to the feelings of the parties and movements as mentioned in this blogpiece. Because it is not only socialist, but also democratic.
The necessities to protect the individuals of the public from suffocation and abuses by the large government that facilitates their happiness, and to prevent the individuals that make up that government from exercising détournement de pouvoir, a strong Constitution will be needed, and one with the essential checks and balances to, finally, prevent the various administrative branches from attacking each other.
And here comes the catch: most, if not all, of the nations of the West already have such Constitutions. So the requirements for a succesful social-democracy are in no way inconsistent with the liberal and Enlightened traditions of Western thought, and can very well function within the frameworks of the various state systems of the Western nations, as all of those aspire to achieve or create exactly these protections and balances.

So why see social-democracy as an ideology hostile to individual freedoms, or inconsistent with market theory or Western tradition? Nothing is more suited for it.

2004-08-27T12:00:00.000+02:00

The Great Follies: Historical and Current Solutions for Appeasement Policies

When on August 27, 1928, the American Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, joined his French colleague Aristide Briand in signing what would become known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, neither of the two statesmen believed the Pact could in any way be enforced or upheld. After all, a treaty renouncing "war (...) as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another" did not seem probable or possible, even in the happy internationalist days of the late '20s.

Yet what brought these quite serious politicians to propose this quite seriously intended treaty, ten years after the Armistice and ten years before the Treaty of Munich? The necessity of preventing an unrighteous war now to be able to fight a righteous war later. Mere symbolic grandstanding such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact was of course not the real instrument, but its assumption of pacifism does fit the bill of this policy very well: appeasement.

Now appeasement has generally rather a bad name in the West, but undeservedly so. My earlier blogpiece on appeasement argued that it is essential for preventing (or delaying for as long as possible) World War, especially within a context of a world of flexible alliances.

During the interbellum period there was a certain balance of powers, or at least a desire to maintain it on the side of the Western nations. The powerful European nations were the United Kingdom and France, who were joined in an uneasy alliance. This was balanced by two immense but isolationist powers on the borders of the European sphere of influence: the United States and the USSR.
During the years of this geopolitical balance, directly after WWI, there was a period of relative peace, and what's more important, of disarmament and nonviolence. This was guaranteed by treaties such as Locarno, Stresa and Washington, and by the London Naval Conferences, as well as a flurry of nonagression pacts.

However, this delicate but effective balance was upset because the second class powers, such as Italy, Germany and Japan, became increasingly dissatisfied with the current situation (for varying reasons) and decided to overthrow this balance. At first, each of these nations was prepared to solve their claims to increased power and influence by means of diplomacy. Yet the Allied powers, rigidly clinging to maintenance of the status quo because of their increasing inability to defend the whole of their empires and wanting to prevent this becoming altogether too clear, rejected every such effort with more force than subtlety. As a result, the have-not powers became increasingly aggressive, and the results are known.

This is a failure to consistently apply appeasement policy to a situation which did have a functional multipolar balance: the first Great Folly. After WWII, a new balance of powers came into being (also known as the Cold War), but it was also in the end ineffective at reducing volatile situations because it had appeasement (by way of the UN and many an international treaty such as START) while lacking multipolarity, instead being entirely based on MAD between two powers: the second Great Folly.

But what is more important is how we can learn from mistakes made then to prevent imminent geopolitical dangers now.
In the current world structure, there is one major power, the USA. There are several second-class powers in (temporary) decline, such as France, the UK, Germany and Russia. This, of course, creates a power vacuum where the influence of these declining nations has receded, but the USA has no sufficient power projection.

Into this gap jump, as happened in the 1930s and in 1945, new powers, as in this case China. The communist Chinese undisputably seek power equality with the United States, posessing a large nation with a huge population and a fast-growing economy.
Yet another force also needs to be taken into account.

The motley group of dissatisfied religious fanaticists, rebels and revolutionaries commonly regarded as "the terrorists" are not by any means a new problem for established powers: already during the 19th Century much of the colonial powers' expenditure went into crushing rebel uprisings and guerrilla tactics, and during the interbellum seldom a year went by without the British or French fighting a religious or nationalist assault. But what makes the terrorists as a whole a power of their own at this moment is the fact that the past decades have seen these various organizations increasingly using modern technology against the civilization that produced them, with sometimes devastating effects. Where years ago islamist uprisings such as that of the Mad Mullah were relatively easy to destroy because of their low level of military technology (a bomber raid sufficed to solve the problem in this case), this no longer applies to the current kind of insurgents.

These are the problems the Western powers face today. Learning from the lessons of recent and less recent history, the solution we should seek lies in a multipolar balance of powers (to affect China) and a powerful appeasement policy (to affect the terrorists).

The first can be achieved by countering the rising power of the dictatorial Chinese with a multipolar free bloc. When the major European nations become first class powers of their own again, the United States will no longer be forced to project power everywhere, reducing risks of 'imperial overstretch' and reducing isolationist pressure from the population itself. The European nations, or maybe even Russia when it has become sufficiently free, can each take their share of geopolitical power and can each project it on their own accord, thereby allowing militant unfree states such as China to be hemmed in, limiting their capacity for aggressive expansionism. This is the policy that was attempted in the '30s to hem Germany in, but which failed to materialize because the Germans acted decisively and struck a deal with the Soviet Union before the Allies could agree on it.
To reach this goal, the United States must concede to the European nations strategic assets that might hinder the forming of a strong alliance of this kind, which is at this moment mainly oil; the European nations meanwhile have to rearm on a serious scale to achieve the capacity for projecting power they will need. The former is essential as it prevents China from repeating history by seducing one of the Western nations to break the alliance, as might happen with France if that nation keeps being consistently denied strategic power by the United States.

The second goal can be achieved by appeasement. Terrorists cannot, once on a path to destroy civilization, ever be reintegrated into that civilization again. They effectively become a liability to all including themselves, and this means no policy of any kind will solve this problem. However, the forming of new terrorists can be effectively prevented, by undermining popular support for terrorism which allows them to function.
To reach this goal, Western nations must ensure that the populations of the Third World nations are as free as the West can guarantee, which requires a strong and especially consistent interventionist policy against the various dictators and warlords of the world. At the same time the major powers must reach out to these populations and earn their goodwill and trust by conceding to them all demands as can be reasonably met, with the clear indication that such can only be considered when the populations involved cease any and all cooperation with terrorist or anti-Western groups in the region. Such a dual policy, of using the stick against their tyrants and the carrot for themselves, will not fail to appease the great amount of people in the Third World who don't like terrorists very much but like the great powers even less. In this way the forming and operation of terrorists will be minimized.

The lesson we must learn from history is that the only way to actually maintain relative peace and prosperity for longer periods in time is to achieve both a multipolar balance of powers and a strong appeasement policy combined with effective power projection, on the side of the free nations. This and this alone can not only reduce the threat of unfree powers, but also prevent the forming of new ones. Then maybe once we can finally say that our civilization has banished war forever.

2004-08-18T17:04:00.000+02:00

The Necessity of European Rearmament

Ever since the Second World War's European theatre ended with the double capitulation of the Germans in 1945, the various continental western nations have been attempting to cooperate in a spirit of mutual security and peace. The Cold War has moderated this antimilitarism somewhat due to the Western European policy of accepting American protection against the Soviet Union both on a military and a political level, but nonetheless this disarmament movement continued within the continent. The European Union, born out of the European Economic Community and before that the Coal and Steel Union, has been on the forefront of this process, desiring to forever end all wars within the continent by a policy of cooperative federalism between member nations and a policy of concentration on diplomatic efforts and an exclusively multilateral interventionism.

The idea behind this is that a policy of simultaneously removing cultural and economic barriers between cooperation and mutual disarmament within Europe can effectively completely defuse the European geopolitical situation, making chances of internal European wars, ever the bloodiest and most disastrous on earth, very slim indeed. On the whole, this seems an excellent policy for Europe seen in the light of balance of powers, of old the guarantee against world wars.

However, when looking at the current geopolitical situation in the world as a whole, this intra-European policy seems definitely short-sighted, and it is time to re-evaluate it.

The crucial downside to this policy is that it is in fact too effective at achieving its goal, namely defusing Europe. The consequence of this is that the military power projection capability of the European Union nations together has, relative to the other powers and power blocs in the world, been extremely reduced since 1945. Where the United Kingdom and France in 1939 had spheres of influence that stretched across every single part of the globe and even the secondary European powers like Italy and the Netherlands could boast impressive extracontinental assets, today all the armies of Europe combined would have significant trouble standing up to the armed forces of Israel, let alone the military might of countries like Russia, China or the United States. The antimilitaristic policies of Europe have indeed ensured that no intracontinental war between first world nations has occurred since 1945, but it has also caused the various European nations to neglect or even downright abandon their military aspirations and powers, to the extent that nearly no EU nation spends a percentage of GDP on the military that even meets the NATO recommended minimum.

What is the problem with all this, one might ask. After all, is it necessary for Europe to have any power projection capabilities in the current world, with the US mainly calling the shots, and China and Russia being the main opponent powers? The answer is a resounding yes, precisely because of this situation.

The consequences of our unilateral disarmament policies are that the United States cannot ever depend on Europe at a serious level for any kind of military operation or intervention, because Europe simply does not have the military power to take over even one single theatre of operations from American forces without an overall loss in military power in that theatre occurring. This in turn causes the Americans, as always wary of Europe but willing to cooperate when on an equal footing, to not take Europe seriously any more when it comes to strategic geopolitical operations, as it increasingly does not matter for them any more whether or not Europe supports them. This means a huge loss of European influence with the US and in the world as a whole, which in turn can have drastic consequences as it means that American power in the world will go unchecked and unmoderated.

