http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/ship-of-fools-a-new-hermeneutic/
Ship Of Fools: A New Hermeneutic
There was in Greek mythology a very ancient divinity, traced back as far as Egypt, called Hermes, “messenger of the gods.” He was to interpret or translate the messages of gods into human words. He is also credited with the origin of alphabetic writing, cunning, deceit, and fraud. And there you have it… (the curriculum)!
Of course, messages from the gods were predominantly prescriptions on how to live (rituals, sacrifices) or proscriptions (codes of conduct, etc). After all, that was the principal role of the the World Religions as they emerged out of the early civilizations of the Ancient Near East. But the mouths of the gods were not the only place where such pronouncements originated, at least not for long. The earliest kings of the lands, considered divine incarnations themselves, also assumed the divine right to establish and maintain social order in the emerging city-states. Laws of the land were established, much like Hermes articulated the divine law, through the written word. It was more than likely that it was through the king that Hermes ‘spoke.’
So the interpretation of religious scripture, along with the proper application (interpretation) of legal codes (texts) became an ongoing concern for theologians and jurists (lawyers and justices) alike. Thus their concern gave way to the discipline of hermeneutics – theological and legal interpretations of divine or human law, respectively. And, of course, this is how the initial cunning, deceit and fraud of Hermes just kept on giving, and still gives today, more than ever.
And so, from Feuerbach, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Bultmann, H.G. Gadamer through Heidegger, we see the unfolding development of the problem of meaning – of the interpretation of religious, moral, social, and legal codes. In other words, we were forewarned that such proscriptions, prescriptions, rights and responsibilities of the citizenry were, and always will be, OPEN TO INTERPRETATION by the experts or those filling the seats of power. Thus do we find ourselves amidst and amok in our current dilemma. The very definitions that inform the laws of the land, and in this case, the definition of the words ‘terrorist,’ ‘spy’, ‘traitor’ are now haunting reminders of this hermeneutic appeal. Some of the edges are being blurred, stretched really beyond recognition (while my guitar gently weeps) — the hermeneutical advantage being driven by the law-makers and other self-anointed experts.
We can of course begin with the issue of ‘espionage’ and Obama’s remarkably free-style application of the ‘legal’ definition to include government or corporate whistle-blowers who choose to disclose issues that are morally or legally questionable, subject to informed debate and consent of the governed in light of the original conditions of the social contract. But, we already know that contracts (social or otherwise) are made to protect one party – the party that drew up the contract – and made to be broken in order to insure such protection is enforced or executed. So, I am afraid the Bradley Manning syndrome may continue unabated for the rest of our nation’s life. But, if you look at our militaristic response to the Occupy Wall Street movement a couple of years back, you will see the same, self-styled hermeneutic of events as they unfolded. There was no respect for freedom of assembly, association, or speech; the people on the streets were treated like ‘terrorists’ engaged in acts of terror. Now, the powers-that-be did not of course speak that way, but it is obvious from their collusion and their militaristic behavior that the cards are being reshuffled in a different direction and to their advantage. They have already gone so far as to inappropriately label whistleblowers as spies and traitors, and they have determined that terrorism is a rampant enough problem in our world, such that the wholesale collection of electronic telephonic, networking, and postal data is a reasonable measure consistent with their obligations to protect the nation, and that it should not to be confused with illegal wiretapping, monitoring, or censorship. It is truly revealing but not surprising that they would label Mr Snowden a spy, when all he did was to disclose the illegal spying of the US administration and their security agencies on American citizens.
Now we have the local Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation director warning a group of county residents that unfounded complaints about water quality could be considered “terrorism.”
You need to make sure that when you make water quality complaints you have a basis, because federally, if there’s no water quality issues, that can be considered under Homeland Security an act of terrorism.
So there you have it folks, another hermeneutic reassessment of the law of the land. But, as farcical as this appears on the face of it; hold your laughter folks and hold on to your hats. It’s only just begun. The band is heating up in the back room and the fat lady is beginning to sing. We will never, ever have a mass demonstration again in the Land of Washington, Franklin, Lincoln and Jefferson. We can never put the number of bodies in the streets as they did this week in Brazil. The powers that be would see this, interpret it, and proclaim it to be an act of TERROR!!
