Realism, history and politics

The ancients, who were our betters and nearer the gods than we are, handed down the tradition, that whatever things are said to be are composed of one and many, and have the finite and infinite implanted in them: seeing, then, that such is the order of the world, we too ought in every enquiry to begin by laying down one idea of that which is the subject of enquiry; this unity we shall find in everything. Having found it, we may next proceed to look for two, if there be two, or, if not, then for three or some other number, subdividing each of these units, until at last the unity with which we began is seen not only to be one and many and infinite, but also a definite number; the infinite must not be suffered to approach the many until the entire number of the species intermediate between unity and infinity has been discovered—then, and not till then, we may rest from division, and without further troubling ourselves about the endless individuals may allow them to drop into infinity. This, as I was saying, is the way of considering and learning and teaching one another, which the gods have handed down to us. But the wise men of our time are either too quick or too slow in conceiving plurality in unity. Having no method, they make their one and many anyhow, and from unity pass at once to infinity; the intermediate steps never occur to them. And this, I repeat, is what makes the difference between the mere art of disputation and true dialectic.

　　 - Socrates, Philebus

This passage from Plato’s Philebus was brought to mind by a couple of conversations I had been party to on Facebook recently – only one of which was on the topic of colonialism. The problem with modern discussions of colonialism (among other historical phenomena needing critique), that I can tell, is that they vacillate between two mutually-irreconcilable and incommensurate poles, which themselves nonetheless exist in a strange kind of dialectic with each other. The first is the one of moral outrage – the idea that colonialism was a horrific evil (which it was), and that any effort to differentiate or distinguish between different forms of colonialism is an attempt to muddy the issue or to exculpate oneself wrongly from the institutions which resulted. The second one is one which pretends to understand the issue, but which actually does exculpate an involved historical figure by claiming – without any further reference to the context – that he or she was a ‘product of his time’.

Actually, the conversation which brought this issue to mind was a discussion of Jehan Cauvin, in the wake of a rather tone-deaf article by Calvinist author Marilynne Robinson attempting clumsily to portray Cauvin’s Geneva as some kind of enlightened proto-Scandinavian welfare state, and Cauvin himself as a jolly French liberal humanist and democrat. Contrarianism can be charming, but not when it comes at the cost of historical fact. I pointed out that the Consistory which handed down totalitarian repressions, tortures and death sentences with relative abandon was largely the work of Cauvin himself, and backed up my argument with evidence drawn from Geneva’s own judicial records. The response, tellingly, was that Cauvin was a product of his time, and that similar tortures and executions were carried out in France and Russia.

Leaving aside the historical fact, here, that even though corporal punishment was used often, execution was vanishingly rare in Muscovite Russia until after the reign of Peter the Great, there is still a distinction that needs to be made. Cauvin’s Geneva was demonstrably worse in the torture-and-executions regard, even than nearby Zürich. In just seventeen years, Cauvin’s Geneva – one city of about 10,000 people – executed 139 – an average of over eight executions per year. This may be compared with the record of the canton of Zürich with over 73,000 people, in which 574 executions were held in the entire sixteenth century, an average of under six executions per year in the entire county. Cauvin’s Geneva was actually worse than the prevailing norms when compared with other examples from its own time and space. These drastic differences in degree should hint to us that it’s simply not enough to excuse the very real evils for which Cauvin was directly responsible, by simply making him a ‘product of his time’ and submerging him and his ideas both in the misleading philosophical unity of his historical epoch.

Likewise, cover is given if we dismiss the Europe of the Reformation and the Renaissance as characterised by a false infinity of iniquity. The initial, lazy slacktivist overreaction which refuses to draw distinctions between different kinds of ‘social evil’ – different kinds of slavery, different kinds of colonialism, different kinds of misogyny – discredits itself by rebelling against our moral intuitions that qualitative differences exist between different circumstances and environments: the same intuitions to which Socrates alluded in Philebus. We miss highly significant differences when we absolutise a particular kind of evil, and we discount these differences altogether when we relativise evils under the guise of ‘historical progression’. As I was arguing earlier, following the labour historian Frank Tannenbaum’s book Slave and Citizen, slavery in Anglo-America was a demonstrably crueler institution than it was in Latin America. In Latin America, slavery was still slavery – and attended by all of the brutalities and inhumanities that characterised slavery in the former British colonies. But, as Dr Tannenbaum carefully notes, manumission was nowhere near as difficult in Brazil and in New Spain as it was in North America; freedmen were treated with full legal dignity; and ‘miscegenation’ was not frowned upon at all.