Another important consequence is that the policy in the long run makes it impossible to reach its own main political target. Balance of powers within Europe may be possible by the cooperation/disarmament duality, but the more Europe disarms, the further distant the goal of balance of powers within the world as a whole becomes. The only major democratic power being the US, strong but fickle, and all the other major powers and secondary powers outside of Europe being either dictatorships or pseudo-democracies, the West is in the risky situation that the whole defense of liberal democracy rests upon one nation that has a history of isolationism and unilateral distancing from world events.

Increasing European military power and expanding, rather than intentionally limiting, European capabilities to exert that power abroad would enable the EU nations to assume the important position of arbitrator: the power between the powers, free but not unilateralist, that can moderate American rashness and arrogance on the one side and check antidemocratic powers in the second and third world on the other side. Such a position is ideal for a post-WWII Europe, and it would greatly benefit the world's geopolitical situation as far as balance of powers and the preventing of world war is concerned. There is no need to give up either internal cooperation or the desire for diplomatic conflict resolution for the fulfilling of this role. All Europe needs to do is to start rearming.

2004-07-11T22:44:00.000+02:00

Republicanism and Aristocracy

One of the most interesting aspects of the late Roman Republic, the period experienced by such famous writers as Cicero, is the way they refer to the past. To the politically active citizens, invariably of an at least upper middle class background, the Roman Republic was in a state of decline. The politicians of the time, they say, have no morals, are crooks, liars and populists; the people are dumb, cowardly and uninformed; immorality and profiteering run rampant to the detriment of the state. This opposed to the past, when (according to those writers) the Roman politicians were powerful and principled and they as well as the citizens full of civic virtue.

There is of course no historical basis whatsoever for such a black-and-white view of a country's history by its foremost political literators. Nevertheless, it is a pattern we see returning in several other places where a strong tradition of republicanism is pressured by the republic's increasing power and size. The United States, perhaps the best example of republicanism in today's world, is one of these places.

More and more American writers, politicians, activists (and bloggers) are complaining about the downfall of the country's strong republican and principled foundations. Politicians, they say, have no morals, are crooks, liars and populists; and the people are dumb, cowardly and uninformed. The interesting thing is that politically interested writers from all political sides are saying this; Greens, Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, anarchists, they all seem to feel witness to some slow decline in political virtue in their days, when compared with the past.

In the specific context of the United States that past is the mythical time of "the Founding Fathers and the early States", where brilliant and civically minded men like Washington and Jefferson overthrew the tyrannical regime of British King George III and proceeded to write an inspired Constitution that is a shining example of republicanism and republican principles. Because of this mythical ideal fundament for the country, its early years were marked by expansion both politically and economically, by a host of great minds as politicians and Presidents, and by a republican civic tradition where every citizen took his responsibility in the political process.

Of course there never was such an ideal time, and what's more, because people from all possible political sides refer to these specific republican principles as the ideal guiding light, they cannot really exist either. So what is it then about the spirit of republicanism in general, that causes political literators to see a moral degradation of the politics and civic life of the country where there is no clear degradation in any historical sense?

The answer, paradoxically, lies in the republican nature of these civic ideals themselves. To be more exact, it lies in the way it handles aristocracy.

The point is, people like Jefferson were aristocrats, and it is precisely this aristocracy that enabled them to be as civicly virtuous as they were. Consider the following: most republican states are, historically, formed in either small city-states or in larger rural areas. In both cases, the population is not very high and the economy is strongly focused on one particular branch (trade or agriculture, respectively). In such societies, there are simply very few people who can afford the expenditure of time and money for an education and a subsequent political career.

Because of that basic economic hurdle, the only ones capable of actually becoming writers, philosophers or politicians are those that have the free time and opportunity to be educated. In anything but a very well-developed capitalist society, it is the aristocracy and the aristocracy only who fits this bill.

This also enables the mythic figure of the principled and inspired leader, who guides the citizens by his civic virtue and his principled politics, all the while supporting their freedoms and not being corrupted by any offer of money or power. While this seems far-fetched to us, it is actually relatively simple for an aristocracy in a society like that to achieve this. After all, he can easily seem principled and virtuous, as he is one of the few who has had education in writing and debating, and so will be able to convey his message to people much more convincingly. He can easily support the freedoms of the citizens, as the citizens are those of his class, or those that his class controls by economic and social ties. He can easily not be corrupt, as no one but the aristocracy can even dream of posessing the funds that might sway him. And finally, it is easy for him not to be seduced by power, as regardless of how democratic this republic is, it will always be an aristocracy who has the power, and he is one of that class.

But as a republic progresses, its size and its power waxes, and time goes by. The republic has now grown great and powerful, a beacon of civilization in a barbaric world (or so its citizens see themselves). What the citizens of this later stage of the republic remember is not the daily life of the old times, the simple economic structure, the pyramidic shaped distribution of social power, the small world in which the citizens moved. No, they remember only the great deeds and the great writings and speeches of old, as those are the most memorable things of that time. And because the powerful late republic succeeded the simple early republic, it must be that these huge gains in power and level of civilization came because of the doers of these great deeds, the writers of these great writings and the speakers of these great speeches. And so they see their old aristocracy, forgetting its background, forgetting why it was these people and only these few that had such eminence: as pioneers of the republican spirit, as people who sacrifice for the civic ideals, as the champions of the common man. In short, as an ideal for citizens and especially the politicians of today and of tomorrow.

2004-06-05T06:09:00.000+02:00

the Utilitarianism of War by Liberal Democracies

There has been much talk about the war in Iraq lately, and about whether or not such a war was 'justified', and its chances of 'success'. This is hardly surprising, as all wars tend to bring out the strongest forms of anxiety in people, and besides, this is part of a new development in geopolitical relations, known as the "war on terror". However, it is important to consider that while 'justification' and 'success' are the key words when describing worldwide public attitude to a given war, both terms seem rather vague. The following describes the most amoral and utilitarian way to make a given war seem just and succesful to the people. Even the most liberal minded democratic governments will make use of these techniques to curry favor among the populace, and as a form of subtle propaganda. To be able to see through this ruse, understanding of its mechanics is crucial.

Fact is, all propaganda and nationalism aside, an informed or even half-informed public will only accept a war when it is both justified and succesful. However much opinions on what these terms mean may vary, these factors must always be present. Wars that, in the public eye, are considered just but unsuccesful, like the US incursion into Vietnam, fail. Wars that are succesful but considered unjust by many, like the French crushing of the Algerian rebellion, also fail.

Of course, in many nations the leaders have little regard or interest in public opinion, and this will not prevent their waging of wars. Whenever that is the case, an unjust war can be fought for much longer than an unsuccesful one. The Soviet leadership easily got away with invading East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia after each subsequent uprising, but the failed war in Afghanistan contributed significantly to the fall of the USSR. This is also why dictators like Saddam generally prefer to invade countries like Kuweit over invading countries like Iran if they want to stay in power; they can get away with unjust aggression, but only if they are very succesful. So the obvious solution for them is to aggress against smaller, weaker neighbors (and not make the mistake of choosing places that are within the direct sphere of interest of a group of much larger and much more powerful nations).

For democracies and free nations, however, this is not quite as easy, as they have to follow both requirements. Their only way out, short of being perfect and fighting only just and easy wars (if those even exist), is to use the fact that these values are subjective. If they want to wage a war and a succesful post-war stage, like in Iraq, they have to make the public consider the casus belli just and the war itself succesful, regardless of the actual circumstances.

Making the war look just is the easier part of the two. This requires obvious tools, like propaganda decrying the evils of the enemy in the war, explaining why it is the holy and eternal task of the country to be the one fighting that enemy, and encouraging everyone to give public support to the troops of the country in their fight against evil.

However, making a war look succesful is less easy.
Infamous about the Vietnam war are the pictures in Time magazine depicting the dead of the past week. Pictures of bodybags returning from Somalia made the incursion a recipe for failure. So the obvious thing to do is to get the media on your side. Now in most liberal democratic countries, the freedom of expression of citizens and the social status of journalists prohibit effective propaganda feeds to the media. So the best thing to do is exactly the opposite: cooperate with the media as much as possible, offer them scoops and inside views, and give press conferences as much as possible. In return, strike a deal with the editors of newspapers and magazines that in exchange for the valuable information, the news will be presented in a way that is as positive for the government waging the war as possible. Of course most editors will reject outright propagandist slants for reasons of morality, so the best a government can do in such a situation is to both bribe them in exchange for the information, and appeal to their patriotism and national feelings. This will not guarantee positive news but will certainly prevent the opposite. To add some extra pressure, every newspaper or news program that does not strike this deal must be refused any and all insider information and government cooperation.

With the support of the media making a war look succesful (or at least making it look like it's as succesful as could be expected), and with appeals to patriotism among the citizens of the country and a clear depiction of evil presenting imminent danger making the war look just, a democratic government is in the best position possible to wage wars of any kind against anyone they want, as long as their military power can sustain it. This has been utilized since Ancient times, when populist generals like Gaius Iulius (later known as Julius Caesar) could effectively channel the feelings of the populace towards any one target they wanted, which allowed them to defeat possible opponents outside the realm and all the while look like the undisputed heroic leaders within the realm. Later dictators, Emperors and Presidents have been able to use the same techniques, (relatively) liberal establishments notwithstanding.

2004-03-16T23:02:00.000+01:00

Appeasement: A Virtuous Peace

A wrathful man stirreth up strife: but he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife. - Proverbs 15:18

In September 2002, just over a year after the terrorist strikes on the United States, columnist David Gelernter wrote in the Weekly Standard that it was "the 1920s all over again". He was referring to the policies of the major and minor continental European nations towards the threat of international terrorism, and towards the American government's strategy in the Middle Eastern region. This same historical analogy has been made by many other pundits, politicians and policy makers the last two years or so, condemning the perceived European unwillingness to respond and pacifism in the face of enemies who have struck in the heart of "safe" territory.

