[Peace-discuss] Rohn Koester's suggestion

[Michael Gaiuranos]

Hi Carl:

Thanks for the reply. Before adding more, I want to emphasize that the
purpose in my responding was in what I perceive as the "call for
suggestions" from people who, for various reasons, can't or won't make it
to meetings. Hence, I am advocating for the kind of plurality that the
Jains (and Jung), for instance, advocate and that Berlin (in Russian
Thinkers) notes has historically been very difficult for humans and human
societies to maintain. This is not just for "humanitarian" reasons: the
variety present in such a plurality ultimately proves more creative, more
strategic, and more political WHEN the group in question can abide by the
surface and irreconcilable differences that such plurality presupposes. If
all I'm doing is cluttering up various list-servs with essentially a
non-public conversation, it'd be better to shift to that domain.

Summary: [1] the ascription of a single "ultimate desire" to people (be
that freedom, solidarity, understanding, or universality) overgeneralizes
the ultimate desire of one group to the detriment of all other groups;
whether this plays out socially between men and women (as different groups)
or through groups of people (that contain men and women alike) is of
secondary importance.

[2] Whatever the merits, internal logic, and moral exhortations of
Humboldt's argument (as you have presented it), it leaves unaddressed those
cases where one's SELF-constrained choices (to limit one's freedom) fails
or refuses to acknowledge SOCIALLY-constrained obligations. Where these
socially-constrained obligations get unmet I'm calling irresponsibility. We
can assume, with legitimate optimism, that the great mass of men will want
to freely choose even those social obligations as their own (i.e., it may
be a social injunction that I murder no one, and if I take up that
injunction it is because my self accepts that to be worthy of assent to),
even where women are concerned, but this offers no mechanism (except a
cynical insistence on self-interest) to prevent men (or anyone) from choose
not to be constrained by those things that are truly socially worth
keeping. It also means that culture generally will not necessarily adopt a
moral attitude toward neighboring cultures (internal or external).

[3] Anachronistically torturing the Ten Commandments into an anarchist
manifesto unnecessarily LIMITS the range of any manifesto we might derive
by that process. Moreover, the liberation that followed from the exodus
required genocide for its implementation; any liberation as an exodus from
capitalism that requires genocide is not desirable, if only because we must
perforce be the victims of that genocide.

============================================

And now, in more detail:

[1] With regard to exclusive or non-exclusive language, first of all my
emphasis was not a critique of the use of the word "man". Rather, I am
saying exactly the opposite of what you propose, because it may be the case
(that is, I suspect it's very likely) that while it's likely accurate to
say that for many men his "...central attribute is his freedom," I won't
assume that for all women that their central attribute is (a desire for
freedom). But more than this, I'm not entirely comfortable or on-board with
insisting on a gender distinction of this--although one can locate plenty
of (admittedly only partial) cultural phenomena to support such a
distinction. Rather, I think there are many people (male and female alike)
who desire freedom (the so-called self-determination) as a central
attribute and others (male and female alike) who desire relationship (what
I called nonself-determination) as well. Still others, male and female,
could care less about this and are interested in abstracting a systematic
explanation for the world while still others (male and female alike) who
assert a mystical truth that makes us all into one. I'm not offering these
categories with sufficient distinction nor with necessary insistence, other
than to say that something like these irreconcilable differences of opinion
do exist and confront one another culturally. So, if I accept a dubious
gendered distinction between men (who want freedom, i.e., the right to
freedom from determination) and women (who want the determination, i.e.,
the right to determine their freedoms), then the "take away" point in all
of that is the irreconcilable and incommensurable value-systems involved in
that. Collapsing the gendered distinction of man and woman into "human
being" erases this into a weak (and complicitly patriarchal) universalism.

[2]. I'm a bit unclear how exactly reprising "that while they would break
all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as many new social
bonds as possible. The isolated man is no more able to develop than the one
who is fettered" answers the issue of "freedom as irresponsibility" and
"freedom from accountability". Let's assume Humboldt intends, in the
rejection of State-mandated (or socially mandated) constraints so that one
might then freely choose one's own constraints, that the choice of such
constraints would not be for the sake of irresponsibility or
non-accountability (to the social world). If that's Humboldt's point, I
congratulate him for expressing an arguably socially desirable premise.
Meanwhile, it is not an understatement--particularly in the domain of sex
and sexual freedom--that men far and away (through infidelity,
prostitution, and rape) exhibit a tremendously disparately greater range of
(sexual) freedom; where sexual freedom is concerned, this not only informs
the sexual freedoms practiced by women but also those freedoms allowed to
women, or even what are described (in cultural discourses) as sexual
freedoms allowed to women, even to this day in our own country (if we're
going to pretend we're cutting edge in that regard). So, if Humboldt's
agreement is internally coherent, and it may be, that's well and good. But,
as someone said (it may have been Kate Ferguson Ellis herself in her study
of Gothic fiction, The Contested Castle, or she may have been quoting
someone in that work) but the separation of the spheres between the
(masculine) world of work and the (feminine) world of domesticity that got
especially pushed as the bourgeoisie rose to power required, in order to
work, one central and crucial assumption: his generosity and her
complaisance. The phenomenon of domesticate abuse, which Gothic fiction in
one sense represents a critique of and cry for help against, results
exactly where the man reneges on his part of this bargain. To see this
point carried out to the nth degree, one only has to read de Sade, who in
his own way takes the premises of the separation of the spheres (or, if you
prefer, the conventions of the Gothic novel) and rewrites them with a
tremendous enthusiasm for inverting completely every moral injunction
assumed (or at least expected) of the one who is expected to be generous in
this setting.