If we’re going to find a way out of the current war between these emotivist factions in our politics, both the identitarian left and the identitarian right, then that way out needs to find a way to draw distinctions, make meaningful comparisons and create apposite analogies that can situate and orient us realistically within our historical moment. The aim of Socrates and Protarchos in the Philebus was to seek out and define ‘the good’ for the human person; here we are using some of the same insights to sort between evils. But the end goal is the same. Politics is about finding and implementing a course of action which moves us toward the good. Dithering between the poles of false unity and false infinity does not get us there.

Pointless video post – ‘Redemption’ by Queensrÿche (with Todd La Torre) and ‘Anyone Can Be a Hero’ by Crystal Ball

After one of the messier, more dramatic and litigious of band break-ups in 2012 (enough Blabbermouth fodder to make Tarja’s departure from Nightwish look like a downright friendly tiff by comparison), two different Queensrÿches showed up to produce two duelling album releases. It’s brutally clear who won that shootout, and it wasn’t the quicker draw. The Queensrÿche featuring three-fifths of the old crew plus Parker Lundgren and Todd La Torre cleaned house with a short and punchy release featuring some solidly retro power-metal offerings like ‘Redemption’ above. The catchy, wailing chorus line comes straight off their early work, too, as though Todd is channelling the Tate of 30 years ago. The lyrics are also quite noteworthy; Geoff Tate’s having left the band on the worst of possible terms hasn’t made the ‘Rÿche any less pissed-off at big media and big business, it seems. Definitely some shades of Operation: Mindcrime here, and not just in the twin-guitar riff attacks. Reminds me why I fell in love with the ‘Rÿche in the first place. Search and you’ll find the answer, indeed!

Speaking of catchy, Swiss eurockers Crystal Ball have serendipitously surfaced on my sonar, so to speak. This is some truly fine power-tinged hard rock, and hell if their new guy Steve Mageney doesn’t sound like the love child of Andi Deris and Thomas Laasch (just enough grit to keep things interesting) rocking out to an accompaniment who all clearly listened to ‘The Final Countdown’ one or fifty too many times. I say this with the greatest affection, by the way. ‘Anyone Can Be a Hero’ is brilliant in its elegant simplicity, an upbeat ‘80’s-style stand-up-and-be-counted arena-rock anthem that simply doesn’t get old. Dawnbreaker, from whence this song comes, is a bit more diverse in its sound, and crosses over into power metal and even straight-up ACCEPT-style ADH at several points, but they’re at their best when they stick to their hair-metal guns, cheese and all, as here. And no, I won’t be getting that haircut; thanks for asking.

Pointless video post - ‘My Prophecy’ by Pertness

The Swiss band Pertness is a recent serendipitous discovery of mine. From the album art you might be forgiven for thinking they were a light-in-the-pants keyboard-laden flower metal band, but actually they sport a blend of power, heavy, melodeath, Viking and folk metal which is unrelenting in its sheer power, and a vocalist who reminds me somewhat of Joakim Brodén of Sabaton. They mostly tend to stick to fantastic, epic and folksy themes, but their last album, From the Beginning to the End (2010), features some social critique and environmental concern as well. Their next album, Frozen Time, should be coming out later this year; I am certainly looking forward to it. Enjoy, folks!

WaPo: Chinese liberals fail history

In a small village in Switzerland which serves as host to an organisation dedicated solely to the interests of the increasingly detached (in every possible sense of the word) global financial and economic elites, the Chinese ‘reform’ clique present (including Hu Shuli and Xu Xiaonian) expressed some very… shall we say naïve views of the history of the nation a ways north of them, as well as of their own. They attempted to paint their regime as inherently violent and unstable by casting the roots of their government back to… Otto von Bismarck.