What is the main focus of the analogy? It is appeasement.
Appeasement is a phrase now thoroughly associated with vile cowardice, with trying to "feed a crocodile in the hope it will eat you last", in the words of famous British politician Winston Churchill. It is associated with Adolf Hitler's betrayal of Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time", when Hitler's troops marched through Prague and every chance of preventing a World War was lost. Most importantly, it is associated with a uniquely European failure to respond aggressively and decisively at the moment a dictator violates international rules and builds up his geopolitical power.

Because of this, opponents of the war in Iraq and those on the Continent who still prefer diplomacy and international games of give-and-take over open warfare and imperialism do their utmost to avoid being branded with the evil eye of 'appeasers'. This significantly weakens their position, as it is hard to explain to proponents of war measures that you do not want war, yet you still want to defeat the enemy and you also don't want to be cowardly. After all, to more and more people, especially in the United States, 'taking a firm stand' and 'waging a war' seem to have become synonymous. The ghost of Chamberlain, peace promises written by Hitler in hand, haunts the international political forum.

Yet this is not justified and not necessary. Because contrary to what some on the right would have you believe, there is more to appeasement than has met the eye of the militants so far.

First of all, appeasement was never about surrendering or retreating in the face of danger. It is about preventing war, certainly; but not at all costs. The issue here is that the best way to preserve peace is to remain at peace for as long as is tenable. This, in turn, means that you have to analyse who the enemy is, what his demands are, and how reasonable those demands are. Reasonable demands can be met, because that decreases the chance of war. This may be denounced by nationalists and proponents of war as "rolling over" or "surrendering", but what it in fact means is that you do not wage war over anything worth less than the cost of (world) war.
This was also the point of the much-derided Munich Conference: Chamberlain nor Daladier were prepared to start what would eventually become the Second World War over something as relatively unimportant as the Sudetenland. Besides, Hitler's claim that the Sudetenland was a German-majority area and that the population of this region, which had only been part of Czechoslovakia since 1919, was overwhelmingly in favor of joining Germany, was true. Considering these things in the light of decolonization and the right to self-determination, the latter much lauded by the same nationalists and proponents of war, waging a World War over Czechoslovak posession of these territories would have been an unnecessary breach of the peace.

Another important thing to consider is that appeasement is an important instrument in achieving a balance of powers, which is beneficial to peace, especially in volatile geopolitical situations (and few are those who would deny we now have a volatile political situation). The policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, the core of the 'Cold War', was in fact a balance of powers between two powers; the Victorian age was a balance of powers between several. In each of these cases, peace was preserved by diplomacy and by appeasement. It may sound strange that appeasement would work between two powers who both desire the defeat of the other, but "appeasement" originally meant "preserving peace", not "acquiescence to demands". Because it is in nobody's favor to start a real World War, all major powers, when in balance, must strive to keep this balance (as any war between major powers in such a situation would lead to World War because of alliances, as the First World War proved). The only way to do this is to not wage direct war. Through this forced (and superficial) pacifism, volatile tension between major powers is defused or, as in most cases like the Cold War, channeled towards minor powers. This actually increases the chances of 'lasting' peace.

'But Hitler did eventually start the Second World War, did he not?', you might ask, as the above abstractions may seem to contradict historical proof. Of course, fighting Hitler in that war was virtuous, the right thing to do. Of course, it would have been unacceptable to allow Hitler to swallow all the Eastern European states one by one and so form a power block in the center of the world that could not be defeated except at the cost of sacrificing almost all of Europe's population. No doubt. But the question is, was this World War because of appeasement or despite it? And what made it inevitable, acquiescence or war-mongering?

The Second World War was inevitable because of the First. The First was caused because public demand forced the major powers of the Victorian balance of powers, so carefully preserved still during the Fashoda Crisis, to abandon mutual appeasement and to fight each other head-on. Germany proclaimed that their troops would march under the Eiffel Tower within half a year; France announced taking Berlin "before Christmas". Instead of the short, valiant and victorious battle they expected, however, they got four years of harrowing fighting which eventually left twenty million dead. In the aftermath of this war, the victorious Allied forces forced upon Germany the Treaty of Versailles. Instead of going for the appeasement strategy of negotiating with the Germans over a reasonable reshaping of Europe as to maintain peace, they went for the aggressive strategy, and ruined Germany and Europe's chances of lasting peace by demanding punitive damages for starting a World War, a sum supposed to be so unimaginably large that no estimate was ever put onto paper. The Weimar Republic was the result of this nation-building by force instead of by negitiations, and it failed utterly, never being able to overcome the resentment of the German population because of the loss of dignity the Treaty had caused. In 1929 Stresemann died, and with him the main proponent of a more appeasing Versailles Treaty which would have acknowledged the end of the war but would not have been militant towards Germany itself, and the Great Depression did the rest. Hitler came to power in 1933, and after the aggressive response of Great Britain to the Italian annexation of Ethiopia pushed Mussolini towards him he started on the path that would eventually lead to the greatest and most horrific war mankind has ever known.

So it was appeasement that could have saved the initially strong Stresa entente of Italy, Great Britain and France: had the nations which later became the Allies allowed him to keep Ethiopia without repercussions, no Axis could have been formed. Surely, this would not have prevented the World War, but it might certainly have made the German onslaught less overwhelming. Another thing is that British and French appeasement towards the Germans over the remilitarization of the Ruhr, the Anschluss with Austria and the Sudetenland issue afforded these two Allied nations the time to remobilize, to prepare for the much-feared aerial bombings and to find the money and economic strength to sustain a war against evil enemies at a time when both were at the absolute ebb of their power. So, appeasement is also an excellent strategy of preparation: solving smaller and less threatening offenses against peace with diplomacy, all the while preparing for war. Such appeasement allows the appeasing nations to strike harder, better and more with more conviction when things really get serious than they otherwise would have been able to do. This goes especially for democratic nations, who always suffer from the hard to overcome effects of 'democratic patience' for wars being short in time and limited in bearable casualties.

This brings us to the present, and the so-called 'War on Terror'. Again we have a clearly vile enemy, against whom it is valiant to wage war. Again we have democratic nations forced to respond to violations of something of a balance of powers, and democratic nations who have to decide whether or not to wage complete open war over these offenses against peace. We have war-mongerers who desire this open war against an enemy difficult to overcome, because the cause is just. We have opponents of the war who share the same ideological rejection of the enemy, but who desire peace above all and who believe the time is not right and the means are not fit. As far as this goes, the analogy is indeed easily made. But let us hope that this time a World War can be avoided, and this time let us hope that history will be more fair to the legacy of the appeasers.

2004-01-21T22:15:00.000+01:00

On Truth and Debate

I believe that every moral question, whether initiated by the lowest of accidents or cases or initiated by great wars and philosophies, is actually but a representation in the current place and time of the greater moral issue. You might call this, referring to Platonic vision, the "ideal moral issue". And because of that, every time people come together and by reason, morals and wit debate these representations of moral issues, they simultaneously debate the ideal moral issue. The consequence of this is that there is but one requirement for a group of reasonable, moral and wise people, no matter the background, social position or other status of the people in the group, to reach the truth, and that is following the "scientific methods" of real debate. As long as that requirement is met, I think even we here on internet forums en blogspots can reach a measure of eternal truth. However, to do that we still do need to have our debate be a real, valid debate, not just a shouting match or popularity contest for opinions. Luckily, there are certain rules we can follow to make debate "real", and so by using the innate methods of real debate catch a glimpse, perhaps, now and then, of the 'ideal truth', or 'eternal truth'.

The point is that a real debate contains innately "scientific methods" for searching for eternal truth. But to be real, debate needs to use those methods, which are simply a way to use logic, ratio and criticism to remove barriers that prevent us from reaching that eternal truth.

The Socratic method, the critical dialogue, is one essential part of real debate. It ensures that every statement presented by any of the parties in the debate as fact, will be reviewed by the other parties with regard to its veracity and will be, no matter the 'social logic' of the statement or the measure to which it seems obvious, criticized by them. This removes the first barrier to reaching eternal truth in debate: the 'false positives', i.e. assuming something to be true without adequate proof or argument.

The second barrier is the social fear. This means that cerain statements will not be criticized, because they are socially accepted and so criticism would make the critic socially vulnerable, as seen in the above paragraph. But it also means the social fear of making positive statements, of saying things you feel are true or even just debatable, but not being socially allowed to say them because they are a taboo for some (rational or emotional) reason.
The essential part that prevents this is the "advocacy for the devil". In fact, this is just the positive version of the Socratic method: every real debate requires at least one party to defend a particular side to the best of his ability, when at least one other party has chosen the opposite side. Even if all parties disagree with a certain thing (which should, as we will see next, also be very rare in real debate), one of the parties should defend that thing. This works, one might say, as a 'filter' for debate. Something may very deservedly be disagreeable to all parties involved, but it is necessary for reaching the eternal truth that it becomes clear exactly what it is in that something that is so disagreeable to all. By having one party defend it to the best of his ability, the parts of that something that are still defendable will remain, but the part that is not defendable will be succesfully attacked. That way, everyone involved will clearly see what the core of the 'evil' in the disputed thing is, and that in turn will provide a source for new debate, or if not, an axiom of truth.
It is important to note in this context that refraining from fully criticizing someone on a certain weak point (or something perceived as a weak point by the critic) because of politeness is also to be regarded as social fear. After all, it is also only socially, not rationally, better not to correct someone's wrongs when that would lead to loss of honor for that someone.

