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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35339 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Free market capitalism and identity

Today I spent some time reading about Georgia Meloni and watching some of her speeches, such as this one. She’s charismatic, but being a rootless global laissez-faire capitalist I am of course not thrilled; anyway, I’d like to offer my perspective on some of the issues raised in her speeches.

It is a natural state of affairs that the governments, by leveraging their capacity for violence, have an enormous power over their citizens and by extension on their businesses; all private organizations are by default subservient to the State.

"Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State" — Benito Mussolini

Diverting from such an arrangement is not trivial. Indeed, how do you stop the people who have, pretty much by definition, overwhelming firepower from using it to take your stuff? One way are the democratic institutions — things like the separation of powers, checks and balances, key positions being elected and therefore held at least somewhat accountable, and so on. All of that works to an extent, but these things are fragile and often not really sufficient.

The other pillar of limiting the power of the govts to control and loot private enterprise, is the competition between different countries. The states themselves can be seen as providers of a certain service — you pay the taxes, and in return get useful things like personal asset protection, arbitrage, infrastructure and so on. As such they are also subject to the market forces. If there are multiple independent offers, and you are free to choose any of them, then in fact you are likely to find a fair deal.

Therefore, in order for the free world to exist it must be possible to change your country at will. It’s easy to see that nationalism runs contrary to this goal. If you only ever can be accepted in one country, if you can only be permitted to run important businesses or organisations in the country of your birth; and doomed to be an irrelevant outsider in all others — well, then your government has you by the balls — you have no real negotiating position with the state.

This reasoning can be extrapolated to other kinds of identity Meloni mentions, to an extent, although of course the most important one of them by far is the national identity. But I disagree that the capitalist’s goal is to destroy identities. It is only necessary for them to be made interchangeable.

If anything capitalism served to amplify and increase the adoption of certain cultural elements, think the Italian cuisine or the Japanese animation. I know what you’re going to say — that it’s not real, it’s superficial, it’s commoditized and the real national identity is something else entirely. Well, it is. The real national idea, the one you’re left with when the music stops, is always to force you to surrender everything you have to the state and to go die in the trenches for no good reason, ostensibly as a sacrifice to your country. Perhaps it’s for the best if we abandon that.

There's a third pillar of Sovereign accountability, and that's intra-national political competition. The nationalist conception of the high and the low versus the middle paints a more historical picture of balance of power than Enlightenment morality and constitutionalism:

The “Jouvenelian model” Bond is referring to, and which his book is opposing to the liberal model, starts from the assumption that “there is in every society a centre of control” (24). What Bond aims to show in his book is that political reality is generated by the struggle of final power centers against intermediate power centers which interfere with the governing imperatives as determined by the final center. Familiar examples would be a medieval king contending with the nobility as he attempts to levy taxes to prosecute a war or some other project; or mid-20th century attempts on the part of America’s federal government to assimilate the recalcitrant Southern states into a fully modern, liberal order...

... all the concepts of liberalism—“equality,” “sovereignty,” the “individual,” “human rights,” and so on—are produced, not by moral advances, theoretical or philosophical inquiries, or “bottom-up” revolts of the oppressed, but, rather, by powerful actors within or close to the heights of state power levying powerless groups against institutions such as the Church, the aristocracy, the paternal authority of the family and, more recently, institutions maintaining law and order, education, business, dependent states, and more

In other words, the rhetoric of Free Market Capitalism, anti-nationalism, and anti-racism, are not some morla enlightenment brought about by Progress. They are the managerial tact of American empire. The move to strike nationalist sentiment is not moral enlightenment reached by individuals freely entering a social contract. It's a political strategy being employed by power actors.

Separate question, but:

What’s going on with that website?

It’s an online journal affiliated with UCLA. There’s an apparent interest in, or at least tolerance for, “other contemporary writers thinking outside of liberal terms.” This particular article was determined to parrot various reactionary talking points. I sampled a few previous issues, most of which were less strident (though it was interesting seeing the phrase “sexual market” in 2012). Each and every article I checked cited one or more works by Eric Gans, the editor.

A brief trawl of Wikipedia suggests that Anthropoetics seems to be the vehicle for “generative anthropology,” the editor’s pet field of postmodernism. The specifics of this theory blur the lines between historical speculation and Christian apologetics. I find it challenging to tell where the rhetorical flourishes end and the actual arguments begin.

Academia truly is a foreign country.

I used to come across Gans (and people quoting him) a fair bit back when I was still regularly arguing with atheists on the internet. He's an odd duck who just goes to show that you can in fact be a conservative in academia so long as you are an atheist and a post modernist, who endorses critical theory, and consistently votes for democrats. Of course for those outside academia the question arises of whether someone who ticks all those boxes is really "conservative" in any meaningful sense.

Accountability via internecine conflict strikes me as historically accurate but inherently unstable. If defecting is the corrective mechanism, such a society is going to find itself in a defect-defect equilibrium. Presumably, at that point, the other two pillars of accountability come in and clean up. That’s cold comfort.