Yes, you read that right. The very same Otto who under his chancellorship dedicated himself to picking up the pieces of the Concert of Europe which had been scattered in the revolutions of 1848 (and as a result gave Europe 20 years of peace), even to the point of his being hounded out of office by a militarist young Kaiser Wilhelm II; the very same Otto who devoted himself to building a social order which could resist both the extremes of laisser-faire economic liberalism and totalitarian communism (and made enemies of the partizans of both ideologies); the very same Otto who, in the effort to do so, built up a very enviable welfare state and an increasingly prosperous Germany in the attempt to bridge class strife and contain the extremes of German and Slavic hypernationalism. Okay, perhaps there are quite a few parallels to be made here, but the Chinese liberals here are engaging in some very specious history in order to advance their own questionable ideology at home.

State capitalism is not something new. When Bismarck invented this idea in 1870 it gave Germany impressive performance over the main superpower of the time, Great Britain… But 20 years later, it was the First World War.

That’s right, Xu Xiaonian apparently blames Otto von Bismarck for the First World War, in spite of the fact that the First World War was the direct result of the ‘badly brought-up boy’ responsible for von Bismarck’s resignation disregarding practically all of the careful, measured foreign policy advice given to him by von Bismarck and treading on various British and Russian toes in the process. Oh, and some South Slavic assassin might have had something to do with it, too. But that’s actually small potatoes to what comes before it.

Bismarck as the inventor of state capitalism? And what was that East India Company whatsit that the British were on about, eh? A capital venture chartered by said superpower, I believe, in 1599, and which was administered directly by the British government after the passage of the Regulating Act of 1773. And this doesn’t count as state capitalism… how, again? But let’s not mind that, let’s move on to this notion that Bismarck had ‘invented’ an ‘idea’ that had already been fully put into practice and had already met with astounding success a hundred years before he assumed the Chancellorship. What did Bismarck have to do with this idea? Oh, that’s right, he erected tariffs to help shelter domestic industries in the wake of a huge stock-market crash in Vienna. Even worse, he created the first welfare, pension and universal health care systems in Europe. And Heaven forbid that we should associate this terrible, terrible concept of ‘state capitalism’ with that Anglo-American golden age of imperialism colonial rapine free trade that brought us John Locke and Adam Smith! No, no, we must associate it with those evil protectionist Germans with their welfare laws, led by the big scary Hun with the big scary moustache. And then, the inevitable invocation of Almighty Godwin:

Even Nazism was a form of state capitalism, and what the Third Reich brought to the world we all know.

Because remember children, erecting tariffs to protect fledgling and vulnerable industries and providing a safety net for workers and retirees is every bit as bad as rounding millions of Jews into death camps, gassing them and tossing them into ovens. And anyone who tells you otherwise is a commie and a fascist. It’s amazing how much sheer Goldberg-style wingnuttery a Chinese econ professor can pack into just three lines of speech; and the fact that his audience was apparently receptive to such rubbish does not speak well either of their collective intelligence or their honesty.

Now, let me be clear. State capitalism - actual state capitalism, with government providing shelter to big rentier corporations and dominating the economic playing field with anti-competitive regulatory measures - is not an admirable thing. That the People’s Republic of China is still, to a great extent, a state-capitalist society is beyond question; but the comparisons with Bismarck’s Germany are facile at best. There is no safety net for labour in China: no welfare, no pensions, no public health care plan, no legal unions outside the state-run one. Such apparently trivial matters are clearly the last thing on these self-styled reformers’ minds, except insofar as such pesky measures might mean raising the tax rates on the sorts of people they represent (those who might take holidays in Davos, for example). And China’s economic protections are of a most peculiar sort: they have been somewhat (and understandably) wary of unhindered foreign direct investment over the past fifteen years or so, but their development model does not appear averse to manufacturing for foreign-owned industries as eagerly as they manufacture for domestic ones. In the terms of geopolitics and foreign relations, some Chinese intellectuals may have a fascination with Bismarck and may even fancy themselves as taking his queues, but this is a case study in how every analogy has its limitations.

One country, many nations?

Colin Woodard, via Dave Brockington. I’m pretty much in full agreement with Mr Brockington on this one; this is an immensely interesting map and a thesis which looks, on its face, to be intuitively convincing. I share Mr Brockington’s concerns, however, that the division of the United States into its cultural regions rather discounts the impact of successive waves of immigrants, and furthermore appears slightly deterministic (which seems to be somewhat the wrong attitude to take, particularly when speaking of phenomena like the Tea Party).