The third barrier is uniformity. While this is often related to the issue of social fear, it is not the same. Uniformity occurs not when there is a similarity to all the arguments used and the positions taken, as with social fear, but when the points of departure, so to speak, are the same. When that occurs, there is a barrier to reaching truth: because there are many roads that lead to Rome, and if everyone departs from the same place, we may never find which one is the right road. To put it more clearly: if everyone starts from the same ethical and cultural side, there is automatically an assumption that is untested (which is against the Socratic method) and there is the chance, ever present, of everyone in the debate collectively erring. After all, how can we know that agreement among debaters means that some truth has been ascertained, when all the debaters are so alike that it might as well mean they have just found some common ground that everyone feels good about, but which may not be as defendable as some other common ground of some different group of people? That common ground is reached of itself means nothing: it is the comparison of ideas and positions that assures correct evalutation, not everyone following the same course. Because of that, variety is essential to maintain competition within the debate, which in turn ensures the search for truth is not easily led astray.

The penultimate method is the mathematics of logic. This is hard to explain precisely, but it is innately posessed by educated people. All the logical structures, like when A=B, B=A, fall under this category. It sounds rather hard not to apply this, but that is deceptive. Firstly it requires a certain level of education, especially education that involves and encourages critical thought; which unfortunately many in this world do not and will not receive at this point. (For example, the Arab world is infamous for providing reasonable factual education, but being abysmal at teaching critical thought. That is one of the causes for the popularity of fundamentalism in the region).
Secondly, even among people skilled at critical thought, like almost everyone in the First World, it is easy to be fooled by things that sound logical but really aren't. Read any random few op/ed pieces in the respectable newspaper of your region, and you will find more fallacies than arguments in most cases. That is not, though, a reason to consider current media low of quality. Rather, it is simply harder to make fully valid arguments than it may seem, as many kinds of reasoning that easily occur to us are unfortunately not valid. However, this can be remedied by having all parties involved take a basic syllogism course, or having the rules of syllogism readily at hand.

The last method is the most simple one of them all, but nevertheless equally crucial as the others. It is information. Now gramatically information cannot be a method, but within debate, especially internet debate (or similar debates that are not face-to-face), it does function as one. All that is needed is to have as much information as is needed readily at hand, and, additionally, to have much, much more available, because information itself can spur ideas and so debate. The function of information within debate, however, is that it can function as a way to change the environment in which the debate takes place, one might say.
Imagine debate as a match of "lasergame". In lasergame, contestants wear special suits and are armed with laser guns, and are then released into some special area (usually an indoor maze of some kind), where they try to 'shoot' others as much as possible. When they hit, they win points, but if they miss, they lose points.
The people lasergaming are, of course, the parties in the debate. The lasers they shoot at each other are the arguments each uses, where the strength and validity of each argument, as judged by the other contestants via its de facto effect, determines whether or not it was a hit. Now information is the background of the debate: the indoor maze. When you bring information, not arguments, to the debate, you effectively change the surroundings of both your and your opponent's position. If the information supports your side, your opponent is figuratively pushed into a corner, where it is easier to hit him with your arguments. Some information may be neutral, changing the surroundings in general but not particularly benefiting any party. It may however, spur new arguments (shooting from new positions, or while moving, in the metaphor). This is the "method" of information within debate.

When all these methods are used, real debate occurs. Real debate removes the barriers that withhold from us the possibility of ascertaining truth, and because of that, it is the best form of debate. When reasonable and intelligent parties hold a real debate, it will not matter what the issue is and it will not matter what the status is of any of the parties involved: the path to eternal truth is cleared, and however far away it still may be, it is only then that it is at least reachable.

2003-11-28T19:09:00.000+01:00

Against a Jury System

One of the most famous aspects, probably, of American trials is the jury system. As court movies are popular in the United States, and most things that are popular in the US get broadcast in Europe, Asia and Oceania as well, the way American trials are run are better known to the general public in these countries than any other trial system, including their own most of the time. The jury system, a remnant of common law, with the deliberations, the objections, the solid businessman declaring on behalf of the jury "not guilty" in a solemn voice: all this has been imbued with an appeal and a heroism that fits mythology better than basic court procedure. From a cultural point of view, jury systems are a definite success.

However, the same unfortunately does not apply from a legal point of view. There are several basic problems with the idea of jury systems and the procedure that inevitably is a part of it.

The basic philosophy behind the idea of juries, an ancient Greek invention originally, nowadays is that everyone has the right to have his guilt judged by his peers. This fits the democratic tradition (also an ancient Greek invention) of the people ruling over the people, and not granting such powers to any one man alone, as such is very susceptible to abuse and corruption. A jury will decide whether or not the defendant is guilty based on secret jury proceedings which no one may know, and that way no judge holds the power of deciding over the defendant's life alone, even though he still determines the sentence; because there can be no sentencing of someone found not guilty of the charges.

That sounds fair enough. But sooner or later, some questions will arise. First of all the famous Platonic questioning of the power of the ignorant: why allow someone who has no knowledge of the intricacies and nuances of law and the legal system decide such an important thing as the guilt of a man in a courtroom? What's more, the jury not only lacks all such knowledge, but it is in fact chosen because it lacks such knowledge. Common sense tells us that it is pretty impractical, not to mention morally wrong, to allow people ignorant about a situation to judge it. The same should apply here, especially because the matter at hand is so important: everyone pretends to have knowledge about football matches and such opinions are usually not a matter of extensive intelligent debate, but in a potential case of life and death, such as a trial sometimes is, most people would prefer to have someone who is capable of that extensive intelligent debating of the case at hand, instead of a rudimentarily random selection of citizens.

Now there is the matter of protection from undue influence and power abuse. The jury system was, as mentioned, designed to combat such problems as one single judge having judicial power in a case would invite them. In the United States (and everywhere else where juries exist, this applies equally if not more so) juries are not quite the independent, impartial observers of the case they are expected to be. While a judge is trained to be impartial and to apply the law equally and fairly to everyone, juries have no such training. The fact that the death penalty is almost always the jury recommendation in cases where a black person kills a white person, but rarely in the opposite case, is an indication that juries are not any more capable of avoiding prejudice and corruption than anyone else.

The rules of procedure in jury systems also allow for much more undue influence than the system can bear. Although the rules of evidence and statement admission are just as strict as in the French legal system (which knows only judges), there is with juries always the opportunity for shrewd lawyers to abuse it by wilfully making invalid, but highly suggestive comments in their speeches and questions. Judges can rule that those are not admissible and that juries should disregard them, but for a group of untrained regular men and women such is not really humanly possible. So in addition to the possible prejudice of even fairly balanced people (as the blatant bigots are usually filtered out), we have the suggestions, implications and insinuations of wily lawyers which can severely infringe upon the right to a fair trial that every defendant has.

The question is now, of course, is it not a lesser of two evils then? That is not the case, though. On the one hand we have judges, who have been trained to be impartial and fair to all parties involved, who know the law and know what parts of evidence, statements and speeches are legally valid and which are not (allowing them to much more easily 'filter out' the parts not admissible), who hav experience in weighing the merits of each case individually and with regard to jurisprudence, and who are controllable by higher courts and by the legislative and executive powers in extreme cases; and on the other hand we have juries, who have no real legal knowledge, who are not trained to be impartial, who will make an honest attempt at a fair trial for all involved usually but who cannot humanly be expected to suddenly suppress all their personal feelings about the parties, who are not bound by any rules nor reviewable in their decisions, and who, ultimately, are completely unfit to rule on often difficult cases of innocence and guilt.

The right and wrong here are, despite all good intentions of the jury system design, pretty much obvious.

2003-10-06T01:59:00.000+02:00

A Reminder that Justice is Unattainable

Reading the newspapers, watching the news and hearing friends and colleagues speak of current events both on a large and a small scale, it is inevitable that the thought will occur to you that a lot of things seem wrong with the society we live in. From old ladies being robbed by youth scum to politicians lying and defrauding their way out of judicial enquiries into their affairs, from chairmen of large corporations leaving their companies like rats leave a sinking ship, to children being left deserted in dustbins and cellars, injustice and wrongs seem to prevail no matter how much energy is spent on combating them and no matter how many laws are made and enforced. Every time the middle-aged parents in suburban neighbourhoods look at each other in anger and resentment and loudly demand justice for these attacks on their otherwise peaceful and routinous lives.

Then, inevitably, when the judiciary finally comes to dealing with those cases they read in the newspaper or heard on the radio, months later, the result is always disappointing. The honest and law-abiding citizens demand harsher penalties: the youths should all get twenty, no, thirty years in jail; the politicians should be publicly flogged; the chairmen sentenced to forced labor for life; the irresponsible parents ("we would never do such a thing, we were raised to be responsible") should be forbidden ever to have children again.

But no such penalties are given. Most likely, the case of the youth and the abandoned children are not handled at all, due to case-overload, and the politicians and chairmen have no trouble getting away with no sentence at all or at best an easily payable fine and a public apology. And then the outrage returns: if our advanced judiciary system can not deal adequately with these punks and criminals, the laws must be made tougher! The concerned dads and moms start writing representatives and Ministers, and eventually, the penalties are made harsher. But to their utter surprise, the crime rates do not drop and the criminals are not deterred. And then for the third time, fueled by incomprehension that nothing seems to work, the upright men and women lament that no justice is done.

