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Hi,
So, this Jonathan Nitzan’s and Shimshon Bichler’s twitter post got me thinking
CasP analyzes capitalism as the negation of human autonomy and open collaboration. How can this viewpoint be useful for the postliberal “Right”?
https://twitter.com/BichlerNitzan/status/1325580225426690048
Now, first of all, short disclaimer: I do not consider myself “Right” (I think, the dichotomy itself is severely outdated). But it just so happens, that I’m somewhat knowledgeable about the topic, and I don’t see a necessary contradiction with CasP here. So, for the sake of the argument, I’ll give my thoughts on the matter.
So, first of all:
1. Human autonomy
“Absence of Feeling of New Chains.—So long as we do not feel that we are in some way dependent, we consider ourselves independent—a false conclusion that shows how proud man is, how eager for dominion. For he hereby assumes that he would always be sure to observe and recognise dependence so soon as he suffered it, the preliminary hypothesis being that he generally lives in independence, and that, should he lose that independence for once in a way, he would immediately detect a contrary sensation.—Suppose, however, the reverse to be true—that he is always living in a complex state of dependence, but thinks himself free where, through long habit, he no longer feels the weight of the chain? He only suffers from new chains, and “free will” really means nothing more than an absence of feeling of new chains.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Wanderer and His Shadow”)
The gist goes like this: “Freedom from” is unattainable. This one doesn’t even contradict science: human behaviour is very deterministic. Raging against being oppressed by someone or something would just go on forever. Up to laws of biology and physics. Human propensity for dissatisfaction is limitless.
And “freedom to” is, essentially,
slaveryservitude. You follow someone or something. Some human, some principle, some goal, doesn’t matter much.At its extreme point it is expressed in Ernst Junger’s “The Worker: Dominion and Form” (2017) [1932], which can be put like this: a worker must stop perceiving their work as work, start seeing it as a way of life and be creative and expanding about it:
Work is thus not mere activity, but rather the expression of a specific being, which seeks to fulfil its space, its time, its legitimacy. It therefore knows no opposition from beyond itself; it is similar to fire, consuming and transforming all that is flammable, that can only be countered through its own principle, only through a return of fire. The workplace is unlimited, just as the working day spans twenty-four hours. The counterpart to work is neither some kind of rest nor is it leisure; rather from this perspective there is no situation that cannot be grasped as work. To give a practical example: the manner in which people now busy themselves with leisure. Leisure either bears, like sports, an entirely undisclosed work-character, or it represents – like entertainment, technical festivities, or country trips – a playfully coloured counterweight to work, but is in no way thereby the opposite to work itself. On this, then, hangs the growing meaninglessness of Sundays and the holy-days of old – that almanac which corresponds ever less to a changed rhythm of life.
<...>
Here of course systems alter their meaning. To the same extent that their character as knowledge diminishes in importance, a peculiar character of power flows into them. This is similar to the situation in which a seemingly peaceful branch of technology, for example perfumery, one day discovers itself to be a producer of chemical means of war and is claimed for that purpose.
(Ernst Junger “The Worker: Dominion and Form”)
To summarize, from the “Right” Nietzschean and/or Jungerian view, it plainly states that you are autonomous as long as you feel yourself to be such. This was the sane part.
It gets much more bizzarre in case of Evola, Heidegger, Dugin, Leo Strauss, etc., where they try to impose adherence to some transcendental principle or some Dasein, or whatever, that helps you to overcome the unresolvable dichotomy between a good way of life and an efficient government.
Still, the basic premise remains intact: they still think, that they pursue person’s autonomy (“authenticity”), and that modern liberalism and capitalism ruin everything. So, despite looking on their part extremely bizzarre, the Right interest in CasP is not that much surprising.
2. Capitalism as the negation
Essentially, the point of Junger’s “The Worker: Dominion and Form”.