In general, Humboldt has long been to my taste. But what my studies of 18th
century female-authored fiction made apparent was how merely tidying up the
exclusivist language of the era doesn't erase the problems present in it.
What this means for us today and now is: how do our cries for freedom not
issue at the expense of others (in the context of this discussion,
particularly at the expense of women, who will still be shouldered with the
task of mothering, teaching, nursing) so that "everyone else" (male or
female) can be free. Perhaps another way to put this is that "freedom" must
necessarily be "freedom from" and what is that from? Freedom from the
mutual obligation imposed by marriage? Freedom from culpability for child
support from idly fathered children?

I'm not disregarding that Humboldt may not be saying, "freedom under all
circumstances, damn all of your demands," but I'm very leery that a call
for "freedom" that ignores specificity of what that freedom is "from,"
easily lapses back into reprising undesirable social patterns. And since
we're white males, who benefit primarily from those social patterns
(however much to our detriment), then I become even sketchier at any kind
of argument that "our freedom" is different or acceptable than other calls
for freedom. This whole exchange is a fabulous luxury--to say nothing of
all of the time and work we were able to spend reading the people involved
in order to have it; other people are busy staying alive. And so are we,
and this is a part of what it means to be alive for us. But it takes no
imagination at all to call this irresponsible. And it takes no imagination
to see how calls for freedom, whether Humboldt's or others, isn't wholly
irresponsible in practice or essence. The opportunity to look at the world
in a strictly individualistic way is not just a luxury, the demand that
others should do so as well is tantamount to a death sentence, since
society is arranged in such a way that the resources needed to support such
individualism are explicitly denied to them in the first place. This, if
you will, is why "poor" people the world over can "afford" to be generous.

So if Humboldt's argument contains a kernel that answers the
noneforceability of accountability apparent in his argument (as you have
presented it), then that's the part to bring up, not that he abstractly
excludes "irresponsibility" from his notion of freedom. Obviously, he will
believe he does not include that. He'd be kind of ignorant to ignore that
his calls for freedom need to be balanced by something (if not the demands
of the social, since that's what wants elimination). The immediate answer
would be education, or more properly acculturation: you raise men who
already want nothing more than to "be generous" in light of women's
"willingness" to be complaisant. (I put "willingness" in quotation marks
because in the circumstances of the time, the social structures that
existed enforced such complaisance. Recall, women could not inherit
anything; if their husbands died, they had to hope for the generosity of
his relatives or they were turned out into the street. Recall that at the
time to attempt self-employment was extremely onerous, if not socially
humiliating--to say nothing of the travails of going into the sex trade.
These social structures far more aggressively extorted complaisance out of
women. by comparison, men only had their social reputation at work and, to
be sure, in the 18th century, that was a mighty force indeed. But it meant
only that so long as all of a man's peccadilloes or major crimes occurred
in the household, then no one had to know about them, and they would
continue unabated.)

To be clear: "complaisance" means "the quality of being complaisant,
amiable, or agreeable," where "complaisant" means: "compliant, willing to
do what pleases others, and polite or showing respect". It is not the same
as "complacent."

[3] In general, I find the arguments given for the Ten Commandments
anachronistic, against the tradition of interpretation accorded to them in
Jewish sources ("thou shalt not steal" as "thou shalt not buy and sell
human beings" didn't give anyone pause while buying and selling wives, for
instance), and gratuitously limiting in terms of what we, as human beings,
might demand as moral exhortations, particularly in that most of the
injunctions are negative ("thou shalt not"); one commentary in this regard
claims that greater spiritual merit accrues in the choice of NOT doing
something rather than by CHOOSING to do something. Kant might disagree. I
suggest you'd arrive at a less patriarchal, more workable vision of
anarchism by not yoking that vision (pre- or post-Reformation) to any
biblical source.

Whatever the Torah had to say prior to its revisions by Ezra and Nehemiah
are now apocryphal (unless we want to accept the Samaritans long-standing
claim that the practice of Judaism brought back from Babylonian exile was
illegitimate), what we now have from circa 450BCE represents a nadir in the
valuation of women. It's not the only such nadir, it's just the best known
and most promulgated, but it guarantees that the discourse we carry on
(even now) is grossly distorted by patriarchal values. The demonization of
Eve is only the second step, which is preceded by the denial of a Creatrix.
The injunction against other gods has as its object especially the cults of
the Great Goddess (particularly Astarte). In a practical expression of
this, despite the injunction against lying, which you name as being opposed
to the Pharaonic practice of deceit, in cases of rape, the truthfulness of
women brought punishment down upon them; or one could say, male lying about
rape shielded them from punishment and thus preserved the status quo in
exactly the way that you describe "thou shalt not lie" as being opposed to.
You acknowledge that "honor thy mother and father" drops the mother, and
yet still call this overwhelmingly patriarchal set of commandments as the
root of revolution. It's a revolution that women get only dragged along in
at best, as mothers to the next wave of suicide bombers. (I updated the
social consequences.) Not that this is only true in Islamic settings; all
mothers in Israel give their children to the military.

I think here is a very adequate summary of the commandments, which can only
be numbered ten by some fancy exegeting: they describe: "the greatest
obligation (to worship only God), the greatest injury to a person (murder),
the greatest injury to family bonds (adultery), the greatest injury to
commerce and law (bearing false witness), the greatest intergenerational
obligation (honor to parents), the greatest obligation to community
(truthfulness), the greatest injury to moveable property (theft)"

Let us remember that the overwhelming percentage of the text referred as
the 10 commandments is taken up with the first give, which exclusive
involve "the greatest obligation" (to worship only YHWH). The text doesn't
merely list injunctions but expatiates all over the place about the
details; calling this an injunction against religion profoundly misses the
mark. It's utterly unnecessary to erect some fantasy this could be the case
to argue on behalf of atheism. Gerda Lerner notes that prior to the cultic
revisions, the intolerant monotheism implicit in "worship none but YHWH"
became explicit and became the basis for exterminating "nonbelievers".
Presumably prior to that, as the Samaritans suggest and reflect, the
"worship only YHWH" part did not demand or imply the annihilation of one's
neighbors.

