Gedachten
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Sunday, April 30, 2006
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.
Monday, March 20, 2006
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.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
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.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
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)
Sunday, December 04, 2005
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.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
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.
Saturday, October 01, 2005
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.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
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.