I'm afraid I will have to break the news to them: no justice will be done, no matter what they do or what demands are met. For no justice can be done. Here, the judiciary is often on the receiving end of endless volleys of complaints by frightful intellectuals and "soccer moms" alike, every time a criminal youth is sentenced to half a year for terrorizing the neighbourhood and stealing mobile phones, or football hooligans set cars on fire and the case has to be shelved due to case overload. The aforementioned people loudly demand justice. But the judge cannot give them that justice, and there are several reasons why.

First of all, "justice" in the form that the people demand always means harsher and crueller penalties. If such demands were to be met, however, crime would still exist, and the people would demand even harsher penalties, and so on. In the end, the judge would be required to act as a new Roland Freissler and torture and humiliate the suspects all day, and eventually have them executed. Strangely enough, the prospect seems abominable to those same intellectuals and concerned parents. And even were it to be instated and widely applauded, the crime it is supposed to deter will still exist.

This is because crime is merely a result of the circumstances, and as such a most natural thing to man. No matter what time, age, society or culture one would live in, one would recognize crime everywhere. The only place without crime would be a place without laws, and because social, unwritten laws exist in any society (even anarchist ones), such cannot be.
The issue here is to recognize that the difference between the "bad people", the criminals, who need to be locked up, punished, kept away, degraded, supervised, etc. at all times to protect the 'normal' citizens, and the "good people", those 'normal', law-abiding citizens, who need to be constantlym backed up by police, guards, the judiciary, a wide array of laws and legislators, and so on at all times to be safe from the "bad people", is very slim. Not only has almost every single one of those 'law-abiding citizens' committed crimes themselves as well, ranging from tax fraud to driving through red lights; but they could very well have been the "bad people" as well, because of the second reason.

As, for example, the Stanford prison experiment, or even the Second World War, have adequately proven, is that almost every single human being is capable under certain circumstances of an almost unparallelled cruelty and malice. No matter the virtuousness or high standing of that person in regular life, he or she could and would have been among the worst dictators ever seen had the circumstances been like that. After all, if fate had not decided otherwise, Hitler himself might very well have spent his life as a mediocre and quickly forgotten painter, while Stalin could easily have been just a seminary student in Tbilisi. And had that happened, who would have seen in them the cruel and horrible, yes, nearly "monstrous" dictators they became? That realization should give any 'law-abiding citizen' food for thought.
Some, when reading this, will think: "Ah, but the circumstances have not been like this, and I am a law-abiding citizen, so do I not deserve the protection from these bad people and do they, in turn, not deserve their punishment?"
It is tempting to cede this point. But I will take my line of reasoning further. If it is so very, almost frighteningly, easy to become a ruthless and horrible criminal when being a "good person", is it not logical to assume that the reverse is also true? If circumstances (including, of course, the free will and character of those involved) alone can dictate that one will become a mass-murderer, can circumstances not also dictate that one will become a benefactor to mankind? It is entirely reasonable to assume so.

And that leads us to the chilling conclusion: that there is essentially no difference between the "good people" and the "bad people", except that some have only felt the cruel storms of fortune rage against them, while others have only experienced a pleasant breeze in their backs to support their course through life. When considering this, do the harsh and cruel punishments one's emotions lead one to advocate not suddenly seem a cold evil, and in fact pity and support seem more humane responses? For it could just as well have been you in that jail in death row, and the prisoner could have had your job and your partner, and, in essence, your life.

For then who is to judge? The biblical adagium "he who is without sin, casteth the first stone" seems marvellously well to apply here. For even the high judges and the lawyers and the District Attorneys with all their legal knowledge and all their training and expertise are just as human as the convict and the condemned. And when every man and woman in judge's robes could well have been the one they are judging, how can real justice be attained? The best possible result can only be that right is done, i.e. the following of the legal rules and the law, and a fair and reasonable ruling according to the judge's best capacities within the borders legislators have set for him. And because those borders are set by human beings as well, do not ask for a continuous change or expansion of those borders: for no matter where they are set, they will remain set by humans, and remain subject to the faults and follies that man is heir to.

So if right is done and it seems in your heart to be a grave injustice, then ask no more: for what your heart desires can only be granted by higher beings, or by none at all.

2003-08-16T06:06:00.000+02:00

A solution to Europe's immigration problems

The recent rise in, for Western Europe at least, right-wing parties has proven beyond any doubt that immigration and its perceived problems are one of the things that bother European citizens the most. From local maverick Pim Fortuyn's anti-establishment movement to the dangerously xenophobic countryside uprising of Jean-Marie le Pen in France, the rightist wave in the European Union member states has been all over the international news this past year.

Although the actual effect of these parties and their role in current politics is often overstated in foreign media, with the predictions of a new "rightist" Europe being sufficiently disproven by now with the huge election defeats of the LPF here in the Netherlands and the FPÖ in Austria, their meaning can not be overlooked so easily. The movements are for the main part based on rebellious platforms, receiving many votes simply because they offer a different sound than the too well-known and too incumbent social-democrat and christian-democrat (the difference between the two is often hardly recognizable) parties of their respective nations. However, the anti-immigration part of their platforms has garnered the most attention, and not wholly unjustified, for it is a reflection of how the average Western European considers his country to be like.

Now there are a few important things to consider when speaking of Europe's immigration problem. First of all, the obvious question of: is it actually a problem?
The answer to that is no. No, because immigration need not of itself be a bad thing. As is proven time and time again in history, allowing other peoples and other cultures into yours not only strongly boosts your economy, but also leads to a mix culture which usually ends up higher at the cultural ladder, so to speak, than its parent cultures. The United States of America are the best example of why allowing in even the tired, the poor, the huddled masses and the wretched refuse in, as Emma Lazarus so brilliantly evoked the spirit of hope for the future, is a really good idea. Because of its general policy, which, as must be noted, has not stood always been an unassailable guideline but always was at the core of the perception of America, of allowing in any immigrant who would come tempest-tost to them, the United States has blossomed from a rebellious state of free land-owners to the most powerful military and economic power the world has seen in ages. And even today, this superpower still allows in all those which are considered to be of use to the country, as well as allowing in an amount of "random" people to allow even now the huddled masses a chance to taste the American dream.

But is there a relation between this undeniable success and the US' history as an immigration state? That is hardly in doubt. Because time and time again the Old World followed its own policies and for a great variety of reasons persecuted an equally great variety of peoples and cultures, gradually more and more people began to see the United States as their ideal way out of their misery. And when one sheep is over the dam, more will follow, as our saying goes. The simple fact that they would not be persecuted in America led to many a person deciding to leave the ravaged fatherland behind and take the boat to the USA.
This, in turn, led to an enormous brain-drain of potentially useful and productive people, who took all the chances in the US they never got in Europe. All those Poles, Jews, Germans, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, French, Irish, etc. etc. becoming productive American citizens where they were miserable second-class humans in their home countries knew that the way of their new country was enterprise and taking life on your own terms, and so they did. This led to unparallelled growth, both in population and in power, in the USA. Without this influx, the US would never have become much more than the original, small-sized land-owner's state, with maybe the relevance of, say, fiercely independent Switzerland or wealthy and small Luxembourg now, but not much more.

What then, of the current lack of success and the integration and crime problems of the immigrants in Europe? Doesn't that prove that this theory no longer works, or at least not in modern Europe?
This is the main question which most locals base their mistrust of more immigration and the sudden drop in tolerance of the foreign and the unknown on, assuming that the way it is now is indicative of how it will be in the future, and how all immigration de facto is. But precisely that assumption can now bring Europe dangerously close to the brink of an economic and social disaster.
First of all, it is imperative that we realize that immigration is essential for the continued existence of our famous social security and welfare systems, which are beyond any doubt worth maintaining as they are. Because Europe's demographic statistics indicate the feared "satisfaction point", that is the phase in which the population is on average so well-to-do that the amount of people with but one child or no children at all reaches such heights that the average growth of the countries is very close to 0%, (and in some cases, most notoriously Iceland, is actually negative), there is no hope that with the current population alone we can continue paying the elderly, which are swiftly increasing in numbers because of the post-war generation reaching old age and the West's high life expectancies, the social support we want to pay them. The only way to solve this problem in a mutually satisfying way is to allow more immigrants into the country, which not only boosts in on a short term scale, but who also have many more children on average than the local populations.
Secondly, if we look at the way immigration from culturally less advanced areas, or of cultures which are for an important part anathema to the culture of the receiving country, has progressed in history, we see the same pattern recurring which is now taking place in Western Europe. And yet, many of us do not see it. Always, so far, has such immigration led to increased crime and maffia forming among the recently immigrated; always have the recently immigrated had problems with getting adequate jobs and always have they ended up in the lowest social strata; always has this led to resentment among the original population, and always have they attempted to stop such immigration based on what they saw; and, most importantly, always have such attempts been detrimental to the receiving country because after some generations, the immigrants were fully integrated and were a fully functioning part of that nation's society.
The very same thing is happening before our eyes, and yet we take the same steps to prevent this immigration because of the crime, the violence, the strange and dangerous culture, etc. I think I can safely say that we will consequently rue these steps later, just as that always was the case.

But how to regulate this immigration then? Because even if immigration is necessary, something must be done to prevent the nation from either starting a dangerous xenophobic course against all immigrants and, eventually, everything perceived as strange and damaging (i.e. Weimar Republic), or the weight of the immigration will burden the whole system in such a way that it will implode before the immigration had the chance to become fully beneficial (i.e. what many British fear at this time), right?
That is correct in so far that it can speed up the described process all immigration goes through and make it work out better and faster, if regulated to the full benefit of the receiving country. And for this, again, we will need to adopt those methods that were and are adopted by the country most succesful in this, the United States.