The second issue is removal of this pillar. There’s no guarantee that a cohesive opposition forms to a “final” power center. Modern China is perhaps a good example. Xi certainly gets things done; one wonders how accountable or constrained he actually is.

Democracy has enjoyed a competitive advantage over the last few centuries because it makes an attempt to address both of these concerns. Voting out the government is a coop-coop resolution to a given dilemma and imposes fewer costs than the defect-defect option. And substituting “consent of the governed” for “consent of the nobles” changes the dynamics of the alternate power centers.

Democracy has enjoyed a competitive advantage over the last few centuries because it makes an attempt to address both of these concerns.

That's the key insight. That liberalism has had a competitive advantage in the centralization of power is the reason it is dominant. Not because of flimsy moral premises, like the notion that the individual precedes the web of social obligations, or that there are inalienable "human rights." Those notions and self-justifications are themselves byproducts of these power struggles; such as the colonial subsidiary struggle against the former centers of Power.

We can move from a Whig view of history, from the view of Liberalism as an emergent moral enlightenment in which primordial truths were discovered, to a post-liberal model which recognizes that liberalism was an innovation in the centralization and organization of power.

Understanding liberal ideology as a set of competitive advantages is fundamentally different than understanding it as a moral Enlightenment. It's true that those are not mutually exclusive, but with this model the former is all that matters. Liberal moral presuppositions, like individual will preceding social order, are flimsy and ahistorical.

Amazing every word of what you just said is wrong.

  • -19

You should probably explain why instead of just quipping your way out of addressing James Burnham and contemporary elite theory at large.

Well the short answer is I'm not a Marxist and that I believe that the whole field of "generative anthropology" is for all intents and purposes bunk. The desire to reduce the entire span of human behavior to originating scene governed by a simple equation is at best futile, and at worst misguided if not outright evil. In practice it's mostly just intellectual types going on about how a certain quirk of some language proves some Marxist talking point.

Accordingly I put about as much stock in it as I do dialectical materialism and its practitioners, or I would a joint lecture from Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein about the importance of fighting "rape culture".

The long answer is probably a 10,000 word post in itself.

This is a bunch of nonsense. Pragmatic political science making falsifiable predictions has nothing to do with the origin of the word. And insofar as it does all of the scholarship of the humanities including history, economics and psychology are subject to your criticism.

The long answer is probably a 10,000 word post in itself.

I mean it is, but given you're proposing to throw out every analysis of power relationships since Machiavelli in the same bin as Marxism on the grounds that the object is just too complicated and irreducible you're going to have to make a more convincing argument than saying De Jouvenel is self serving, even as his analysis destroys much of the liberal assumptions he ostensibly holds dear.

I find it weird to accuse a school of thought that includes people with such dissimilar political views as Pareto, Mosca and Schmitt of being mere ideological vehicle. Surely if we take your analogy, that would amount to holding a lecture that included both Harvey Weinstein, Valerie Solanas and the Pope.

And what then would the lecture be about that they'd agree on if not the structure of relationships between the sexes in a purely descriptive sense.

No what it sounds like to me is that you'd really like to believe in your own particular idealism and that shattering it into object level power politics must be defended against for reasons that are beyond rationality.

You seem to be conflating the specific belief in generative anthropology with faith in the wider fields of anthropology and social science.

Granted, this is a conflation that the advocates of generative anthropology encourage, but I see no contradiction in believing that Machiavelli and Pareto have important things to teach us while simultaneously condemning post-modernism and believing that Eric Gans is full of shit.

Explain how elite theory is generative anthropology then? You haven't explained that and yet you seem to be dismissing Burnham on those grounds.

Okay, I want to see that post. Flipping through the GA Wikipedia and a couple articles was surreal. It really raises some questions about the commonly asserted leftist monopoly on academia.

The desire to reduce the entire span of human behavior to originating scene governed by a simple equation is at best futile

Liberalism isn't guilty of this? Liberalism presupposes an ahistorical "state of nature" from which individuals consented to Social Order in order to protect their rights that are said to come from God.

The alternative view is that the social order precedes the individual, and that individual consciousness is and always has been inherited from the social order, and that rights are a consequence of the social order rather than a moral justification for its existence. That strikes me as much less hand-waving than the former story.

It also doesn't restrict these power conflicts to material conditions. Things like identity and race matter as much and often weigh more than material conditions. Liberalism is closer to Marxism in its emphasis on material conditions and de-emphasis of identity and race in comparison to nationalism.

Liberalism isn't guilty of this?

Perhaps you ought to clarify what you mean by "Liberalism" in this context, because at first glance I'd say the answer is "no". Further more I'd point out disagreement on the historicity and precise nature of "the state of nature", along with everything that implies, is at the core of the divide between the classical right and the classical left along with it's various successor ideologies (Marxism, Progressivism, Post-Modernism, Et Al).

I have long since learned, as a measure of elementary hygiene, to be on guard when anyone quotes The Last Jedi.

What makes you think I'm quoting Mark Hamill and not Humphrey Bogart?

Edit: To be fair, I know that I'm in the minority here in terms of age, and I know where the immediate association with that line lies.

Touché!

EDIT: But that makes your comeback all the better!

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