Low lie the Fields: Irish at the Euro 2012

A few weeks ago the Irish national team, certainly not the most talented team in the world, made an appearance on the world stage at the Euro cup. They would eventually walk away winless after a 4-0 loss to Spain but the score isn't what I'll remember about this game. I'll remember the fans and their passionate singing of the "fields of Atherny" for the final ten minutes of the game.

The Irish fans, a people who've been hit as hard as anyone by the Euro-crisis, thanked their brave team with a somber and meloncholy tune about loneliness, hardship and eventual hope, a striking example of solidarity at a time when the people need to hold to each other. Of course, as cheeky Irishmen, they also had to poke a little fun at their German task mistress, Angela Merkel, whose insistence on a policy of strict austerity to pay down the national debt has caused no end of trouble for the working or out-of-work Irish, with a flag reading, "Angela Merkel thinks we're at work."

The whole affair reminds me of Nancy Scheper-Hughes ethnograpghy, Saints, Scholars, and Schitzophrenics, about mental illness in rural Ireland. In this beautiful piece of ethnographic work, Scheper-Hughes address some of the problems that rural Irishmen face while watching their friends and brothers leave in pursuit of prosperity somewhere else while they are left to tend the lonely fields back home. The Irishman who stays has to deal with social pressure from both direction. From the one side they are told that to leave faily property would be disloyal and from the other they are seen inferior to their brothers sisters who've left for other countries and often staying behind means being alone, as few women remain.

 The song the Irish fans sung was particularly fitting as it deals with the hardship of being left behind, "its so lonely round the feilds of Anthenry". In the song, a man is arrested and sent to Botany bay for stealing corn for his starving children and it features a dialouge between him and his love who he must leave behind. The character I think most of the Irish fans singing the song would most sympathize with would be the woman, which fits with Scheper-Hughes idea that the men had been in some way emasculated by their experiences.

 The book was written twenty years ago, long before the Euro-crisis reached what it is today, but I think the struggles it revealed are still experienced by Irishmen today and perhaps amplified by the deteriorating economy.

 The sound of those voices lifted into the air, celebrating their common suffering and hope has pushed me to give a shout-out to my comrades in Ireland, perhaps a few weeks later than I should have. To the people who've endured more than their share of hardship at the hands of the elite; to those who've watched their friends and families leave; to the oppressed periphery sliding into debt slavery; to those who still hold to hope; I wish you peace and love from America.

Narcissistic Self-Reflection

I haven’t been doing a lot of blogging recently. Partially because I know no one reads these posts regularly so keeping uniform intervals between posts is a bit less than important but mostly because I’ve really been trying to figure myself out recently. With the end of my high school days, I think I’ve come to a better understanding of a lot of what I was feeling throughout my high school career and how that has colored my thinking on subjects from politics to philosophy, which have always been a form of escape for me and a pursuit of meaning in a world that often seems alien and meaningless. Reexamining myself, I think a change in identification may be in order; I’m just not exactly sure from what to what. All in all these changes have taken place throughout the last four years and some of the might not seem very important to someone who isn't interested in anarchism and I’ve still got a lot to sort out but my horoscope told me that today was a good day to write about my beliefs so I decided I’d muse a little on what has shifted. Besides, it’s good to reflect on yourself a little bit, even if it seems narcissistic.

I really made the move to the left of the political spectrum a long time ago and have been moving further and further that way ever since. I was a vulgar libertarian for only a short time and a Rothbardian anarchist even shorter before discovering the works of Kevin Carson which really pointed me in the direction of anti-capitalism and what might be called “true anarchism” going back to Bakunin and Kropotkin. Understanding the roots of the inequalities in capitalism to be the result not of inherent differences in human abilities (as most mainstream conservatives and vulgar libertarians do) or of plain dumb luck (like I used to believe) but of systematic exploitation which was really just a continuation of medieval hierarchal society with new gods and new machines led me into a study of the work of communists, who I used to consider my intellectual enemies (I now recognize thinkers like Nietzsche and Machiavelli, with their emphasis on individual power, to be my enemies-- In the spirit of how their works are popularly understood, not in the men themselves or even their works as a whole).