For this reason, it becomes so important for the worker to refuse every explanation which seeks to interpret his appearance as an economic phenomenon, even as a product of economic processes, thus, basically, as a kind of industrial product, and for him to see through the bourgeois origin of these explanations. No action can cut more effectively through these ominous bonds than the declaration of independence of the worker from the economic world. This does not mean the renunciation of this world, but rather its subordination under a claim to power of a more comprehensive kind. This means that the fulcrum of rebellion is not economic freedom and economic power, but power itself.
(Ernst Junger “The Worker: Dominion and Form”)
The bourgeois (der Bürger) has no substantial “Form” (Gestalt). The bourgeois activity is an attempt to superimpose the logic of accumulation and ideology of free market over “social hologram” in CasP’s terms.
There is also an overlapping with the notion of power. Unlike neoclassical economists, they are not trying to separate economics and politics.
“Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy. The political does not reside in the battle itself, which possesses its own technical, psychological, and military laws, but in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility, by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy. A religious community which wages wars against members of other religious communities or engages in other wars is already more than a religious community; it is a political entity. It is a political entity when it possesses, even if only negatively, the capacity of promoting that decisive step, when it is in the position of forbidding its members to participate in wars, i.e., of decisively denying the enemy quality of a certain adversary. The same holds true for an association of individuals based on economic interests as, for example, an industrial concern or a labor union. Also a class in the Marxian sense ceases to be something purely economic and becomes a political factor when it reaches this decisive point, for example, when Marxists approach the class struggle seriously and treat the class adversary as a real enemy and fights him either in the form of a war of state against state or in a civil war within a state. The real battle is then of necessity no longer fought according to economic laws but has—next to the fighting methods in the narrowest technical sense—its political necessities and orientations, coalitions and compromises, and so on.”
“The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state—as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains —religion, culture, education, the economy—then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics.”
(Carl Schmitt, “The Concept of the Political”)
Carl Schmitt also offers some sort of understanding of the problem of hierarchical power, similar to the one, pointed by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler here about Xenophon’s “Anabasis”. The core point of his “Political Theology” and “On Dictatorship” is that sovereign and sovereign’s commissars are extralegal, and thus may override, suspend and debug rigid bureaucracy structures, when necessary.
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A fascinating post, A B. Just wanted to reply with a technical note. For some reason, some of your angle brackets got replaced with html code. Playing around, it looks like this happens when you toggle between ‘text’ view and ‘html’ view. That’s unfortunate. We’re working on getting a preview function for the forum. But for now, be aware that if you toggle between html and visual, some of your code may get wrecked.
Anyway, I manually fixed the problem here.
Looking forward to the discussion.
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I’ve been thinking about CasP and the Right for a few days now. The more I think about it, the more scared I become. Most CasP researchers (including me) assume that if you lift the veil of power — talk about it openly — then this automatically leads to a critique of power. But that’s a philosophical assumption, in some sense, tied to liberalism.
Liberals dislike (or at least claim to dislike) concentrated power. But they don’t talk about the realities of power openly. CasP researchers keep this dislike of concentrated power, but care about reality.
The Right, however, increasingly celebrates power openly. It hearkens back to the fascism of the 1930s, or even earlier to feudalism. In the feudal mode of power, power was celebrated as a virtue. Yes, it was mixed with religion. But you could see how if you showed that a king’s income was a function of his power, he would take that as a compliment. ‘Now give me more power please’, he would say.
If CasP is to be a progressive research agenda, then the onus is on us to not only investigate power, but to show its injustices.
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You start with the notion of hierarchy as a necessary evil (oppressive but efficient); you then say it is necessary (because autonomy is impossible); and finally you conclude it’s desirable (über alles). During this journey, injustice tends to diminish and eventually is assumed away as an issue. That’s how Carl Schmitt, a Nazi, could become the darling of many leftists and CasP the sweetheart of the post-liberal Right….
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you then say it is necessary (because autonomy is impossible)
Technically, autonomy is impossible, because you’d have to prove the existence of free will for that, while all the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. Either autonomy is to be reformulated into “I don’t feel oppressed” (and it opens an obvious can of worms) or autonomy simply does not exist.