Mark my words, folks. Any congregation of people with the appearance of raising complaints, discussing relevant political issues, or, god-forbid, challenging the official narrative, automatically has the “signature” of a terrorist plot or engagement. Listen clearly, Chris Hedges. They will not allow you much more rope in this game of chicken. They have already laid the ground-work, and executed the strategy nearly flawlessly in Pakistan and other parts of the developing world. It is only a matter of time before they apply the same heuristic, and the same principles of interpretation (hermeneutic) here in the HomeLand!
We are all potential terrorists under the new hermeneutic, articulated so clearly just this week by the avenger-in-chief, (Hermes) Obama, messenger of the One God… MONEY! Collecting call and online data is legal and protective of the oligarchy’s rights under the terms of the contract. The release of classified information that identifies illegal actions of empire are acts of treason or acts of terror, pure and simple. Assembly or association or speech that is inconsistent with the embodiment of the official narrative is terrorism. This is where we are headed folks.
Put a half of million disgruntled citizens on the streets of this country (like they are doing in Brazil) and we will have a new federal prison open for business… the business of incarcerating citizen-terrorists… or we will just ship them off shore to a black-site somewhere for extraordinary rendition; or, perhaps disperse them with a few hundred armed drones. In any event, we, the government, will rid ourselves of some of those seven billion people that are crowding out the deserving few, the chosen, the owners, as George Carlin liked to say.
No folks, it won’t be long before questioning the authorities either online about public policy, or on the streets of a city near you en masse, will be interpreted as an act of espionage, treason, or terror — aiding and abetting the enemy. But, you know, Stalin had a much more efficient way of handling such challenges to his control and to his regime; he just sent folks off to gulags in Siberia, starved them to death in the winter, and then blamed it all on mother nature. I wonder upon what our authorities will blame the silencing of the voices of dissent here in the Home (of the brave)… Land (of the free). I’m certain it’s only a matter of them finding… or rather, articulating, the right hermeneutic!
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
SC118-5
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/the-executioner/
The Executioner!
He is the man behind the rough looking body guards lounging lazily in the Foster Grants… like the fearsome North African leaders of old; he determines who lives and who dies… He is the hegemon… the angel of death… the grim reaper… he is Barack Obama. This once and ‘wanna-be-eternal’ king singlehandedly destroys whatever is in its path, like a two mile wide tornado in Oklahoma, the worst wildfire in Colorado history, or a once-in-five-hundred-year flood in Germany; and he seems comfortable propagandizing or lying without compunction or guilt, worse even than Bill Clinton. (“I did not have sex with that woman.”) Obama does much better with his dissembling: “before any [drone] strike is taken there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured“). GW Bush… should take lessons from this man-god… and a wrathful one he is!
He appears to be responsible for more gratuitous killing across the planet than any of his evil predecessors, and certainly more already than the 9/11 hijackers. All in the name of freedom and democracy… and for the glory of god. What sacreligious crap. He kills indiscriminately with one hand as he takes away any of the presumed rights this State was founded upon with the other. He is taking care of the enemy! (definition – ‘anyone who would presume to take food or petrol from the hand or mouth of deserving American Oligarchs, their friends and co-conspirators’) So he is locking up the ‘in-mates’ as he whittles away at the ‘out-mates.’ Talk about having your cake and eating it!
His Special Ops paramilitary units carryout secret missions of assassination, while his drone-army-camps — comprised of pubescent boys with pimply faces sitting in their dirty underwear eating Cheetos and drinking Chocolate Yoohoo in some dingy Washington DC basement – kill babies, children, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, any one gathering for a meeting, a pic-nic, a game of pick-up basketball… or more than likely in Pakistan, a “jirga,” or assembly of tribal elders. Those are “signature strikes” ladies and gentlemen, taking out anyone who appears involved in any event that his ‘best and brightest’ computer-game geeks determine has the ‘signature’ of a terrorist gathering. WOW!! Sure seems simple enough; especially for the simple-minded Americans who buy this shit! But, sadly, the only thing ‘signature’ about these lucky strikes is the American John Hancock resting upon the lifeless forehead of every woman, child and harmless man.
Forty tribal elders dead!! killed by a ‘signature strike’ during a ‘pow-wow’ discussion of mining and logging issues in their local villages. WOW!! How the fuck do we do that? And get away with it! But, hey, anybody who can smile in the face of Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, and the black sites literally littered across the globe in our name, while compiling private electronic communications data on all Americans — someone like this can certainly handle the indiscriminate killing of innocents in the name of his god, whatever its name happens to be.