Many communist ideas sat well with me (more of those of Kropotkin than Marx); after all I consider myself an egalitarian at heart and have always detested commercialism. I also know that throughout high school, in both academics and athletics, I had my fill of competition. I considered myself somewhat anti-social, going so far as to diagnose myself with avoidant personality disorder (though I distrust psychiatry as much as anything else). Following what I thought was my anti-social nature; I lost myself in individualist literature (if one can call Ayn Rand literature. Stirner, maybe, but Rand?). Upon reflection, I can say that a good deal of my anti-social nature was due to my disgust with competition and hierarchy. If I had to talk to someone from a position of inferiority, I’d sooner just not talk to them (I never got to know any of my teachers all too well and always had a kind of paranoia that my peers were looking down on me, particularly the female ones). I had been familiar with most communist doctrines before, including the basic idea of workers’ solidarity, but they never appealed to me until I began to discover the root of my discomfort with modern society which is based on coercion, subjugation, and exploitation. Solidarity then, was not an acceptance of the collective will, as I had once thought and therefore shunned it, but instead a rebellion against their selfish competition. The idea that, as one blogger on libcom.org put it, “working too hard is anti-social behavior” really spoke to the part of me that felt alienated. It said, “Maybe you’re not the one with the problem. Maybe you aren’t the anti-social one. Maybe it’s them and their heartless competition. Maybe it’s them and their fetishification of the commodity and their obsession with money and their need to quantify everything.” In short it said, “Blame capitalism. For all your angst, just blame capitalism.” This is, of course, the all too simple answer of a self-isolated teenage boy to his suffering in a position in which all of society was saying, “You have no reason to suffer!”

So I began to refer to my friends, who had the confidence to get jobs, as wage-laborers, to modern medicine as the cult of doctorism, to a popular shopping center in our area as a den of commercialistic depravity. I had decided this society was not for me and I would make my way out to study others, rekindling my passion for anthropology.

This is not to say that I consider myself an anarcho-communist now, I am still much closer to mutualism based on Carson and Proudhon. I can’t say I consider the sensible pursuit of profit to be immoral, particularly through a useful trade. Even merchants are useful when they are turning a profit based solely upon their service of transporting goods from those who have them and are looking to sell them to those who need them. Sinbad and the Arab traders in history and the Kajiit caravans in fiction live a life full of adventure which is easy to romanticize and it’s hard to say they hurt anyone. So I do believe in a market, as I always have. A truly free market uncorrupted by coercion and those that make profit on it.

This does likely mean that some people will get ahead, though not nearly to the extent that they are able to under modern state-capitalism. But is it fair for me to declare competition immoral because it disgusts me? Is it fair for me to declare that the only just society is one completely devoid of it? No, it would be no more fair than if I had declared that the only just society is one entirely free of spiders. My opposition to hierarchy and competition is on a fundamentally lower than, say, my opposition to war and violence (it’s ironic I began this ordering of my beliefs with my opposition to hierarchy considering I’m doing so hierarchically. I was, of course, referring to hierarchy in human relations only. I believe many things but some of them mean much more than others. For example: I would die for my belief in the inherent value in a single human life but I probably wouldn’t even lift a finger for my belief that The Next Generation is better than the Original Series).

Taking my distaste for hierarchy and competition (distaste is perhaps a better word to use than opposition) into account I’d say I wish to see a society much like Lysander Spooner and the American individualist anarchist wished to see, with lots of small landowners employed by themselves and carrying out some useful trade or other. This is certainly no departure from my older beliefs. I’ve always romanticized Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian and republican America of small farmers with no one coercing or being coerced, in fact it’s probably been this Shire-like dream that has colored a good deal of my political thinking.

To see where I’ve diverged from this ancient dream of mine we have to go back to solidarity. In the past couple of years, as I have studied syndicalism and the labor movement, I think there is more place in my ideology for the collective. I have no problem standing with comrades; in fact I prefer it as long as they don’t mind that I don’t do an awful lot of the talking. It was only when I was asked to stand against adversaries that I chose to stand alone.

My problem with collectivism is that it’s hard to accept half-heartedly. Halfway in between individual property rights and communal ownership is some sort of democratic capitalism, likely with a heavily entrenched coercive apparatus and likely to descend into kleptocracy, the prevailing political system of the world today. This leads me back to mutualism and the dichotomy between property in use only or property in use and holding.

Mutualism is less an exact philosophy than a set of similar trends in thinking. Its adherents generally consider themselves socialists, anarchists, libertarians and promoters of a truly freed market (as opposed to the Reganesque free market). It has its roots in Proudhon but I’m not the right person to attempt to really describe exactly what it is. A major distinction between it and the other market-loving individualist anarchists is the difference between property in use and holding and property in use alone. Most propertarian individualists consider property to be made when an individual mixes her labor and creativity with the natural world to change it in some meaningful way. Mutualists, on the other hand, might say that this amounts to little more than moving a couple of sticks around and declaring the entire forest hers.

Personally, I believe such beliefs are very much cultural abstractions and would likely vary by community in an anarchist world. The mutualist idea in practice would be a hedge against capital accumulation and large scale inequality; though I think large scale inequality is nearly impossible without a sustained application of force. If an individual is using force to protect her forest, which she considers hers by virtue of her rearranging the sticks; one could see how such “defensive force in protection of property” could actually be exploitive and aggressive force.

The difference between mutualism and other socialist anarchist philosophies is its focus on the market and trade. One would expect a mutualistic society to look quite like Lysander Spooner’s individualist America except with more workers’ syndicates and less bourgeois tastes in which workers would own a good deal of the means of production but an individual would not be entirely dependent upon the community for her lively hood and could still likely go into a trade for herself or with her family.