Either way “justice” then becomes “I don’t like the way things are now. I want things my way” and thus is a selfish struggle for power on its own. Not that there is anything necessary wrong wrong with trying to impose that, though.
Most CasP researchers (including me) assume that if you lift the veil of power — talk about it openly — then this automatically leads to a critique of power. But that’s a philosophical assumption, in some sense, tied to liberalism.
During this journey, injustice tends to diminish
This requires to understand the nature of philosophical assumptions. And knowledge. And power, for that matter.
When one pays with money, one tends to think that it is money that does something. But in fact they are (at best) mere pieces of paper, that “work” only given the configuration of other factors. One merely assumes their intrinsic value to exist. Something goes Weimar republic, those papers become toilet paper.
However, the problem seems to go much deeper. The ability to wrongly attribute causality, is the very core of human cognition. I’ll quote (extensively) from R.S. Bakker’s blog on this matter:
“When consistently confronted by effects absent any cause—viz., a system that outruns our on-the-fly capacity to cognize—we assume such efficacy to be intrinsic to the entity occasioning it. Given the sheer ubiquity of such effects, then, we should expect attributions of intrinsic efficacy to be a ubiquitous feature of human cognition.”
“Since science has shown us that larger systems are always responsible, however, we should presume that all applications involve neglect of those systems. We should assume, in other words, that no such thing as intrinsic efficacy exists, and that if, for any reason, it seems that such a thing does (or worse yet, has to), it only does so for neglect.
And yet the vast majority of us continue to believe in it. Rules constrain. Representations reveal. Decisions resolve. Goals guide. Desires drive. Reasons clarify. According to some, the bloody apriori organizes the whole of bloody existence!”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/meaning-fetishism/</p>Justice justs.
We assume that our way is correct, while others is wrong. We do not know, whether we have sufficiency of information (Daniel Kahneman calls it WYSIATI – what you see is all there is). Our introspection is a retrospective rationalization of our actions. We do not actually have access to the systems that make us tick:
“Take memory research as a case in point. In the Theaetetus, Plato famously characterized memory as an aviary, a general store from which different birds, memories, could be correctly or incorrectly retrieved. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, when Hermann Ebbinghaus began tracking his own recall over time in various conditions, that memory became the object of scientific investigation. From there the story is one of greater and greater complication. William James, of course, distinguished between short and long term memory. Skill memory was distinguished from long term memory, which Endel Tulving famously decomposed into episodic and semantic memory. Skill memory, meanwhile, was recognized as one of several forms of nondeclarative or implicit memory, including classical conditioning, non-associative learning, and priming, which would itself be decomposed into perceptual and conceptual forms. As Plato’s grand aviary found itself progressively more subdivided, researchers began to question whether memory was actually a discrete system or rather part and parcel of some larger cognitive network, and thus not the distinct mental activity assumed by the tradition. Other researchers, meanwhile, took aim at the ‘retrieval assumption,’ the notion that memory is primarily veridical, adducing evidence that declarative memory is often constructive, more an attempt to convincingly answer a memory query than to reconstruct ‘what actually happened.’
The moral of this story is as simple as it should be sobering: the ‘memory’ arising out of casual introspection (monolithic and veridical) and the memory arising out of the scientific research (fractionate and confabulatory) are at drastic odds, to the point where some researchers suggest the term ‘memory’ is itself deceptive. <…> But why would this be? Well, apparently forming accurate metacognitive models of memory was not something our ancestors needed to survive and reproduce.”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/reengineering-dennett-intentionality-and-the-curse-of-dimensionality/
.</p>Human meaning, human language, human cognition, basically all human social cohesion mechanisms themselves stem from neglect. Our ability to communicate, to read, to write, to see pictures – is, technically, a Type I False Positive Error. To survive in the wilderness, you needed to interpret that ambiguous blur in the bushes as a predator. Because it could be one, for all you know. Better safe than sorry. Ignorance enables.