Being fully cognisant of the fact that the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’, my own family’s cultural affiliation appears notoriously difficult to pin down. The Coopers were originally Pennsylvania Quakers (authentic Midlanders), before the War of American Independence forced my own branch of the family to migrate into the Deep South, where they stayed until two generations ago, when my grandfather relocated first to Providence, Rhode Island (deepest, darkest Yankeedom) and then to Arlington, Virginia (Tidewater), where my aunt and my father were born and raised. The Doanes, on the other hand, are Yankees through and through – but they don’t fit Mr Woodard’s Weberian ‘ideal type’ at all. Rather than being patrician, Puritan social engineers, they have been and are much more similar in temperament to the Midland ideal type: Methodist and broad-church to a fault with a very strong sense of family and place, my grandfather is a dairy farmer who distrusts big government and big religion as much as he distrusts big business. Somewhat oddly, my own ‘red Tory’ political, religious and cultural attitudes appear vaguely to be those of a High-Church or Catholic Tidewaterman (though I was raised in Madison, Wisconsin – which, according to Mr Woodard’s reckoning, is a Yankee stronghold).

Which brings me to another point. The religious culture of the Midwest is indeed heavily Protestant, but the Calvinist legacy, if it ever existed there, has long since faded to the faintest echo (except possibly in Western Michigan, but there it survived due to Dutch Reformed immigrants, not Puritans of Scotch or English extraction). The culture of the Great Lakes states has been far more closely shaped by immigrants from Central, Eastern and Northern Europe (note the preponderance of German, Swiss and Finnish culture still lingering around places like Stoughton, New Glarus and the mining towns of northern Wisconsin, or the Norwegian culture stretching all across Minnesota), who share in the anarchistic and egalitarian tendencies of their forebears, who fled from their home countries largely during the mid-1800’s (a tumultuous time in Europe). Also (applying Mr Woodard’s implicit assumptions regarding the formation and character of these cultural blocs), if Upper Canada resembles the Midlands at all, it is more likely than not an accidental resemblance, due to the constitutionally-moderate, anti-slavery and communitarian leanings of the United Empire Loyalists who settled there in the wake of the War of American Independence.

I’m not particularly sanguine, either, on a.) the intractability of the Tidewater region in its historical alliance with the Deep South, or on b.) the ease with which El Norte can be comfortably brought into the modern American progressive fold alongside, say, the New Netherlanders. During the Civil War, the High Church Episcopalians and the Catholics of the Coastal border states were heavily divided on the issue of slavery, which really was dying out, particularly in the large cities (which had begun to resemble the economy of the North). Maryland was home to one of the largest populations of freedmen in the entire country, although the vestiges of slavery lingered through the Civil War. Since then, in spite of occasional bouts of Confederate nostalgia, Northern Virginia and the Research Triangle in North Carolina have made them key swing states in recent elections (both having gone to President Obama in 2008). Since the party realignment in the wake of Civil Rights, also, both Delaware and Maryland have been Democratic strongholds.

Regarding El Norte, Catholicism runs very deep within the Hispanic and Southwest American Indian cultural template (although said Catholicism is also quite often very Low-Church, even Charismatic in flavour), and although Democratic candidates have found common ground with them on issues of immigration, they remain very culturally conservative, overwhelmingly pro-life and opposed to same-sex marriage. The faith of the average norteno is still a faith which is (in the words of Mr Lindsay) characterised by ‘compassion for the poor, disgust at wars of aggression, revulsion at the lying of countries into such wars and at gargantuan personal profiteering from them, hostility to drugs and to sexual promiscuity’.

Still, the central thesis is immensely thought-provoking, and I agree with Mr Brockington that the quibbles with Mr Woodard’s thesis do not overshadow his ability to tell an intuitively-convincing tale; and that what remains is to test his model empirically.

Pointless video post - ‘Inis Mona’ by Eluveitie

Week’s not complete without a Pointless video post, even with limited access from Beijing! Getting more and more into folk metal recently; I find I enjoy the blend of Gothenburg / Swedish death metal with folk instrumentation, the way Ego Fall [颠覆M] does it with traditional Chinese and Mongolian instruments. Eluveitie’s ‘Inis Mona’ is a sterling example of this blend, with traditional Swiss folk instruments like the uilleann, the bagpipes and the hurdy-gurdy (yes, you read that right); it’s amazing how a song can be both this darkly aggressive and this beautiful all at once. Enjoy, peoples!