The answer is as simple as it is overlooked: a quota system. This means that the current half-solutions will be replaced by a both fair and beneficial system, namely setting quotas for immigrants based on culture/nationality and representation, as well as potential. That means that instead of allowing in more and more of the same nationalities and cultures into our society, the key is variation. It's very simple how this works: based, for example, on the fact that there are already half a million Turkish and another 400.000 Moroccan immigrants in the country, you stop all immigration from there, because they are overrepresented. Instead, you set a quotum for 100.000 from Southern Asia, another 200.000 from South America, and 50.000 from the Pacific; because those groups are underrepresented in the country, and they provide just as much potential on average as any other nationlity, of course.
What are the benefits of this? Equally simple: you avoid the integration problems and the mounting mutual feelings of cultural distrust, by letting in so many different cultures that no single culture can form a "society within a society". This will also facilitate the fundaments for integration, namely the incentive to learn the language and assimilate; because after all, the immigrants will also all be foreigners to each other, so the only ones they can hold on to besides themselves are the "hosts" of their new fatherland. This, in turn, benefits economic prospects which reduces crime and the feeling of disenfranchisement, and so on.

Why, if this works so well, has it not been implemented yet in Europe? This is because this system presupposes the idea that both economic and political refugees will be treated equally and equally will be admitted or rejected based on their personal qualifications, which is so far still unheard of and which runs counter to the current course Europe takes. Why this is is not readily apparent to me, because it doesn't matter much to you whether your utter misery is due to lack of food or due to lack of freedom; after all, misery is misery, in all its guises. Also, this system requires selection based on heritage which is often quickly decried as discrimination, even though the same system is already applied with regard to political refugees: a few government officers, with yearly salaries about a hundred times that of the average income of the nations their refugee "cases" come from, get to decide whether or not those refugees had a good reason to flee their country, which is mainly decided based on the country they come from and whether or not it is officially deemed "safe", whatever that means. Yet no one decries thát as discrimination.

So, in summary, implementing a quota system will benefit all of Western Europe in the long run, allow us to keep our valuable social systems for the next generation, will reduce intergration and crime problems among the immigrants, reduce feelings of fear and distrust among the local population, and will be both honest and clear to the refugees waiting for their chance to contribute to a country more welcoming to those it does not know or understand, yet.

(This blogpiece was inspired by Blind Guardian's cover of Mike Oldfield's "To France")

2003-08-12T07:30:00.000+02:00

If you can't stand the heat: Rise and Fall of Alexander Kerensky

Just as much as many politically interested people, I am fascinated by the lives and deeds of famous men (and women) of political history. Many great leaders and statesmen, from Churchill to C. Iulius Caesar, and from Josef Dzugashvili, alias Stalin, to Alexander the Great, many are well-known even to the general public, and have countless books written about themselves and their exploits.
This, however, makes them sometimes a bit too well-known, and studying the "subtop" of leaders and statesmen can actually be a more interesting experience, reading about those whom the spotlight seems to have missed somewhat.
One of those people is Alexander Kerensky.

"Who is Alexander Kerensky", you might ask, "I've never learned anything about him at school, nor does he appear in any books I own." That is well possible; his apogee was short and rather painful, and due to the events that surrounded him his own story has been somewhat neglected. Nevertheless, his role in the history of the world was an interesting one from a modern perspective, and had he not made his two big mistakes the world might well have looked completely different now, and many things would have been changed.

Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970) was born in Simbirsk, in Russia, which was at the time a Tsarist state of increasing instability. He was the son of a school headmaster, and studied law at the University of Petrograd. In 1905, he joined in secret the Socialist Revolutionary Party, being influenced by the writings of the Marxist Peter Struve. He became an editor of a radical leftist-anarchist paper called Burevestnik, meaning something like "the Stormbringer".

This was, however, not much succesful; he was soon arrested and sent into exile, the usual punishment for dissenters in Tsarist Russia. Returning to Petrograd in 1906, he became a lawyer, though not a particularly succesful or noteworthy one., although he became somewhat infamous for his defence of radical activists and Marxists in court. At that time, he was himself still quite a radical leftist, strongly opposed to the Tsarist government.

In 1912, he joined the more moderate, somewhat social-democrat Labour Party, despite that radicalism. Being well-educated, especially for the son of a local headmaster, he was very eloquent and was immediately noted for his speeches. He was elected into the Duma of Russia and became popular with laborers and industral workers for his socialist orations.

He gained even more popularity because of his role in the discovery of Roman Malinovsky, a bolshevik who had spent a brief time in jail, as an undercover agent for the Okhrana, the Tsarist internal security department. In 1914 Malinovsky was thought to have been paid 100 Rubles a month, a rather nice sum at the time, for informing the Okhrana of every illegal pamphlet, speech and meeting held. The Okhrana was a very dangerous organisation, even more so than the bolsheviks themselves, and it had departments in major European capitals as well as secret death squads. Because Malinovsky had been made one of the bolshevik party leaders, being elected to the Duma as well in 1912, by Lenin himself, the case was even more painful. Malinovsky was initially cleared by an internal investigation of the bolsheviks, but Kerensky distrusted him. In 1918, with the help of Kerensky, Malinovsky was executed.

In February of 1917, Kerensky left the moderate Labour Party and joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, now openly calling for the removal of the Tsar and the Monarchy. With this he drew the ire of the Romanovs, who planned on having him executed for treason. However, in March that year the Tsar was forced to resign because his troops mutinied after being ordered to continue World War I. This should have been a major warning for Kerensky, but at the time he did not heed it, despite his growing political position.

A Provisional Government was formed, with Prince George of Lvov at the helm. This Government had great trouble to assert their authority from the start, with the local Petrograd Soviet, the union of the bolshevik "proletariat", only agreeing to obey them if their demands were met, which included a liberal democracy and full amnesty for political prisoners and exiles. In this Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky was made Minister of Justice. Having become more and more a moderate leftist during the radical developments, he immediately pushed through abolishment of the death penalty and the basics for a liberal democracy, including freedom of speech. His ideals were more of a social-democrat nature than a bolshevik one, but his dream of a socialist democracy would never happen.

Having made plans for universal suffrage, he was made Minister of War in May. He appointed General Brusilov as commander of the Russian Army, and made several famous speeches in support of continuing the war in the west, which by that time was beginning to show some movement after having been a bloody stalemate for three years. The bolsheviks, however, did not want to continue the "imperialist" war, and they organised some protests in Petrograd against the decision.
The Galicia Offensive in July was Brusilov's execution of the orders of Kerensky to continue the fight. It was initially quite succesful, but the war of attrition soon broke the Russian advance, much as it had done the years before. Poor supplies, a dropping morale, and German reinforcements created another costly standoff. Halfway July, the Offensive was ended, with Kerensky's popularity having diminshed significantly.

In retrospect, Kerensky should have ended the war at that time and devoted his energy and powers to securing order domestically, where looting mobs and up to 2 million deserted soldiers roamed the countryside. Instead, Kerensky concluded Brusilov had failed in his tasks, and he replaced him with General Lavr Kornilov, a staunch anti-bolshevik who, as head of the Petrogad Garrison, had proposed to end the bolshevik might with violence. This was his first big mistake, as Kornilov was essentially a reactionary and did not intend to follow any slow path to a democratic state. As could have been expected, the two continually clashed over military politics, like Kornilov's plan to militarize the factories for ideal army use.

Eventually, Kornilov was fed up with the moderate policies of Kerensky and staged a coup. He officially announced he demanded the resignation of the Provisional Government and that all power be conferred to the Commander-in-Chief, being him. Kerensky had no choice but to answer by firing him and ordering him back to Petrograd.
This was wat Kornilov had waited for; together with General Krymov he sent troops to take control of Petrograd by force and seize power. This, of course, seriously threatened the position of Kerensky and the Provisional Government in general.

At that time, Kerensky gambled, and lost; his second big mistake. He thought he had no other protection any more, and called upon the bolshevik Red Guards to protect Petrograd. Of course, the bolsheviks only agreed in theory, but Lenin made plans to use this occasion to seize power himself for the Communist Revolution.
Alea iacta est; once started, it could not be undone. The bolsheviks fortified the city, but also sent envoys to the soldiers of Generals Krymov and Kornilov, who then mutinied against their commanders. For the Generals, the game was over at that point, and Krymov committed suicide, while Kornilov was arrested.

Kerensky's last way out was to assume the Commander-in-Chief post himself. Though trying to create a balance of powers by making an alliance between the mensheviks and the old Socialist Revolutionaries, he no longer had authority left, because the bolshevik militia now counted some 25,000 members and the Soviets were in bolshevik hands as well.
On November 7, 1917, he was informed in time that the bolsheviks planned on overthrowing the Provisional Government that day, and he left Petrograd to try and persuade the Russian Army on the Northern and Eastern fronts to rally to his side. That very day the red Guards stormed the Winter Palace and arrested his cabinet, having disposed of the Tsarist family.

Kerensky's loyal army was defeated at Pulkova by the bolsheviks, and Alexander Kerensky himself fled in a car to Finland. The bolsheviks then attempted to stage a Communist coup in Helsinki in January 1918, despite promises to recognize Finland's independence. They were eventually defeated near Viborg by the Finnish under General Mannerheim. Kerensky fled again, this time to London, traditional safe-haven for political refugees from the Continent.

He later moved to Paris, publishing articles opposing the Communists in the Soviet-Union and supporting social-democrat thought, some of which were printed in Russian, mainly aimed at the Russian refugees of which many had come to Paris. When war was imminent in 1939, he attempted to convince the European democracies to intervene in both Germany and the Soviet-Union, perceiving them as an imminent danger to democracy in general. When war broke out over Poland, Alexander Kerensky moved to the United States.

When the Germans, violating the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, invaded the USSR in 1941, he vocally supported American aid to the Russians. He went to work at the Hoover Institute in California.