As for the rest, does identifying the greatest injury to a person, family
bonds, commerce and law, and moveable property credibly and sufficiently
identify? Does the identification of these greatest injuries as murder,
adultery, perjury, and theft represent a credible or compelling list of
ultimate injuries? (It's controversial whether "bearing false witness"
should be understood in a legalistic term, as something like perjury, or
more generally, as lying.)

I'm not claim the 10Cs are supposed to be a total moral system, so don't
misread what I'm saying that way. They merely point to fundamentals.

Is murder the worst you can do to a person? (If so, why argue a moral
system that takes slavery as the most fundamental wrong? It would seem
slavery is a more pernicious crime against a person. Murder denies one the
capacity to live, and if man's fundamental nature is freedom, then freedom
not only denies the right to live, but also denies the fundamental nature
as well.) Is adultery the most damaging act against family bonds? (In which
case, why are men and women treated different in adultery?) Marriage, as an
institution, was imposed by one's parents. Just as one is expected to obey
and worship the Authority of god, so must you obey the authority of the
parents and not be adulterous. (This is why honor thy mother and father are
necessarily commandment 6). Similarly, since YHWH and parents are
infallible authorities, one should similarly honor judges. Even to this
day, it is imperative at times to lie in court for higher moral causes, or
simply to refuse to speak facts and be punished with contempt of court
charges. And, in a doctrine of anarchism, can theft really be the ultimate
offense against moveable property, when property is theft? The hypocrisy is
glaring and apparent, even without Jean Valjean's "crime".

One might recall also that Dante reckoned sodomy, blasphemy, and usury as
worse than murder--and quite apart from whether I agree with him or not,
the idea that murder is the worst thing you can do to someone belies a lack
of imagination.

What particularly underlies all of these injunctions is the opposite of the
antiauthoritarianism you name, and I doubt that's merely because at some
historical point we totally got the 10C's backward. The issue isn't
historical accuracy, of course, but current utility. Do we get anywhere
socially by this deliberate misreading of the 10Cs? The very fact of
resorting to them may be irremediably indicted with authoritarianism. To
make something useable out of them would involve changing them so
completely that one would better have started from scratch, just as people
try to rescue the Golden Rule from its moral ambiguities, when one might
more simply recall the Eastern moral injunction, "harm none."  Doesn't get
much more straightforward than that.

I'm not sure if it's helpful to go far enough backward in time, prior to a
capitalism and religion uninfected by the inputs that helped construct both
since the 18th century in the areas that called themselves civilization. My
point was that the swapping of the metaphor of Mother (as State) in place
of the metaphor of Father (as State) is a difference of emphasis rather
than kind, and particularly problematic in view of "civilization's" rampant
sexism (patriarchal structuring).

I realize this is a bit "alongside" your response, but then so was your
response. We can say that authoritarianism is a human problem, not a
judeochristian or capitalistic problem, and that judeochristianity (and
Islam) and capitalism (particularly as it was practiced by the Fathers of
Industry and Fathers of Science who were probably more oppressively awful
to their own families than Kings were to their subjects on average) reflect
in the main (with whatever lip service otherwise was seen as necessary) the
human problem of authoritarianism. That leaves authoritarianism as a
problem to be solved regardless in our metaphors for the State as we (all
of us) discourse to try to find alternatives to it.

Thinking of the myth of the Garden of Eden, it is clear that that's a
narrative written by children, not parents. Children blame their parents
for everything. It is parents who fucked everything up, and children can
only try to make the best of a bad situation. it's also apparently a myth
written by boys, because Mom is particularly blamed for fucking things up.
No parent, and certainly no mother (except a genuine traitor to her own
kin) ever would have written that myth. Had a parent written it, they would
have insisted they did their best, would have insisted nothing else could
have been done, and so forth. It's no accident, I contend, that this shows
up later in the book of Job, where YHWH says, "Who are you to question me."
But I'm bogging down in details now. (In point of fact, when one looks at
some of the oldest myths in the world, our status as "child" relative to
Nature is certainly an accurate "starting point". Other world myths,
however, don't demonize the divine parents, who themselves are a later set
of figures compared to a vast undifferentiated Nature in the earliest
myths--usually identified as female, yes, but sometimes bisexual or
asexual).

The point I want to make is that the biblical template has a
schizophrenically parentalistic (not just paternalistic) emphasis. In
Genesis 1, written later, the children blame the parents for the original
condition. In Genesis 2, written first, the father already browbeats his
children and demands their unflinching obedience. In part, this is because
children grow up into parents. But the bottom line for us, searching for
alternatives to the current undesirable social order, means that we remain
stuck on either side of authoritarianism--either we blame others for
fucking up or we make excuses for our own fucking up.

But we know from statistic that abused children don't always (or even
often) grow up into abusers. The myth that we're doomed to become what we
hated as children (the authoritarianism we rejected as unfair) is just
that, a myth. And so long as we stay stuck in a choice of metaphors between
Father, Mother, or Son (patriarchy excuses Daughters from participating,
except as future Mothers, so there is no need to ask them their opinion),
as the only major organizing metaphors you can pull out of the bible
(consider again the Ten Commandments), then we'll stay stuck. Hence I
reject any impulse to make a virtue (or even a necessity) of the vice of
the bible.