<p style=”text-align: left;”>”For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment —that’s where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments <…> are the most indispensable to us <…> To concede the fictional nature of the conditions of life means, of course, taking a dangerous stand against the customary feelings about value. A philosophy which dares to do that is for this reason alone already standing beyond good and evil.”</p>
<p style=”text-align: right;”>(Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”)</p>Just like freedom is not feeling the chains, the truth is not detecting the lies (informational discrepancies). “It is true, that there is no truth” is not a contradiction in the slightest, when it means “Operation accomplished, object X not detected in the environment” or “Thank god, god does not exist”
The “critique”, as far as I know, was coined by the Frankfurt School, who warns about Disenchantment. The Frankfurt School is notorious for being in opposition to science, and in a certain sense, such figures as Adorno do have a point. Science extinguishes everything “human” in human. The “injustice-talk” is moral, therefore normative and therefore, there are huge problems with it.
“What Nietzsche and Adorno glimpsed, each in their own murky way, was a recursive flaw in Enlightenment logic, the way the rationalization of everything meant the rationalization of rationalization, and how this has to short-circuit human meaning. Both saw the problem in the implementation, in the physiology of thought and community, not in the abstract.”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/03/20/enlightenment-how-pinkers-tutelary-natures/</p>If one has a student, and that student is, say, lazy and inattentive – chances are, you apply moral judgement. “They can do better, but don’t want to”. If, however, you acquire knowledge, that that person has, say, ADHD, then you know that being angry at them won’t work. Their brain works that way, they cannot do otherwise. Blame simply vanishes. Someone ignorant of that knowledge, ignorant of all the psychology-disorder-brain-talk, however, would consider that you are unjustly too lenient on someone (thus applying moral judgement on you)
“<…> I sometimes think that the kind of ‘liberal atrocity tales’ I seem to endlessly encounter among my nonacademic peers point in this direction. For those ignorant of the polluting information, the old judgments obviously apply, and stories of students not needing to give speeches in public-speaking classes, or homeless individuals being allowed to dump garbage in the river, float like sparks from tongue to tongue, igniting the conviction that we need to return to the old ways, thus convincing who knows how many to vote directly against their economic interests.”
“The problem, quite simply, is that the tools in our basic socio-cognitive toolbox are adapted to solve problems in the absence of mechanical cognition—it literally requires our blindness to certain kinds of facts to reliably function.”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/neuroscience-as-socio-cognitive-pollution/</p>In other words, the attempts to use the normative for solving problems are literally shown to be malfunctioning, in terms of framing “how much people know/ignore”. Moral judgement, a whole chunk of behaviours that we used to solve problems with, operates on ignorance and the stability of the “larger neglected system”. Moral judgement simply isn’t reliable anymore. As Joshua Greene points out:
“The tribes of the new pastures are engaged in bitter, often bloody conflict, even though they are all, in their different ways, moral peoples. They fight not because they are fundamentally selfish but because they have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be. These are not merely scholarly disagreements, although their scholars have those, too. Rather, each tribe’s philosophy is woven into its daily life. Each tribe has its own version of moral common sense. The tribes of the new pastures fight not because they are immoral but because they view life on the new pastures from very different moral perspectives. I call this the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality. ”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>(Joshua Greene, “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them”)</p>Jonathan Haidt also brings this up with the concept of “social matrix”:
“I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism. We supported liberal policies because we saw the world clearly and wanted to help people, but they supported conservative policies out of pure self-interest (lower my taxes!) or thinly veiled racism (stop funding welfare programs for minorities!). We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals. And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours.
When I moved from Yale to Penn, and then from Penn to the University of Chicago, the matrix stayed pretty much the same. It was only in India that I had to stand alone. Had I been there as a tourist it would have been easy to maintain my matrix membership for three months; I’d have met up now and then with other Western tourists, and we would have swapped stories about the sexism, poverty, and oppression we had seen. But because I was there to study cultural psychology I did everything I could to fit into another matrix, one woven mostly from the ethics of community and divinity.”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>(Jonathan Haidt – “The Righteous Mind. Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”)</p>Okay, moral judgements (“(in)justice”, “progressive”, etc.) aside, what do we seem to have then?