The mutualist idea is not an end-all answer either however, but again, these theories of morality are cultural abstractions and serve only to prevent conflict and serve the peoples’ happiness. For anyone who is interested I would recommend looking at Per Bylund’s ideas of property in use rather than in the object itself. However, these ideas are something I only wanted to address in brevity. I’m more concerned with the changes in my own thinking based on my experiences and wanted to introduce mutualism as my middle ground between individualism and collectivism in which the enterprising spirit (which I am certainly not) can create and find success and happiness and in which there is also room for the quietly loyal and all together unambitious second-rater (which I certainly am) to find do something meaningful other than be subjugated to the capitalist class; join the military, subjugate others and die; or get a government job and prop up the exploitative system.

I guess that with self-examination I’ve discovered that I really just don’t have the heart for capitalism. In fact I’m not sure any of us do. Human beings didn’t evolve to be calculators of net worth; we evolved as communal hunters and lived that way for a stretch of time that makes capitalism look like a mosquito on an elephant. False consciousness and greed can only carry us so far. You can give people symbols to be loyal to and to define themselves by (sports teams, hipsterism, bands, nation-states). You can exploit all the avarice you can find in the human soul, but in the end the things people are always the most loyal to, the things people wish they had spent more time caring for and being cared for by are not things at all but people. I remember hearing somewhere that the most mentioned dying regret of men is that they wish they hadn’t worked so much. I’m not even twenty years old yet and I already feel that way. I already know that I don’t want to define myself by what I do to make money (money is just a tool to get by in a foreign world) or by what false-consciousness symbols I’m loyal to but by the people I love. I want to live a life of comfort yes, but meaningful comfort. I want to live in a world where people don’t have to work a lot, but when they do it is out of love for their brothers and sisters. I want meaning. With every fiber of my being I want meaning and that’s really been what my pursuit of philosophical truth and political virtue has been about.

When I lost my faith in the supernatural, though I certainly don’t rule it out, I found that it’s much harder to find individual meaning in life than I had thought it was and when people do it’s usually a form of aesthetic nihilism. I thought liberalism was about clearing a ground for individuals to discover their own meaning and to an extent I was right. The problem is that people derive meaning from each other and in a liberal society, in order for them to provide for themselves and their loved ones they have to spend an awful amount of time toiling to prop up an exploitative system. A liberal society encourages competition at the expense of cooperation, which was never what I was about even when I considered myself a true classic liberal. It pushes meaning into the hands of the individual who is then left to her own devices to define who she is and why anyone should give a damn about her in the first place. This just isn’t how it should be. Mankind is a social animal and virtue and meaning and identity are all communal ideas. You cannot separate a person from their community identity and expect them to be happy. That’s why I think people spend so much time trying to define themselves with social media and fan crazes. It’s also why nationalism took on its great fervor after the rise of capitalism. With the decline of religion people needed something to be loyal to besides the market and nation-states have done a pretty good job filling in the void. We’ve lost community identity so we look for it wherever we can.

My greatest fear truly is meaninglessness. That’s something I’ve known for a long time. I want my life to mean something. I don’t care what happens to my consciousness after I die, eternal darkness doesn’t sound so bad; I just don’t want everything to have been meaningless. Meaning is what I have been looking for through my study of mankind and my search for it has led me away from my previously individualistic ideas towards more collective ones (I’ve always been more of an aggregate thinker anyways). The pursuit of Truth is the pursuit of meaning and I believe that Community and Love are where we find meaning and that is why I chose to embrace the philosophies that place enough of an emphasis on them. When faced with the choice between individualism and collectivism I still choose both just as Max Nattlau did. Human beings find comfort in both solitude and community. I suppose this is where I should give something of a closing statement, after all I was told by my horoscope to practice my writing a little, but the holes in my thought process are far from filled and my ideas are far from their closure. There is quite a bit more I should have to write before I write the end. I’ll just take solace in the fact that I found an appropriate place where the end should be, even if I haven’t quite found the end yet.

Margaret Mead and Stefan Molyneux agree!

I was reading Margaret Mead's famous anthropological study, Coming of Age in Samoa, when I noticed a similarity between an assumption she made and the worldview of Stefan Molyneux, the host of FreeDomain Radio (for anyone unfamiliar with FreeDomain, Stef is all about self-ownership and NAP and seeks to extend the bounds of morality we hold whendealing with our neighbors and friends to the interactions of societies and governments. Of course if governments observed these decencies, they would no longer be governments.

Steph, building off the rationalism of Ayn Rand, has stated that he believes the root cause of much of the psychological strife children and adolesents experience is due to an inability to reconcile two ideas about reality. For instance, if a parent tells a child not to hit but himself hits the child, the actions of the parent are irreconcilable with the words of the parent so, as well as being abused, the child grows up believing that morality is mostly talk and something that adults will throw off whenever it is convienient. This would tend to breed a cynicism and an amoral attitude whenever the child can get away with it.