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 5:54 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>
wrote:

Michael--



Without attempting to respond to your whole argument, I'd offer the
following remarks:



[1] The sentence in question (it's an important one) - "For Humboldt as for
Rousseau, and before him the Cartesians, man's central attribute is his
freedom" - comes from a text written more than 40 years ago, when care to
avoid exclusivist language was not so pronounced, so to speak. The meaning
of the passage would be unaffected, were it to read "...the human being's
central attribute is her/his freedom." And the change would not affect the
rest of Chomsky's argument (nor yours). (See Noam Chomsky, "Government in
the Future," Seven Stories Press.)



[2] The classical liberal concept of freedom - which Chomsky thinks leads
on to anarchism in an age of industrial capitalism - as an essential
element of human nature would be opposed to irresponsibility and license,
as contrary to that human nature. "...a classical liberal doctrine ... is
not primitive individualis[m], in the style of for example Rousseau. So
Rousseau extols the savage who lives within himself, but Humboldt's vision
is entirely different: '...the whole tenor of the ideas and arguments
unfolded in this essay might fairly be reduced to this: that while they
would break all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as
many new social bonds as possible. The isolated man is no more able to
develop than the one who is fettered.'"



[3] The notion of the state that you describe is I think less
"judeochristian-esque" than capitalist. If you'll forgive my quoting myself
from a seven-year-old article, here's the briefest of sketches of how I
think we got from one to the other <
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/03/29/the-subversive-commandments/>:



The Subversive Commandments

Ignoring government assaults on the Bill of Rights (for which, admittedly,
the remedy under the present US Constitution is impeachment, the
responsibility of Congress) the US Supreme Court has instead fastened its
attention on a political fetish-object: the Ten Commandments. In the midst
of an illegal war, a torture scandal, and lawless administration actions —
such as imprisoning an American citizen, Jose Padilla, for almost three
years now without trial or charge — the court recently heard arguments on
the question (as the New York Times put it), "what does it mean for the
government to display a copy of the Ten Commandments? … a six-foot red
granite monument that has sat since 1961 on the grounds of the Texas
Capitol, and framed copies of the Ten Commandments that were hung five
years ago on the walls of two Kentucky courthouses."

In an impressive confirmation of the Postmodernist-cum-Humpty-Dumpty theory
of the meaning of words ("The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is
to be master — that’s all"), both sides (as we say) tell us what the Ten
Commandments mean. Conservatives defend the postings in Kentucky and Texas
on the grounds that the Ten Commandments "formed the foundation of American
legal tradition." Liberals on the other hand insist that the posting is an
"establishment of religion," contrary to the first amendment to the
Constitution. In fact, both are wrong: the Ten Commandments in their
historical setting are a revolutionary manifesto, dedicated to the
overthrow of traditional authority and religion.

The Ten Commandments (unnumbered) were written down perhaps as early as the
fifth century BCE in two passages in the Hebrew bible (Exodus 20:1-17 and
Deuteronomy 5:6-21), but they represent a view that goes back perhaps
another eight centuries to the beginnings of the people of Israel — who
were probably not originally what we would call "an ethnic group." As
described by Norman Gottwald in his magisterial _The Tribes of Yahweh_, the
Israelites as a people began in a revolution of slaves against the
Egyptian empire, a massive rejection of the society of the time. That
society was one of authority and religion, presided over by a king whose
position was guaranteed by the gods. The Hebrews (the word seems originally
to have meant "outlaws") rejected both the kings and the gods.

The Exodus events of perhaps the thirteenth century BCE were not so much a
migration (as is pictured in the bible story) but a "going out" (exodus)
from a society and its assumptions. The Ten Commandments are a proclamation
of that revolution, a "Declaration of Independence of Liberated Israel."

The text begins with the presentation of a liberator, styled YHWH (a form
of the Hebrew verb "to be"), "who brought you out of the house of slavery."
YHWH is not a god in the sense of the surrounding society. Gods guarantee
authority, and YHWH destroys it: "You shall have no gods." Idolatry is the
greatest sin in Judaism, Christianity and Islam because it means bowing
down before symbols of oppression. Even an image of YHWH is forbidden — the
only image of YHWH is humanity (Genesis 1:26). To "misuse" the name of YHWH
is not a matter of saying "goddamn": it is to use the name to wield
numinous power, as was done with the names of the gods — that is to say, it
is to practice religion. The Ten Commandments forbid religion (Exodus 20:
1-7).

The commandment about the sabbath has nothing to do with going to church.
On that day, "You shall not do any work": it is a commandment against the
idolatry of work. The revolutionary Israelites were slaves, valued only for
their work. "We are people, but you have forgotten it." The next
commandment is similar. "Honor your parents" has nothing to do with
obedience: it means not to discard people just because they are too old to
work.

The rest of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:8-17) are a picture of the
society that was being rejected, a society that claimed the power of life
and death ("You shall not kill"). The commandment against adultery is not
primarily about sex (the Hebrew bible isn’t very interested in sex) and the
commandment against stealing is not about property — they’re against
stealing people. Biblical scholars have recognized for many years that
these commandments are condemnations of the powerful who invaded households
to steal concubines and slaves.

Such a society is based on greed ("You shall not covet") and requires the
protection of lies ("You shall not bear false witness"). The Ten
Commandments sketch the sort of society that the Israelites thought
themselves called upon by YHWH to construct. The commandments are not
primarily individual but communal, a demand for a just community, without
the domination and stratification of most previous (and most subsequent)
civilization.