His literary works, beside many editorials, newspapers and pamphlets, are the Prelude to Bolshevism (1919), the Catastrophe (1927), the Crucifixion of Liberty (1934), and his masterpiece the Kerensky Memoirs: Russia and History's Turning Point (1967).

He died of cancer on June 11, 1970, in New York.

Why "incitement to hate" laws are both morally and legally wrong

2003-08-05T22:07:00.000+02:00

Why "incitement to hate" laws are both morally and legally wrong

Most, if not almost all, people following modern Western politics will agree that both the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and all other comparable nations share about the same ideals of human rights. To acknowledge this, the European Union member states have not only agreed upon a common Constitution recently, but, more importantly, have for several years now accepted jurisdiction of the European Court for Human Rights, which follows guidelines set out by the EU Treaty and the generally accepted Western human rights standards.

With one apparent exception, however. Freedom of speech.
This has always been a difficult issue in European states since 1945, and with the emergence of a united Europe the situation has not improved. The problem is that, despite the fact that freedom of speech is a human right according to all EU law and morality, it is still not granted to all equally, and it is still not respected when the speech involved is not popular or not well-received.

Most European countries nowadays, and I'm sad to say especially the progressive ones in Northeastern Europe, have "hate speech" laws that make it illegal to use speech or writing that could offend minorities or otherwise cause third parties to aggress against such minorities. These laws are obviously made for the nice ideal to protect (potentially) vulnerable minorities from fanatical groups and from hate and smear campaigns by racists and bigots, but nevertheless they are obviously a blatant violation of the idea of freedom of speech.

Now supporters of these laws, and I'm afraid I'll have to admit they are quite commonly accepted in Europe, defend them with the argument that free speech is okay, as long as people do not discriminate others. After all, all reasonable people oppose discrimination, right?

Now the latter may well be true, but the issue with this oft-heard argument is that discrimination is totally irrelevant to freedom of speech cases. The legal definition of discrimination entails that someone makes a selection against a party based on irrelevant properties. I will use the example of a bar owner refusing a black person entry because of his skin color. (That libertarians might argue that it is the economic right of the bar owner to allow anyone in or refusing anyone for his own reasons is a different debate entirely.) The core of this legal definition, and that is something most people, and even respected media sources, are woefully unaware of, is that discrimination must therefore always be an action. With an "action" in the legal sense is meant anything that directly and measurably affects others by way of some decision or lack thereof by one or more parties. That means, to the surprise of many, that speech and forms of expression are not in any way an action, so speech can correspondingly never be discrimination by definition. Let me repeat that for full effect: expression can never be discrimination.

When made aware of this fact most defenders of "hate speech" laws are prepared to accept that, but they will continue with the argument that "freedom of speech is okay, but it should be bound to rules, right? After all, everything is bound to rules, and no extreme of anything ever leads to something good".
The answer to this is that, as all things, freedom of speech is indeed bound to certain rules, but not that any Parliament can for that reason randomly infringe on it. The issue here is that the defenders do not see the fundamental difference between "bound to rules" and "bound to any rules".
Certainly there are boundaries; direct, purposeful threats are illegal, as is the infamous 'yelling 'fire!' in a crowded theatre'. But that does not mean that freedom of speech can suddenly be subjected to content-based regulation, as that is against the core of the freedom of speech: the right to say what you want without a dictatorship, whether of one person, one party or the majority, making that impossible.

The next argument I usually get is that maybe it is indeed a human right to be fully respected, but it can still be regulated in content-based ways; after all, it may conflict with the right not to be insulted, the right to be respected as a human being, etc.
This is usually the most difficult part of the debate, as unfortunately the answer is that there are no such rights, which is something that sometimes leads to the defenders 'giving up on you' or breaking out the ad homs. Nevertheless, it is true and it must be said. No treaty, law or Constitution of any country recognizes any human right "not to be insulted", nor was it any part of any Enlightenment theory or liberal thought. None of the great thinkers and writers that have shaped our modern legal system with the idea of 'human rights' would ever have even considered such a thing.
Now why is this, some ask? That's not hard to figure out if you consider the basis of human rights, that is the idea of "your rights end where mine start". The important part here is that the notion of being "insulted" and similar feelings are things you do to yourself, not others to you. This may sound strange, but the other person is just expressing himself; yóu are the one who decides that it applies to you and that you have to care so much that you feel personally insulted, and yóu are the one who actually bothers to listen. The person expressing himself can not be blamed for the effects of his speech that he has no direct control over. Therefore, limiting freedom of speech for this reason actually only limits the rights of the speaker, and does not benefit the listener's rights.
Something that has to be added to this reasoning is my observation that "aggressive speech" actually has much less effect in cultures where a tradition of freedom of speech exists than in cultures where it can be considered 'new' or even, more dangerously, 'progressive'. The average American follower of politics is not shocked by the latest Ann Coulter rant. In my country, she'd cause an almost unprecedented uproar. The latter produces much more exposure, and so makes it actually more likely that she will attract followers or interested listeners than her one ranting voice between all those other ranting voices in the US does.

After this, the defense of the laws usually falls apart. I've read some use the right to privacy as an argument to support it, which is irrelevant because speech cannot intrude on privacy legally speaking nor practically speaking, as privacy is a search and seizure related right. Another defense used by a person well respected by me was that "human rights are meant to protect people"; this actually sounds rather convincing, but is not true. Human rights are meant to define those legal rights that we consider 'universally granted', i.e. that are granted to everyone even if the local laws do not recognize them. That this is an arguably Eurocentric (or I should say "Occidentocentric", though that sounds stupid) vision is maybe true but not relevant to the debate.

So, in summary, the internal hypocrisy and inconsistency of "hate speech" laws make them completely void in both a moral and legal sense, because the recognized right to freedom of speech and the non-existence of the alleged 'right not to be insulted', combined with the necessity of compelling state interest and non-content based legislation, as well as the irrelevance of discrimination statutes in this debate, clearly make them fall apart when put under rational scrutiny.

On the issue of Gay Marriage

2003-08-03T19:22:00.000+02:00

On the issue of Gay Marriage

When it comes to the issue of gay rights, one of the 'hot topics' most in the news at the moment is the debate over same-sex marriage in the liberal democracies of this world. No one doubts that none of the third world nations or even the second world nations has a liberal tradition strong enough to freely debate and handle such issues, so we will concentrate on the most advanced, free nations of West and East for the moment.

Although most politically skilled people and most of the moderate majority of the population agree that the homosexual minorities in the various nations deserve equal rights to the rest of the population, the exact details of what still constitutes those "rights" and what does not is still controversial to the core. Most would agree on equal protections in the working place; but whether or not that extends itself to the military is in doubt. Most would agree that consensual sex between adults is covered under those rights, but between the different modern nations there is quite some discrepancies as to whether that is a general idea of the populace, to be subject to local legislation, or whether that is an innate right to be protected by the judicial system. The recent Supreme Court case in the United States, Lawrence et al. v. Texas, has resolved this dispute in the US in favor of the latter view, but ten years ago Bowers v. Hardwick still held the former view. The matter of civil unions, marriages and other forms of living together for homosexual couples (or even more than two) is the new big issue.

Let us analyze the precise issue first. In my own country, the Netherlands, and recently in neighbouring Belgium as well, homosexual marriages have been legalized, with full equality to heterosexual marriages in all aspects of the law.
Various states, including but not limited to Denmark, Germany and Canada, have instituted the idea of civil unions, this being about equal to our "registered partnerships"; they grant about the same rights and (fiscal) status, but are neither in name nor in social status equal to marriage. And then we have a multitude of modern nations with no such thing at all, including Greece, Italy, Japan, South Korea and the United States except for the state of Vermont, which has recently under Governor Howard Dean passed a law recognizing civil unions.

Such large discrepancies, even within the usually uniform European Union, about this must mean that there are compelling reasons for both sides, although there is always a truth somewhere. The main problem is that the issue of marriage is irrevocably tied to religious sentiment and the degree that religion, and then I mean Judeo-Christian tradition even though Islam and Hinduism are no more supportive of the idea than they are, dominates the social thought of each nation.

The usual argument of the opponents is that by legalizing gay marriage you are treading on the territory of the churches, as marriage is their invention, so they get to decide what it means and who it includes. This is not a valid argument. First of all, separation of church and state determines that no church nor any consideration of "church issues" may hinder legislation in their actions, insofar as those actions would be impossible because of church rules. Secondly, all legal definitions are made by the laws and the legislation, and therefore also can be changed by those laws and that legislation; so the opponents are basically saying that marriage is now at the moment not extended to same-sex couples, which is either stating the obvious or factually untrue, dependent on the country you live in. Finally, and this is the most important argument against that argument, it is in fact not the case that regulations of marriage are by definition linked to the church, because church marriages are not obligatory by law, nor is it possible to only marry in the church and not for the law. Marriage is a secular thing, that only because of reasons of tradition and religion is often carried out in churches, but it is not the sole domain of church rules.

Some opponents make the weaker argument that it would devalue the status of marriage to expand it to same-sex couples. That is easily refuted; there is simply no proof to assume so, and it can just as well be said that including more people in that ceremony would make it socially more important, not less. Besides, the current rate of divorces in modern nations indicates that the value of marriage is either irrevocably dropping anyway, or people simply don't care about it. Either way, the argument does not hold.

Then we have the issue of the added value of gay marriage; some would say that giving gays civil unions would do just as well, and would avoid the sensitive issue of marriage, "making everybody happy, right?". The answer lies in the fact that, no matter the usefulness or worth of civil unions, denying gay people the right to marry is still discrimination on irrelevant grounds, and therefore not acceptable. In this case, principles supercede pragmatism; it simply will not do to try and avoid the core issue, which is equal rights by proposing a compromise that is not good enough for both parties. Instead of making everyone happy, it makes everyone unhappy. And the issue of gay marriage is just as sensitive to activist gays the other way round as well.