Margaret Mead was also trying to explain some of the psycological strife children in America go through. Notably she was trying to answer the question whether adolescent anxiety and angst were a result of the physiological phase the body was going through or of environment conditions of the society. To answer the question, she turned to a people far different than those she originally inquired about and compared the adolescent experience of girls in Samoa with girls in America and found that there was significantly less nuerosis in Samoa and that much of the strife that makes adolescence a difficult time for the American girl did not exist in Samoa.

She cited many differences between the cultures that cause these diffences in adolescent experience, such as attitudes towards sex and death, but a lot of her assumtions drew on the idea that America, being a much more heterogenous culture, had many more internal inconsitenceies which could trouble the young mind. In America, worldviews are in constant collisions with each other, while in Samoa there is one basic path to life and one basic understanding of the universe. In America, we still believe that there is one objective truth, but we have many definitons of what that truth is, so many, in fact, that the young mind must understand that whatever any person around her believes is very likely false. If she does chose to accept some worldview as her own and embrace it wholeheartedly, she runs the risk of dealing with its own internal inconsistencies. The inability to reconcile all of these problems likely leads to a good deal of strife in the adolecents' expeirence.

I find it interesting that such different thinkers could come to a similar idea. Though the sight different examples (Stef's based on violence. Mead's based on reconciling Christianity with war and the Declaration of Independence with inequality) I do believe they are both striking essentially the same bone and that there is a lot of truth to their thoughts. Unfortunately, these problems are likely to stay, as we are not likely to give up our hetergenous society. A few suggestions I would build off both Stef and Mead are to not pressure children to make decisions early, when their minds are still adjusting to the world as is the habit of the protestant evangelising movement in America and to always treat children honestly and fairly. It is important to walk the walk as well as talk the talk when dealing with them because I believe, as do many psychologists, that experience as a child has an extreme impact on developement and if your experience with rules of morality is full of hypocrisy and dishonesty, you are not likely to hold much account in morality.

Solutions to problems like these are not easy to come by, especially considering that they are problems throughout society. Our chief method of combatence is awareness and I think the more people understand that adolecence does not have to be an especially difficult time in a person's life and that much of the difficulty is a product of the environment, the closer we will be to living smoother and more contented lives.

Herbert Spencer: Dismantling the Myth.

My AP World History textbook defines "White Racial Supremacy" as:

"Belief in the inherent mental, moral, and cultural superiority of whites; peaked in acceptance in decades before world war 1; supported by social science doctrines of social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer."

Spencer gets a bad rap from the educational establishment for his supposed "social Darwinist" views. What they fail to realize is that he was condemning existing nation states by saying they only existed because they were stronger than those before them, not by some social contract or divine right. He was actually very anti-imperialist. If anyone needs further proof that what a man actually believed and wrote in his lifetime could be drastically different than what he is famous for; here it is. A great article about how drastically wrong the textbooks are which could truly refute the myth can be found here,

http://mises.org/daily/4779

Apparently they also forgot about the time Spencer wrote this lovely article, not to mention his writing against imperialism, racism, and coercion:

PATRIOTICSM

Were anyone to call me dishonest or untruthful he would touch me to the quick. Were he to say that I am unpatriotic, he would leave me unmoved. “What, then, have you no love of country?” That is a question not to be answered in a breath.

The early abolition of serfdom in England, the early growth of relatively-free institutions, and the greater recognition of popular claims after the decay of feudalism had divorced the masses from the soil, were traits of English life which may be looked back upon with pride. When it was decided that any slave who set foot in England became free; when the importation of slaves into the Colonies was stopped; when twenty millions were paid for the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies; and when, however unadvisedly, a fleet was maintained to stop the slave trade; our countrymen did things worthy to be admired. And when England gave a home to political refugees and took up the causes of small states struggling for freedom, it again exhibited noble traits which excite affection. But there are traits, unhappily of late more frequently displayed, which do the reverse. Contemplation of the acts by which England has acquired over eighty possessions – settlements, colonies, protectorates, &c. – does not arouse feelings of satisfaction. The transitions from missionaries to resident agents, then to officials having armed forces, then to punishments of those who resist their rule, ending in so-called “pacification” – these processes of annexation, now gradual and now sudden, as that of the new Indian province and that of Barotziland, which was declared a British colony with no more regard for the wills of the inhabiting people than for those of the inhabiting beasts – do not excite sympathy with their perpetrators. Love of country is not fostered in me on remembering that when, after our Prime Minister had declared that we were bound in honour to the Khedive to reconquer the Soudan, we, after the re-conquest, forthwith began to administer it in the name of the Queen and the Khedive – practically annexing it; nor when, after promising through the mouths of two Colonial Ministers not to interfere in the internal affairs of the Transvaal, we proceeded to insist on certain electoral arrangements, and made resistance the excuse for a desolating war.* Nor does the national character shown by a popular ovation to a leader of filibusters, or by the according of a University honour to an arch-conspirator, or by the uproarious applause with which undergraduates greeted one who sneered at the “unctuous rectitude” of those who opposed his plans of aggression, appear to me lovable. If because my love of country does not survive these and many other adverse experiences I am called unpatriotic – well, I am content to be so called.