Three-quarters of the history of Christianity had gone by before the Ten
Commandments became, on the eve of the Reformation, the primary expression
of morality in western Europe — and then only after a revolutionary
reinterpretation, as the modern attempt to discover their original intent
(as the lawyers would say) shows. For over a thousand years, the tradition
of the seven deadly sins, from late antiquity, formed the basis of
Christian moral exhortation — not the Ten Commandments. The historian John
Bossy writes, "For Chaucer, and indeed for Dante, these had been a high
doctrine, to be left to divines; there were still in the sixteenth century
quite well-informed Catholics … who had never heard of them … [the]
transition to the Ten Commandments as the moral system of the West … may
fairly be described as revolutionary."

What prompted the revolution in moral theory was the rise of capitalism, as
can be seen in the reinterpretation of the crucial commandment in the early
modern world, that about "honoring your father" ("and your mother" — set
aside for obvious reasons). An entire structure of obedience is spun out of
it — and the other commandments are reinterpreted in its light — now that
the (quite different) notions of of authority in the thousand-year reign of
feudalism are coming to an end. Protestants and Catholics alike rather
suddenly turned to the Commandments, wrenched from their historical context
and twisted in an authoritarian direction.

The Ten Commandments in their proper historical context commend atheism in
regard to the religion of the gods and anarchism in respect to the laws of
the kings. Arising from a revolutionary people, they support the overthrow
of authoritarian structures in the name of human community. That sounds
pretty good to me.



Regards, CGE





On Nov 2, 2012, at 2:33 PM, Michael Gaiuranos <michaelgaiuranos at gmail.com>
wrote:



 CG and Generally:

A wonderfully long reply I will not do justice to here now, but I want to
add two points as contextualizations. And since I'm often fatally
long-winded, here they are summarized: (1) any discussion of the character
of the State (and our relationship to it) will be improved by finding
alternatives to the judeochristian-esque elements of the discourse that
inform our discussions of the State; (2) To the extent that "freedom"
socially functions as "irresponsibility" or "license," then those who are
asked to bear the costs of that irresponsibility or license have a claim
against such a conceptualization.

Both of these are offers (additions, not substitutions) that we all have
necessarily partial understandings of the needs, goals, purposes called for
in social action, so let's not fight about the truth of those partial
understandings but instead draw on their variety as inputs for collective
doing-together.

===============
(1). Part of what is at stake in Carl's reply and the discourse of what
social action could be taken (or wants to be taken locally/collectively)
involves the details of the metaphor used to describe the State. At the
risk of hijacking the point (especially amongst those who see religion as a
waste of time), I'm going to distinguish our (unfortunately) familiar
notion of the Divine (colloquially known in judeochristian/Islamic terms as
god) with a less familiar conception (known broadly elsewhere as the
Supreme Consciousness--and specifically Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita).

I propose there is a justness in bringing this up not because anyone here
believes this but because the judeochristian sense of the divine is,
itself, already a symptom of an outlook (as Krishna is also a symptom of a
different outlook) that underpins vast tracts of other discourses where we
live. Yahweh and Krishna (one could substitute Vishnu, Shiva, Kali,
Brahman, Brahma here--and the fact that one can do this substitution shows
the difference of discourse) are symbols of the broader cultural discourse.
because they are cultural fictions, perhaps the discourse shows up in its
purist form.

The root difference between Yahweh and Krishna (as a metaphor for the
State): humankind serves Yahweh, while Krishna serves humankind. With
Yahweh, the State works in mysterious ways and we are enjoined to work in
the ignorance of faith, grateful for whatever beneficences befall us,
uncomplaining at whatever rigors are asked or exacted upon us, and never
questioning (or, if we do, getting reminded of the Book of Job) that we are
small petty things who don't and can't understand. Of course, in all of
this, Yahweh (the State) claims to love us, claims that any violence it
practices upon us is for our own good, and so on. At root is the ultimate
mystery we can and do ask, "Why again do You need me for anything?" Why in
the world does the all-powerful, all-knowing State need me for anything?
One can sense here exactly an article of bad faith. If my labor (or worship
is required, then Yahweh cannot be so all-powerful. At worst, this is a
trick to deny my agency and extort my obedience (if not loyalty). How can
the State require our worship if we are nothing and can accomplish nothing
without It ... and so on. Sheer pragmatism dictates to us its better really
to act as if Yahweh (the State) doesn't exist. Certainly one should never
ask anything of It--at best, you will be ignored; at worst, you might get
Its attention. &c.

In contrast, Krishna provides an image of the State first and foremost not
as a permanent truth but simply the current manifestation. Here, the State
serves as our charioteer; the State serves us, ever ready to answer, to
each according to her needs, the questions of what is to be done. The
existential circumstance of this--the metaphysics behind Krishna as an
image--could be brought in to complicate this more. But when Krishna is
asked if he would explain something, he replies, "I would be delighted."
Transparency is his metier. Assisting the ends of humankind is his
elemental purpose. In this metaphor, the status of the individual is very
different as well, and the answers, "Why should I worship You" are various,
but one of the first is (as Buddha said explicitly), "Don't worship me."
The details of this for the individual I leave to some other time, but it
makes a seque to my second point, which is briefer.

Summary: (1) the discussion of the character of the State (and our
relationship to it) may be improved by ferretting out the
judeochristian-esque elements of the discourse that inform our discussions
of it.

(2). Central to CG's reply is the sentence: "For Humboldt as for Rousseau,
and before him the Cartesians, man's central attribute is his freedom."

Emphasis on "man". I hear this, and I think of the demand (by men)
especially since the enlightenment for women to remain in the home, to
remain innocent (i.e., ignorant), and all the rest. This isn't just a
euroamerican phenomenon of course, but we're in a euroamerican context
presently, sot hat's what I speak to. nor am I simply pointing to the
androcentricity of the whole argument here. To a very great degree, the
notion of freedom (particularly as described in CG's reply) is freedom from
determination, freedom from "unnatural" constrains--and its exactly that
that leads to libertarianism and a need to rescue Humboldt etc from their
logical opposition to the "unnatural constraint" of a State. This "desire
for freedom" (legitimate or not) manifests continuously in our culture as a
desire for irresponsibility, a desire for non-accountability, a desire
for--to put it in a word--license, more than liberty. This is how my friend
Neil jokingly paraphrased "libertarians as Republicans who want to do
drugs."