But if we set aside our traditional fetish for ‘reason’ and think of post-Medieval European society as a kind of information processing system, a zombie society, the story actually looks quite different. <…> the ‘death of God’ becomes the death of supervision <…>
On an information processing view, in other words, the European Enlightenment did not so much free up individuals as cognitive capacity. Once again, we need to appreciate the zombie nature of this view, how it elides ethical dimensions. On this view, traditional chauvinisms represent maladaptive optima, old fixes that now generate more problems than they solve. Groups were not so much oppressed, on this account, as underutilized. What we are prone to call ‘moral progress’ in folk political terms amounts to the optimization of collective neurocomputational resources.
Power begets power; efficiency, efficiency. Human ecologies were not only transformed, they were transformed in ways that facilitated transformation. Each new optimization selected and incorporated generated ecological changes, social or otherwise, changes bearing on the efficiency of previous optimizations.
<p style=”text-align: right;”>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-zombie-enlightenment/</p>In other words, that power/hierarchy thing we observe is not merely a thing of political economy. It’s an evolutionary event. Humans transform their environment, and that in turn further alters their behaviour (brains are heuristic, they rely on the environment). How do you stop an evolution?
As Jonathan Haidt in “The Righteous Mind” notes, “human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee”. Humans indeed act as sort of hivemind, but as R.S. Bakker points out it seems to work up to a certain limit:
“Technology, as the homily goes, ‘brings us closer’ across a variety of cognitive dimensions. Moral progress, then, can be understood as the sustained effect of deep (or ancestrally unavailable) social information cuing various ingroup responses–people recognizing fractions of themselves (procedural if not emotional bits) in those their grandfathers would have killed. The competitive benefits pertaining to cooperation suggest that ingroup trending cultures would gradually displace those trending otherwise.”
“<…>
Nothing guarantees moral progress outside the coincidence of certain capacities in certain conditions. Change those conditions, and you change the very function of human moral cognition.
So, for instance, what if something as apparently insignificant as the ‘online disinhibition effect’ has the gradual, aggregate effect of intensifying adversarial group identifications?”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2016/10/30/snuffing-the-spark-a-nihilistic-account-of-moral-progress/</p>
The left/right dichotomy, essentially, is less of a political debate, but, instead, an application of group selection. Both sides are numerous enough to afford having their own “reliable” sources to confirm whatever madness they consider to be the truth. Few would even consider hearing the critique.
“Populations begin spontaneously self-selecting. Big data identifies the vulnerable, who are showered with sociocognitive cues—atrocity tales to threaten, caricatures to amuse—engineered to provoke ingroup identification and outgroup alienation. In addition to ‘backfiring,’ counter-arguments are perceived as weapons, evidence of outgroup contempt for you and your own. And as the cognitive tactics become ever more adept at manipulating our biases, ever more scientifically informed, and as the cognitive technology becomes ever more sophisticated, ever more destructive of our ancestral cognitive habitat, the break between the two groups, we should expect, will only become more, not less, profound.”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/04/29/the-crash-of-truth-a-critical-review-of-post-truth-by-lee-c-mcintyre/</p>
“The toll of scientific progress, in other words, is cognitive ecological degradation.”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2018/03/27/enlightenment-how-omens-of-the-semantic-apocalypse/</p>To summarise, fetishizing something is literally the way human cognition works. Be it worshipping Capital, god, or raw power. The tools resolving via normative judgements, however, are becoming increasingly obsolete. The mixing between causal (investigating the nature of power) and normative (showing the injustice) won’t work, because the normative itself is problematic. The groups are becoming too big to consider hearing the reasoning of others – most rely on their own sources and consider outgroup competitors’ arguments as weapons.
That’s how Carl Schmitt, a Nazi, could become the darling of many leftists
Yet, if Donald Trump says “Earth is round”, then we would still have to agree with that statement, no?
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