To me the cry – “Our country, right or wrong!” seems detestable. By association with love of country the sentiment it expresses gains a certain justification. Do but pull off the cloak, however, and the contained sentiment is seen to be of the lowest. Let us observe the alternative cases.

Suppose our country is in the right – suppose it is resisting invasion. Then the idea and feeling embodied in the cry are righteous. It may be effectively contended that self-defence is not only justified but is a duty. Now suppose, contrariwise, that our country is the aggressor – has taken possession of others’ territory, or is forcing by arms certain commodities on a nation which does not want them, or is backing up some of its agents in “punishing” those who have retaliated. Suppose it is doing something which, by the hypothesis, is admitted to be wrong. What is then the implication of the cry? The right is on the side of those who oppose us; the wrong is on our side. How in that case is to be expressed the so-called patriotic wish? Evidently the words must stand – “Down with the right, up with the wrong!” Now in other relations this combination of aims implies the acme of wickedness. In the minds of past men there existed, and there still exists in many minds, a belief in a personalized principle of evil – a Being going up and down in the world everywhere fighting against the good and helping the bad to triumph. Can there be more briefly expressed the aim of that Being than in the words “Up with the wrong and down with the right” ? Do the so-called patriots like the endorsement?

Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling – anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called – in a somewhat startling way. It was at the time of the second Afghan war, when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man – then a captain but now a general – drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying – “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.”

I foresee the exclamation which will be called forth. Such a principle, it will be said, would make an army impossible and a government powerless. It would never do to have each soldier use his judgment about the purpose for which a battle is waged. Military organization would be paralyzed and our country would be a prey to the first invader.

Not so fast, is the reply. For one war an army would remain just as available as now – a war of national defence. In such a war every soldier would be conscious of the justice of his cause. He would not be engaged in dealing death among men about whose doings, good or ill, he knew nothing, but among men who were manifest transgressors against himself and his compatriots. Only aggressive war would be negatived, not defensive war.

Of course it may be said, and said truly, that if there is no aggressive war there can be no defensive war. It is clear, however, that one nation may limit itself to defensive war when other nations do not. So that the principle remains operative.

But those whose cry is – “Our country, right or wrong!” and who would add to our eighty-odd possessions others to be similarly obtained, will contemplate with disgust such a restriction upon military action. To them no folly seems greater than that of practising on Monday the principles they profess on Sunday.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* We continue to hear repeated the transparent excuse that the Boers commenced the war. In the far west of the U.S., where every man carries his life in his hand and the usages of fighting are well understood, it is held that he is the aggressor who first moves his hand towards his weapon. The application is obvious.

When The Bear Becomes the Bee-Keeper

Franz Oppenheimer wrote a book called "The State" in which he defined the six-stage evolution of the state in society by the domination of one ethnic group by another. The two will eventually fuse, but Oppenheimer essentially believed that the principle cause of the State's existence was the subjugation of one people by another.

I wrote a short poem over the subject and but first here's a very brief outline of the stages.

Stage One: A group of people acts as a bear would to a bee-hive and invades another. Tyranny, rape, and pillage. They often return to the same group of people and pillage again.

Stage Two: The Bear becomes the Bee-Keeper. Dominates the hive for more money. A notion of right and wrong develops among the conquerors regarding the way in which they should treat the subjugated. Live subjects can produce more than dead.

Stage Three: Surpluses lead to more tribute-- Precursor to taxation.

Stage Four: Both ethnic groups become a union on one strip of land. Move from international to intranational relationship.

Stage Five: Conflicts between different peasants are put down by the leaders; leads to the court systems.

Stage Six: Interference in subjects' affairs increase. Stratification increases.

When The Bear Becomes The Bee-Keeper;

Wandering Herdsmen, out for a fight,

Come across a settled society at night,

And as the bear acts to the bee,

Or how the Viking acts on the Sea,

So these tyrants robbed and stole,

And became the great kings of old.

With authority established by the sword,

They rode to victory in monstrous hordes.

But a true nation did not come to be,

Until the tyrants came to see,

That a dead man cannot work the fields,

And an untended crop, little profit yields.

So the tyrant let the man stand and the tree grow,

Leaving him with his seeds to sow,

And let be the peaceful sleeper,

When the Bear became the Bee-Keeper.

So the notion of right and wrong,

Enter into our present song.

For what is good to the Peasant is profitable to the king.

"Praise to his Virtue," the Peasants sing.

When prosperity came to all,

And Gold decorated the tyrant's hall,

He made the Peasants feel accepted,

And their tribute was never rejected.

So the Law of the land was made,

By Methods no less cruel than De' Sade's.