The point, of course, is that this freedom (as license, more than
liberty--and, to be sure, it's not like no one has not commented on this:
HG Wells for one asserted that a reduction of liberty leads to an increase
of freedom)--this freedom occurs in a social context, where the
self-determining men do so if not at the expense of women then in the
general absence of them. Neumann's Origins and History of Consciousness
(and Campbell's hero mythos) takes as fundamental the need to separate from
the "determination" of "mother"--and thus, generally, any determination of
women in general. Thus, the demands of women must--if one is to
existentially express "man is in his essence [as] a free, searching,
self-perfecting being, "--be ignored or, worse, combatively denied or
denigrated to achieve that "freedom".

The answer to this does not ineluctably lead to the conclusion that women
must also be thought of as "in her essence a free, searching,
self-perfecting being". If women would be rid of the shackles that
patriarchy place on them--and it's hard to imagine they wouldn't want
that--then what "freedom" means for women in that sense is different than
what freedom means in Humboldt's sense etc (for men). I don't think it's
overreading CG's response to say that one (implicit) metaphor to express
the point he is making--to rescue the logically anti-statist view of
Humboldt etc from that to revisit it in our contemporaneous setting--is an
image of state as Mother. Except to say that the metaphor of Krishna as
State is not the metaphor of Mother as State, it seems obvious that
judeochristian conceit of Father as All explicitly hides the implicit labor
of the Mother. This is all for show, it always has been, for She must be
there, because She always has been and is and will be. Covertly shifting
the emphasis of the State's character from the overbearing metaphor of
Father to a nurturing, supportive metaphor of Mother as State may seem
exciting for men who want to be supported while fleeing from the
determination of women to experience an essential freedom, but it does
nothing to desiccate the socially problematic equation of women with Mother
that would leave the shackles in place so men may pursue freedom).

Against the desire for non-determination by others (what would positively
be called self-determination), there is also the deep desire for
relationship with others, which necessarily presupposes and cannot get rid
of determination. Our most familiar image of this, if we've experienced it,
arises precisely in nondysfunctional families, where the diversity of human
expression gets subsumed under the notion, "We're a family." Sometimes
motehrs make this argument, sometimes fathers, so it's not merely a
gendered issue. The claim to throw off the determinants of the State in
order to be free is simply a restatement of, "So long, Mom. Gotta jet."
Even the Christian hero (Jesus) spits on his mother (so to speak) on the
cross. But this says nothing for what the "mother" is supposed to do. If
the impulse to "relationship" gets ensconced in our culture primarily with
Woman, who is asked to keep together the family, then advocating freedom
becomes a denigration of woman. Either we may say negatively that Woman
(with a capital "W" this is referring to no specific women) "doesn't want
freedom" or (positively) that She wants relationship, interdependence. The
often proposed "solution" of interdependence as for the problem of too much
dependance and or independence thus misses the mark. It only address half
(if that) of the problem.

The inadequacy of this shows on the social plane where "interdependence"
should manifest as "community". And (in point of fact) we ARE
interdependent in this sense; my well-being is a function of my
interdependent social well-being, but the recognition of that in the social
domain is so vitiated that (1) finding allies who agree is rare, and (2)
trying to model my behavior on that premise gets misread in light of the
lack of recognition. (I'm covertly pointing back to Krishna as a metaphor
of State rather than Mother by saying this, because Krishna emphasizes how
our ignorance, our partial understanding, of social reality becomes the
source of all woe). The various calls by feminists to acknowledge a
"female" sense of relationship points to this, but I will insist that
"interdependence" (as constructed in a patriarchal culture) does not avoid
the pitfalls of patriarchal culture yet. A call for "interdependence" thus
looks like a demand to put on chains, because it is read as a resistance to
"freedom" (just as we read in CG's reply that self-determination becomes
the right to pick which chains one wants to wear). Clearly, it's the
terminology int he discourse that's the first chain, and I'd sooner try
without that as a first step.

And since I limited myself to the man/woman part of the equation involved
in "And, since man is in his essence a free, searching, self-perfecting
being, " I necessarily left out the issues of class and race that would
equally and fruitfully be brought in as a further qualification of too much
unbridled enthusiasm for freedom and the State as a means for attaining
that.

Summary: To the extent that freedom is irresponsibility or license, those
asked to bear the costs of that irresponsibility have a claim to raise
against such a conceptualization of "freedom".


 On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 9:22 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>
wrote:

>From the Enlightenment & the rise of capitalism we've lived in a world in
which what makes us human - our purposeful work of head and hands - is
taken out of our control. We have to sell our work - better, rent it - to
the owners of capital if we want to eat regularly ("get a job"): we work
under their direction. This is alienation - an objective situation, not
just a psychological state.



That this situation is an insult to human nature - and seen to be such for
generations - was pointed in the first lecture I ever heard Noam Chomsky
delicer, "Government in  the Future" (1971). A selection follows. --CGE



==========================

...One of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position is
in Wilhelm Von Humboldt's "Limits of State Action", which was written in
1792, though not published for 60 or 70 years after that. In his view: "The
state tends to make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends,
overlooking his individual purposes. And, since man is in his essence a
free, searching, self-perfecting being, it follows that the state is a
profoundly anti-human institution." That is, its actions, its existence,
are ultimately incompatible with the full harmonious development of human
potential in its richest diversity. Hence incompatible with what Humboldt,
and in the following century Marx, Bakunin, Mill, and many others, what
they see as the true end of man. And for the record I think that this is an
accurate description.