Suffice to say that I know several married same-sex couples, and the marriage ceremony as well as its stability and happiness afterwards were exemplary. Now if only more people in foreign lands were to allow themselves to be convinced by reason and morality, instead of irrational fear for the unknown.

The Icelandic Free State

2003-08-02T15:50:00.000+02:00

(Proto-)libertarianism in action: The Icelandic Free State

As is well known to those with more than a passing interest in modern political theory, libertarianism, i.e. the ideal of an extreme form of "live and let live" with as small a government as possible and as much rights as can be granted without intruding on those of others, including the so-called "victimless crimes", is one of the most compelling and complete theories of the Western world today. Especially in the United States, embodied by the Libertarian Party and libertarian elements in other parties, like Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), and to a much lesser degree in social-democrat Europe, where it is mainly linked to the movement for direct democracy, libertarianism is one of those ideals that can shape not only legislation, but even the way of thinking of that political generation, across the board. As the antithesis to social-democracy, it is popular with all kinds of (fringe) groups for various reasons. Gun lovers favor it because it recognizes a "right to self-defense by all means necessary". The conspiracy theorists love it and hate it, for it means removal of almost all of the bulk of government, but on the other hand it leaves intact those institutions that the tinfoil hat crowd fears most, the military and the secret services. It is popular among rightists for its economic conservatism, while it is popular among left-of-center groups for being socially progressive.

As with "true" communism, anarchism, complete democracy, and similar well-known but to the critical mind most unlikely and untrustworthy utopian thought, libertarianism has so far never been 'tested' in reality. In the modern world, almost all nation-states are either violent dictatorships or violent anarchies, while the increasing number, though still rare, of liberal democracies are almost exclusively either social-democrat or some sort of individualistic christian-democrat powers, the latter ranging from the United States itself to Luxembourg and Switzerland. That leaves us some unbalanced Asian democracies (Japan, South Korea) and a host of pseudo-democratic "give and take" states, like Singapore, Brazil or the Russian Federation.

However, and I now finally come to the point, this is not completely true. Unnoticed by all but a few American, Cold War-based geopolitical strategies, in the North of the Atlantic Ocean, lies the small island country of Iceland. Nowadays it is a relatively wealthy modern state, recently known for its popular music groups and the issue of its dependence on American soldiers for its defense (the mentioned geopolitical strategy), whose main problem is an ever-decreasing amount of inhabitants, which at the moment count a mere 300.000.

But because of its isolated position in the world, Iceland has a most fascinating history. In early times, the island was completely uninhabited, and the only natural mammals that lived there were the arctic fox and the field mouse, and an occasional polar bear arriving from Greenland. In the 8th and 9th centuries AD some Irish monks, seeking solitude, lived as hermites in little huts on the island. But the country only really started in around 900 AD, when Norwegian farmers, embittered over the way the Norwegian King Harald Fairhair ignored the age-old rules of the free farmers, levying taxes on freemen and instating the rule that state ownership should supercede private ownership, which meant that the King would have authority over the farms and fields that had been family posessions of the farmers for ages.

These Norwegian free farmers encountered a completely empty land, except for the occasional monk, whom they quickly evicted. These landnámsmenn divided the land between them, and settled there. Soon, a most interesting social order was formed. With the instating of the Althing in 930 at the end of the landnám, a sort of proto-libertarian state was founded, that would last until the end of the fourteenth century.

In what ways could such an old, and essentially barbarian, culture be libertarian, you ask? The main answer lies in the fact that, because of the hostile geography of the island, no single person had the power to actually reign over the others.
The useful farmlands were spread far apart, and neighbouring farm-families lived many a mile from each other. Because of the rocky land only the famous small Icelandic horses could be used, and no form of wheeled transport was possible.

To allow for some cooperation in difficult times (which occured rather frequently) in a difficult country, a natural system formed. The free farmers, called bændr, chose from among themselves for each district goðar (chieftains) for the goðorð of each district of the country. These goðar (multiple could share a single goðorð) represented the interests of their own group of farmer families. A free farmer associated with a certain goði (singular) was one of his thingmenn. Now such a chieftain did not, as in feudal societies, wield complete power over his thingmenn. Far from it; having no standing army or compelling power of his own, he could only lead by the consent of his followers. Admittedly, the office of goði was usually hereditary, but it could be shared, gifted, bought or relinquished.

The most interesting, and the most appealing to libertarians with some sense of fantasy, aspect of the Icelandic Free State was the ingenious legal and legislative system.
In 960 the Althing agreed upon something that can very well be seen as the earliest Constitution known to man.
The country was divided into quarters, and each quarter had three springtime assemblies for legal dealings, known as várthing. In this very local várthing, the chieftains of the three goðorð of each várthing district presided, and all their allied thingmenn were by law obliged to attend. All court cases that could not have been settled out of court by that time to the honor of all parties, were brought to the assembly. The goði appointed twelve (!) bændr to serve as a jury for each case, and had no further influence over the trial; they were often themselves very active in litigation on these occasions. Important other issues at the springtime assemblies were determining the standards for goods (due to a lack of import of valuable metals, they had no coinage to speak of; therefore, other barter standards had to be set), and dealing with debts and trade issues. A libertarian aspect of this is that all these things, even the official standards, were determined locally, and affected only those that had decided on them.

In autumn, there was another assembly, the leið. It had no legislative or judicial function, but it was an administrative meeting for each individual goði. Its main use was, besides making the laws, enacted at the várthing, officially public, the formal registration of the thingmenn of each goði, thereby determining who had defected to another side and who had joined that particular leader. This was more or less the equivalent of an approval rating poll.

At the core of the "great village", as the Free State is often called, lay the Althing. This was the annual meeting of all goðar with their following, at the meeting site of Thingvöllr (the Meeting Plain) in the southwest (near what is now Reykjavik), which was split in two by the Axe river or Öxára. Because everyone of importance and everyone who depended on them, either politically or economically - all peddlers and tradesmen worth their salt came to the Althing - appeared, for the duration of the Althing it became the national capital.
The most important happening was, of course, the lögrétta, the law meeting. There, all goði, more or less acting as representatives of their districts, enacted laws (and the exemptions), conducted foreign policy (very rare), and reviewed old laws and rulings. The Althing was always public and held in the open air, with benches divided in three rows. On the middle row, the goði sat, and behind and in front of each was an advisor. Those advisors could function as lobbyists for local or special interests with the goði, giving the political process even more of a libertarian outlook.
The lögrétta elected among themselves for three years a Speaker, known as the lögsögumaðr, which was the only national official of the country; there was no other national government. The duty of the lögsögumaðr was not only to preside over the lögrétta, and publicly declare all laws passed, but also to know the law (he had to be able to recite one-third of all the law from memory), in cases of dispute. He had several legal advisors to help him with this. He gained nothing but honor and prestige from this position; in true libertarian fashion, he was no more than a citizen serving as an official, even to the point of getting no reimbursement for his trouble. Their status was much like the Consuls of the Roman Empire; purely administrative and formal, with only the honor of having the years being named by their reign.
There was also a supreme goði, called the allsherjargoði, but his only official duty was hallowing the Althing at the opening, and determining the official Althing area.

The court system was also crucial to the functioning of the Free State. The Constitution of 960 prescribed that eacht quarter of the country would have one court at the Althing. These served both as courts for important cases, as appelate courts for deadlocked cases at a local várthing. As in most societies with the local area being of foremost importance and with few people per district, many cases were settled privately out of court. But the system was well-suited to handle difficult cases: each goði of full power (out of 36) nominated a judge to the court, and the judges were then by lot appointed to the different quarter courts. That way, each court had judges from all parts of the country, securing a form of impartiality. There was also a separate session to lay claims against the impartiality of the judges, for reasons like kinship. Because this led to free farmers being interested in the affairs of other quarters than their own (for they could be appointed to rule on cases there), a form of national jurisprudence and handling of law was established, while at the same time maintaining the proto-libertarian bottom-heavy structure.

These cases were all subject to public scrutiny, and had to be decided almost unanimously. If six or more judges dissented on a certain case, the different groups of judges each delivered a different verdict to the parties; this had no official meaning though besides determining legal deadlock, and the case was adjourned for an appeals court instated later, called the Fifth Court. This functioned more or less as the Supreme Court, having the final word in difficult and sensitive cases. Even here though, the judges were still appointed bændr.
Because there were no requirements of legal expertise to become a judge, it was very important to have people of influence at your side, as well as knowing the law. One of the most important function of goðar was speaking on behalf of their thingmenn in court cases, and goðar were actually more respected for legal knowledge and winning cases than for strength. One of the most respected chieftains of the sagas was a certain Mord, who was quite an old man, but a great legal mind; his downfall eventually was his greed, not lack of physical strength. For the 10th Century AD, this is quite an accomplishment of civilization, and the only justice system even coming close to rivalling the advanced Chinese law system for centuries.

Eventually, the Icelandic Free State had to come to an end, as all things pass. At the end of the 13th Century, the Norwegian Kings had grown so much in power that Iceland was incorporated into their realm; at first as an autonomous state only formally under their rule, but under the Gámli Sáttmali the Icelandic free farmers swore allegiance to the King personally, and gradually the old system, based on the tradition following the landnám, died out, being replaced by the well-known medieval system of feudalism and church power.

(For those interested in the subject, read Viking Age Iceland by Jesse Byock. It has my full recommendation, whatever that is worth.)