The hegemons can stay or go anywhere,

But if they return, the land is theirs.

If a few rivalrous Peasants,

Make everyone else's day unpleasant,

With their quarreling amongst each other,

The tyrant must now be an elder brother,

And find a solution, equitable and fair.

To mend the dividing tear,

Which ripped its way so maliciously,

Into his people and their productivity.

By now the invaders have chosen to stay,

And have chosen women with whom to lay.

On this strip of land, they will build a new nation,

And secure domestic relations.

The Peasants now greet their captors,

Not as wolves, hawks, or raptors,

But as protectors of the realm,

And steersmen at the ship's great helm.

Leading softly, through the night,

As arbitrators of wrong and right.

"The State is all and we are none,"

They cry, as patiently, they await the sun.

   

Who Cares What Other People Think?

Who Cares What Other People Think?


He does too.





So I'm reading through Hodgskin's "An Essay on naval Discipline" and within the first few chapters he discusses what exactly "Fame" is. He defines it as a pursuit of the praise of other to such an extent that the recipient of that praise becomes conscious of his superiority of others and, because man is naturally disposed to seek praise, it is one of the principle motivators of people to action.



Adam Smith in his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" stated similar ideas and given the two thinker's close proximity to each other in time and theory (Hodgkins was a follower of Ricardo whose ideas on the Labour Theory of Value) are often lumped together with Smith's, although there are distinctions).



I can easily think of many Americans who have that mentality of "Keeping up with the Joneses" which so influenced the song "Grand Illusion" by Styx,



"Welcome to the Grand illusion
Come on in and see what's happening
Pay the price, get your tickets for the show
The stage is set, the band starts playing
Suddenly your heart is pounding
Wishing secretly you were a star.



But don't be fooled by the radio
The TV or the magazines
They show you photographs of how your life should be
But they're just someone else's fantasy
So if you think your life is complete confusion
Because you never win the game
Just remember that it's a Grand illusion
And deep inside we're all the same.
We're all the same...



So if you think your life is complete confusion
Because your neighbours got it made
Just remember that it's a Grand illusion
And deep inside we're all the same.
We're all the same...



America spells competition, join us in our blind ambition
Get yourself a brand new motor car
Someday soon we'll stop to ponder what on Earth's this spell we're under
We made the grade and still we wonder who the hell we are."



Sometimes, capitalism is criticised for inspiring a pursuit of wealth with little to no self reflection, an obsession with the material that takes hold of our lives and destroys social solidarity and leaves the great majority of us feeling unfulfilled and left behind.



But, by my observation, it is instead the pursuit of the praise and admiration of our fellows that we seek material wealth so vehemently, only to squander it on things we would be perfectly happy without (as long as the Joneses didn't get one).



Why then do human beings seek praise so much? The raw pursuit of admiration doesn't seem to have any immediate benefit to either the individual or collective (particularly when that admiration is derived exclusively from the acquisition of material wealth and the squander thereof). Sacred cows, unholy pigs, love of pigs, the obnoxiously fierce concept of masculinity; all of these can be at least partially explained by what might be called materialistic theories but I cannot see a materialist reason for the rise of our obsession with each other's praise (besides the basic need of humans to work together, which can be solved much more easily than a devotion to spending and wasting more than anyone else).

Marvin Harris, one of the leading anthropologists in America argues in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches" that all human culture stems originally from some concrete place or need. For instance, those societies that would need some sort of redistribution of wealth, but do not have the appropriate social structure to maintain it, may have some sort of a potlatch. During this the individual gives away as much food as possible, for the perceived reason of making everybody love him. The answer is evolutionary in nature; those societies full of affable people willing to give food away and receive love will survive while those that aren't will not.

While I accept Harris's solution for the Native Americans who practice the potlatch, I'm not sure how well it applies to modern America. Perhaps it is simply left-over from before, when a voluntary redistribution of wealth was more necessary (though I would argue it is very necessary now). The problem is that our pursuit of admiration doesn't always lead us towards altruistic pursuits but often selfish ones (Is this because of the "invisible hand, Mr. Smith?).

This question is one that has always peeked my interest and my own emotions as I, like anyone, pursue the good opinion of my peers. I will no doubt consider to ponder this question, but for now I am left in mystery as to the origin of our obsession with proving ourselves worthy of extravagance. I only know that for our society to advance into a more equal, free, and voluntary form we must overcome it.    

Polygamy and other victimless crimes.

Law, Custom, and Taboo

There are many different theories on how exactly the concept of a "law" came to be. Was it the arbitrary dictations of an aggressor on his victims? In many cases, yes. Was it a strengthening of the position of simply a local custom into a taboo with force to back it up? In many other cases, yes.