The modern conservative tends to regard himself as the lineal descendant of
the classical liberal in this sense, but I think that can be maintained
only from an extremely superficial point of view, as one can see by
studying more carefully the fundamental ideas of classical libertarian
thought as expressed, in my opinion, in its most profound form by Humboldt.

I think the issues are of really quite considerable contemporary
significance, and if you don't mind what may appear to be a somewhat
antiquarian excursion, I'd like to expand on them.

For Humboldt as for Rousseau, and before him the Cartesians, man's central
attribute is his freedom. "To enquire and to create, these are the centers
around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve." "But," he
goes on to say, "all moral cultures spring solely and immediately from the
inner life of the soul and can never be produced by external and artificial
contrivances. The cultivation of the understanding, as of any man's other
faculties, is generally achieved by his own activity, his own ingenuity, or
his own methods of using the discoveries of others."

Well, from these assumptions, quite obviously, an educational theory
follows and he develops it, but I won't pursue it. But also far more
follows. Humboldt goes on to develop at least the rudiments of a theory of
exploitation and of alienated labour that suggests in significant ways, I
think, the early Marx. Humboldt in fact continues these comments that I
quoted, about the cultivation of the understanding through spontaneous
action, in the following way: He says, "Man never regards what he possesses
as so much his own, as what he does and the laborer who tends the garden is
perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys
its fruits. And since truly human action is that which flows from inner
impulse, it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into
artists, that is men who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by
their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their
intellect, ennoble their character, and exult and refine their pleasures;
and so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though
beautiful in themselves, so often go to degrade it." "Freedom is
undoubtedly the indispensable condition without which even the pursuits
most congenial to individual human nature can never succeed in producing
such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man's free
choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter
into his very being but remains alien to his true nature. He does not
perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.
And if a man acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or
instruction, rather than in ways determined by his own interests and
energies and power," he says, "we may admire what he does, but we despise
what he is."

For Humboldt then, man is born to enquire and create, and when a man or a
child chooses to enquire or create out of its own free choice, then he
becomes, in his own terms, "an artist rather than a tool of production or a
well trained parrot". This is the essence of his concept of human nature.
And I think that it is very revealing and interesting compared with Marx,
with the early Marx manuscripts, and particularly his account of "the
alienation of labour when work is external to the worker, not part of his
nature, so that he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself
and is physically exhausted and mentally debased. This alienated labour
that casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns
others into machines, thus depriving man of his species character, of free
conscious activity and productive life." Recall also Marx's well known and
often quoted reference to a higher form of society, in which labour has
become not only a means of life but also the highest want in life. And
recall also his repeated criticism of the specialized labour which,
"mutilates the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrades him to
become a mere appurtenance of the machine, makes his work such a torment
that its essential meaning is destroyed, estranges from him the
intellectual potentialities of the labour process in very proportion to the
extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power."

Robert Tucker for one has rightly emphasized that Marx sees the
revolutionary more as a frustrated producer, than as a dis-satisfied
consumer. And this, far more radical, critique of capitalist relations of
production, flows directly, often in the same words, from the libertarian
thought of The Enlightenment. For this reason, I think, one must say that
classical liberal ideas, in their essence though not in the way they
developed, are profoundly anti-capitalist. The essence of these ideas must
be destroyed for them to serve as an ideology of modern industrial
capitalism.

Writing in the 1780's and early 1790's, Humboldt had no conception of the
forms that industrial capitalism would take. Consequently, in this classic
of classical liberalism, he stresses the problem of limiting state power,
and he is not overly concerned with the dangers of private power. The
reason is that he believes in and speaks of the essential equality of
condition of private citizens, and of course he has no idea, writing in
1790, of the ways in which the notion of private person would come to be
reinterpreted in the era of corporate capitalism. "He did not foresee", I
now quote the anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker: "he did not foresee that
democracy, with its model of equality of all citizens before the law, and
liberalism, with its right of man over his own person, both would be
wrecked on the realities of capitalistic economy." Humboldt did not foresee
that in a predatory capitalistic economy, state intervention would be an
absolute necessity. To preserve human existence. To prevent the destruction
of the physical environment. I speak optimistically of course.

As Karl Polanyi for one has pointed out: "The self-adjusting market could
not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural
substance of society. It would have physically destroyed man and
transformed his surroundings into a wilderness." I think that's correct.
Humboldt also did not foresee the consequences of the commodity character
of labor. The doctrine, again in Polanyi's words, "that it is not for the
commodity to decide where it should be offered for sale, to what purpose
it should be used, at what price it should be allowed to change hands, in
what manner it should be consumed or destroyed." But the commodity in this
case is of course human life. And social protection was therefore a minimal
necessity to constrain the irrational and destructive workings of the
classical free market.

Nor did Humboldt understand in 1790 that capitalistic economic relations
perpetuated a form of bondage which, long before that in fact, as early as
1767, Simon Linguet had declared to be "even worse than slavery," writing
:"it is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our
farm labourers to till the soil, whose fruits they will not eat, and our
masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that
drags them to those markets where they await masters, who will do them
the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on
their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich
him. What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? 'He is
free,' you say. That is his misfortune. These men, it is said, have no
master. They have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of
masters: that is, need. It is this that that reduces them to the most cruel
dependence." And if there is something degrading to human nature in the
idea of bondage, as every spokesman for the enlightenment would insist,
then it would follow that a new emancipation must be awaited, what Fourier
referred to as the third and last emancipatory phase of history. The first
having made serfs out of slaves, the second wage earners out of serfs and
the third which will transform the proletariat freemen by eliminating the
commodity character of labour, ending wage slavery and bringing the
commercial, industrial and financial institutions, under democratic control.