One thing we can be very sure about however is that the modern conception of "law" did not originally exist to stop people from infringing on each other's natural rights. In truth, the concept of natural rights was largely a product of the peasantry or subjugated class of a State, which Franz Oppenheimer illustrates very clearly in his classic, "Der Staat" or "The State". Law, Oppenheimer claims, was preceded by the moment that the "bear became the beekeeper" or when conquerors realized that a man alive is worth more than a man dead and a tree tended too is worth more than a neglected stump. He is not claiming that they had an epiphany but instead that, by evolutionary model and natural selection, those hegemons who did treat their subjects with some semblence of decency were more likely to survive.

Not all laws, however, protect one individual from another. For that matter, not all cultural taboos, in any culture, exclusively protect the individual. I had a conversation recently with someone convinced that things like polygamy or sexual activities amongst children are tabooed because they must be unhealthy or directly hurt someone. I tried to explain that polygamous cultures in the past have provided more rights to women in many cases but they continued to insist that because the Mormons in America did not that no polygamous culture ever could. I don't try to make claims to absolute objectivity but if we can't open our frame of vision beyond only those things recorded in our own culture we are lost from an anthropological standpoint.

Beyond the issue of polygamy is the issue of sexual activity amongst children (only child to child--Adult to child is a completely different and often head 'splodeing issue). In our culture it is severely frowned upon although it seems to directly harm absolutely no one. Forgetting religious concerns for the moment, why would such things be prohibited? Some claim because it would be unhealthy for the child. Perhaps in our culture this is true but the only unhealthy aspects of it would be the psychological problems that accompany the violation of a taboo, which must be blamed more on the taboo itself than the act if the act has no other discernable consequence. Among the !Kung people in the Kalahari, it is common practice for children to do this and is perceived as normal and healthy. You can look at the causes of such practices among different societies but, while that is a fascinating subject, I am, at this time, more concerned with the question of morality. The !Kung children grow up fine and perfectly adapted to their culture.

On the other hand, the !Kung have a strict taboo against speaking the name of the dead, who they fear will cause them physical harm if they do. They also have a taboo on telling dirty jokes in the company of your sister. While this may be good advice, most would not consider it to be immoral and it causes direct harm to know individual.

The !Kung may wonder at how we speak the names of our dead or make sexual references in the immediate vicinity of female relatives and we may wonder why they allow children to fondle each other. In each instance no one is being hurt but we still perceive wrong being done.

I'm not trying to denounce all taboo, many of which have utilitarian purposes and are a important part of group identity and solidarity, I am only insisting that to exist in a multicultural world we must make no claim to being a "Christian" or "Muslim" nation and must allow people to do what they will. All people are free to harbor their own feelings about certain acts, harmful or otherwise, but I would recommend that we analyze to roots and effects of our own traditions before condemning others and, above all, that we try to keep open minds and big hearts.   

David Graeber and Western Expansion or Picked Last in Gym Class

Anthropologist David Graeber had this to say about the expansion of the "West" in his pamphlet "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology",



There has long been a related debate over what

particular advantage “the West,” as Western

Europe and its settler colonies have liked to call

themselves, had over the rest of the world that

allowed them to conquer so much of it in the four

hundred years between 1500 and 1900. Was it a

more efficient economic system? A superior military

tradition? Did it have to do with Christianity,

or Protestantism, or a spirit of rationalistic inquiry?

Was it simply a matter of technology? Or did it

have to do with more individualistic family

arrangements? Some combination of all these

factors? To a large extent, Western historical sociology

has been dedicated to solving this problem. It

is a sign of how deeply embedded the assumptions

are that it is only quite recently that scholars have

come to even suggest that perhaps, Western

Europe didn’t really have any fundamental advantage

at all. That European technology, economic

and social arrangements, state organization, and the

rest in 1450 were in no way more “advanced” than

what prevailed in Egypt, or Bengal, or Fujian, or

most any other urbanized part of the Old World at

the time. Europe might have been ahead in some

areas (e.g., techniques of naval warfare, certain

forms of banking), but lagged significantly behind

in others (astronomy, jurisprudence, agricultural

technology, techniques of land warfare). Perhaps

there was no mysterious advantage. Perhaps what

happened was just a coincidence. Western Europe

happened to be located in that part of the Old

World where it was easiest to sail to the New; those

who first did so had the incredible luck to discover

lands full of enormous wealth, populated by

defenseless stone-age peoples who conveniently

began dying almost the moment they arrived; the

resultant windfall, and the demographic advantage

from having lands to siphon off excess population

was more than enough to account for the European

powers’ later successes. It was then possible to shut

down the (far more efficient) Indian cloth industry

and create the space for an industrial revolution,

and generally ravage and dominate Asia to such an

extent that in technological terms—particularly

industrial and military technology—it fell increasingly

behind.

A number of authors (Blaut, Goody,

Pommeranz, Gunder Frank) have been making

some variation of this argument in recent years. It

is at root a moral argument, an attack on Western

arrogance. As such it is extremely important. The

only problem with it, in moral terms, is that it

tends to confuse means and inclination. That is, it

rests on the assumption that Western historians

were right to assume that whatever it was that

made it possible for Europeans to dispossess,

abduct, enslave, and exterminate millions of other

human beings, it was a mark of superiority and that

therefore, whatever it was, it would be insulting to

non-Europeans to suggest they didn’t have it too. It

seems to me that it is far more insulting to suggest

anyone would ever have behaved like Europeans of

the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries—e.g.,

depopulating large portions of the Andes or central

Mexico by working millions to death in the mines,

or kidnapping a significant chunk of the population

of Africa to work to death on sugar plantations—

unless one has some actual evidence to suggest they

were so genocidally inclined. In fact there appear to

have been plenty of examples of people in a position

to wreak similar havoc on a world scale—say,

the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century—but

who didn’t, not so much because they scrupled to,

so much as because it would never have occurred to

them to act this way to begin with.

In the end it all turns, oddly enough, on how

one chooses to define capitalism. Almost all the

authors cited above tend to see capitalism as yet

another accomplishment which Westerners arrogantly

assume they invented themselves, and therefore

define it (as capitalists do) as largely a matter

of commerce and financial instruments. But that

willingness to put considerations of profit above

any human concern which drove Europeans to

depopulate whole regions of the world in order to

place the maximum amount of silver or sugar on

the market was certainly something else. It seems

to me it deserves a name of its own. For this reason

it seems better to me to continue to define capitalism

as its opponents prefer, as founded on the

connection between a wage system and a principle

of the never-ending pursuit of profit for its own

sake. This in turn makes it possible to argue this

was a strange perversion of normal commercial

logic which happened to take hold in one, previously

rather barbarous, corner of the world and

encouraged the inhabitants to engage in what

might otherwise have been considered unspeakable

forms of behavior. Again, all this does not necessarily

mean that one has to agree with the premise

that once capitalism came into existence, it

instantly became a totalizing system and that from

that moment, everything else that happened can

only be understood in relation to it. But it suggests

one of the axes on which one can begin to think

about what really is different nowadays.

Graeber blames the expansion of the West not on its military might or technological prowess but simply on its bloodlust which he claims was fuelled by capitalism, which to Graeber is no different than pure, unadulterated greed.

First, though I agree with Graeber on many things, I have to take issue with the definition of capitalism he chooses to use. One cannot define capitalism as simply a social structure that values the acquisition of material wealth more than you can define socialism simply as a social structure that values fried chicken. In any economic system, people value different things and certainly there are people in capitalist societies that value wealth above all else but I don't think I would be wrong to say that those people are in the minority. Graeber rightly identifies that capitalism is not determined as a matter of law or technology but is wrong in asserting it is the social acceptance of greed. Rather, I maintain, that it is defined by the social acceptance of capital and free-trade (I use the term loosely) and the ability of individuals to use their own subjective judgement in determining what is of value to them. Early forms of Western capitalism were, of course, more structural and take on a structural, rather than cultural, definition. When speaking of history, it makes the most sense simply to define capitalism as private property and trade which don't of themselves imply freedom.

Second, I think he is wrong to place the rise of the West as a world power solely on our adaptation of "capitalism", variations of which have existed as long as trade has throughout the world. The rise of the "West" (if you can call the horrific effects it had on the rest of the world a "rise") was caused by more than a multitude of factors, cultural and structural. To take the emotionally anti-west view that we were simply less moral than other powers at the time ignores the fact that China, India and the Islamic world were, at the time, looking inward, so to speak. China, which was isolationist to the point of xenophobia for most of its existence, had just ended its brief experiment in expansion with the close of the exploratory voyages under the Admiral Zheng-He and India, which had never really been expansionist in the first place, was still splintered from the fall of the Gupta Empire. The Islamic world was experiencing the opposite of an Enlightenment as people turned to Sufi mystics and Islamic piety rather than the natural sciences. In essence the West simply caught the rest of the world asleep at a time when truly devastating expansion was the most possible.

I think of the West as something of the kid who gets picked last on the soccer field when it comes to the realm of world trade. Western powers had taken a very long time to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the Classical period which left Europeans pretty much the least powerful and least wealthy continent out of Europe, Africa, and Asia throughout the Post-Classical period. Europeans had wanted to engage in the luxury goods trade but had little to offer the rest of the world except depleting supplies of gold. With the beginning of exploration and the dawn of the truly global marketplace--America and Oceania were in contact with the rest of the world for the first time-- Europeans began to see the riches around the world for the taking but with little economic power, political power would have to do. After colonisation, economic power followed political power and the West emerged as the world's hegemony. I think of this as the kid on the soccer field who has little to offer the rest of the players feeling so left out and wanting to play on the field so bad that one day, while all the other players are relaxing in the shade, he brings a gun to the fields and shoots them all, claiming the field as his own. A grotesque metaphor perhaps, but one that I think strikes closer to the heart of the matter (and the heart of darkness) than  simply blaming the White man's greed.