These are all things that Humboldt in his classical liberal doctrine did
not express and didn't see, but I think that he might have accepted these
conclusions. He does, for example, agree that state intervention in social
life is legitimate "if freedom would destroy the very conditions without
which not only freedom but even existence itself would be inconceivable"
which are precisely the circumstances that arise in an unconstrained
capitalist economy and he does, as in remarks that I quoted,
vigorously condemn the alienation of labour. In any event, his criticism of
bureaucracy and the autocratic state stands as a very eloquent forewarning
of some of the most dismal aspects of modern history, and the important
point is that the basis of his critique is applicable to a far broader
range of coercive institutions than he imagined, in particular to
the institutions of industrial capitalism.

Though he expresses a classical liberal doctrine, Humboldt is no primitive
individualist, in the style of for example Rousseau. So Rousseau extols the
savage who lives within himself, but Humboldt's vision is entirely
different. He sums up his remarks as follows, he says "the whole tenor of
the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be reduced to
this: that while they would break all fetters in human society, they would
attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible. The isolated man is
no more able to develop than the one who is fettered." and he in fact looks
forwards to a community of free association, without coercion by the state
or other authoritarian institutions, in which free men can create and
inquire, achieve the highest development of their powers. In fact, far
ahead of his time, he presents an anarchist vision that is appropriate,
perhaps, to the next stage of industrial society. We can perhaps look
forward to a day, when these various strands will be brought together
within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social form that barely
exists today, though its elements can perhaps be perceived, for example in
the guarantee of individual rights, that has achieved so far its fullest
realization (though still tragically flawed in the western democracies), or
in the Israeli kibbutzim, or in the experiments with workers' councils in
Yugoslavia, or in the effort to awaken popular consciousness and to create
a new involvement in the social process, which is a fundamental element in
the third world revolutions, coexisting uneasily with indefensible
authoritarian practice.

So let me summarize this first point. The first point of the state that I
want to setup as a reference, classical liberal, its doctrine is that the
state function should be drastically limited, but this familiar
characterization is a very superficial one. More deeply, the classical
liberal view develops from a certain concept of human nature: one that
stresses the importance of diversity and free creation. And therefore this
view is in fundamental opposition to industrial capitalism, with its wage
slavery, its alienated labour and its hierarchic and authoritarian
principles of social and economic organisation. At least in its Humboldtian
form, classical liberal thought is opposed as well to the concepts
of possessive individualism, which are intrinsic to capitalist ideology. So
it seeks to eliminate social fetters, but to replace them by social bonds,
not by competitive greed, not by predatory individualism, not of course by
corporate empires, state or private. Classical libertarian thought seems to
me therefore to lead directly to libertarian socialism or anarchism, if you
like, when combined with an understanding of industrial capitalism...

 On Nov 1, 2012, at 8:03 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <ewj at pigsqq.org> wrote:



 As a dedicated workaholic I find this partitioning of one's work and one's
life
as being incredibly difficult to understand.  I seldom stop thinking about
my
work, even when I am not thinking about my work.

What is it that makes people hate their jobs?

Is there some fundamental mismatch between what people do and what
comes natural to them?  I find it very natural to immerse myself in my work.

*

I was thinking about this
MisMatch/MisAlignment/Incompatibility/Maladaptation syndrome
thing in regard to the huge number of people who end up in Amerika's Cull
Pens, the prisons.

Some get captured there as pawns because prisons are good business.

But really the majority are there because they are MisFits.  I recognize
that not
all MisFits end up in the Iron Hotel...

But there is something Fundamentally Wrong with a society that hates its
work and
wants to spend less time working and more time not working, and something
fundamentally
wrong with a society that generates so many culls.


On 11/02/12 8:36, Susan Parenti wrote:



 Susan, thank you so much for your messages about this -- I can't
attend the meeting tonight, but I have an idea I would like to pass
along.

I try to imagine the different world we would all be living in if the
prediction made in 1965 by a U.S. Senate subcommittee had come true:
that by the year 2000, the standard U.S. work week would be reduced to
20 hours, due to efficiencies created through computerization and
automation. Certainly we've realized these efficiencies, but workers
in the U.S. are working longer hours than ever -- certainly longer
than any other post-industrial nation in the world.

Why is this? Okay, so a culture of market-driven material competition
would be expected to generate obsessive, irrational behaviors about
work, and just as clearly, overscheduling the employed class preempts
political activism. No doubt, many more reasons could be added to this
list. // Following the script of standard employment models, where
routines and relationships are ready-made, requires less
responsibility and courage than making free choices and dealing with
the consequences. Are we promoting the harder-but-richer path of
greater discretionary time, or are we using one economic crisis after
another to ensure that the same tired routines are reproduced?

A shorter work week would be an excellent Occupy-oriented argument and
would work alongside arguments against underemployment and
unemployment, and in favor of a living wage -- behind all these
arguments is the need for a fairer parsing of compensation for labor
and the time we dedicate to receive it. As a protest movement, a
reduced work week certainly has a policy dimension, with many
statistical analyses and anecdotes to support legislative reform. As a
political movement, though, it can also be practiced by anyone with a
full-time job, in which individuals make a commitment to take back 10
or 20 hours per week, either overtly (by promoting goal-driven
schedules over absolute schedules, say) or covertly (by being champion
slackers). I like both approaches.

Sorry again for not being at the meeting tonight -- I hope these ideas
feel worthwhile and welcome at the meeting.

Best Wishes,
Rohn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20121103/9aab4aed/attachment-0001.html>