But, don’t you know it… the killing non-Western indigenous types appears to be high priority on the agenda in preparation for the final leg of the race. The empire must find ways to reduce planetary population overshoot so that the imperialists have more stuff to consume until it all ends… perhaps extending their party a few more years. Remember, “he who dies with the most toys wins!” This is the ugly face of empire folks, as it makes the short strokes to “the end of time as we have known it.” Like most ‘actors’ on the civic stage throughout roughly 5,000 years of recorded history, our politicians have nothing more to offer us but increased control, oversight, manipulation and the threat of death. Nothing has really changed throughout the entire time… only the tools to manage the masses.
Do not let historians or histories of the founding of this ‘republic’ fool you. It was all a bunch of wealthy merchants, land owners, lawyers and charlatans with political clout that created a set of laws and documents to steal whatever they could from the indigenous populations here, and enrich themselves while importing slaves from Europe and Africa to tend their fields and work their machines. Furthermore, those documents and laws are always subject to hermeneutic revision, repeatedly revised and reinterpreted in order to satisfy the requirements of the managers and owners today. That is the nature of the beast we face. And they can rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite as long as they like… it is built in to the system… And so while the tribal elders in Pakistan sit down to discuss the meaning of things in their communities… our leaders redefine the meaning of the law, so as to allow them to murder those tribal elders by drone, and to do so without reprisal. We are the executioner!
The Executioner!
He is the man behind the rough looking body guards lounging lazily in the Foster Grants… like the fearsome North African leaders of old; he determines who lives and who dies… He is the hegemon… the angel of death… the grim reaper… he is Barack Obama. This once and ‘wanna-be-eternal’ king singlehandedly destroys whatever is in its path, like a two mile wide tornado in Oklahoma, the worst wildfire in Colorado history, or a once-in-five-hundred-year flood in Germany; and he seems comfortable propagandizing or lying without compunction or guilt, worse even than Bill Clinton. (“I did not have sex with that woman.”) Obama does much better with his dissembling: “before any [drone] strike is taken there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured“). GW Bush… should take lessons from this man-god… and a wrathful one he is!
He appears to be responsible for more gratuitous killing across the planet than any of his evil predecessors, and certainly more already than the 9/11 hijackers. All in the name of freedom and democracy… and for the glory of god. What sacreligious crap. He kills indiscriminately with one hand as he takes away any of the presumed rights this State was founded upon with the other. He is taking care of the enemy! (definition – ‘anyone who would presume to take food or petrol from the hand or mouth of deserving American Oligarchs, their friends and co-conspirators’) So he is locking up the ‘in-mates’ as he whittles away at the ‘out-mates.’ Talk about having your cake and eating it!
His Special Ops paramilitary units carryout secret missions of assassination, while his drone-army-camps — comprised of pubescent boys with pimply faces sitting in their dirty underwear eating Cheetos and drinking Chocolate Yoohoo in some dingy Washington DC basement – kill babies, children, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, any one gathering for a meeting, a pic-nic, a game of pick-up basketball… or more than likely in Pakistan, a “jirga,” or assembly of tribal elders. Those are “signature strikes” ladies and gentlemen, taking out anyone who appears involved in any event that his ‘best and brightest’ computer-game geeks determine has the ‘signature’ of a terrorist gathering. WOW!! Sure seems simple enough; especially for the simple-minded Americans who buy this shit! But, sadly, the only thing ‘signature’ about these lucky strikes is the American John Hancock resting upon the lifeless forehead of every woman, child and harmless man.
Forty tribal elders dead!! killed by a ‘signature strike’ during a ‘pow-wow’ discussion of mining and logging issues in their local villages. WOW!! How the fuck do we do that? And get away with it! But, hey, anybody who can smile in the face of Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, and the black sites literally littered across the globe in our name, while compiling private electronic communications data on all Americans — someone like this can certainly handle the indiscriminate killing of innocents in the name of his god, whatever its name happens to be.
But, don’t you know it… the killing non-Western indigenous types appears to be high priority on the agenda in preparation for the final leg of the race. The empire must find ways to reduce planetary population overshoot so that the imperialists have more stuff to consume until it all ends… perhaps extending their party a few more years. Remember, “he who dies with the most toys wins!” This is the ugly face of empire folks, as it makes the short strokes to “the end of time as we have known it.” Like most ‘actors’ on the civic stage throughout roughly 5,000 years of recorded history, our politicians have nothing more to offer us but increased control, oversight, manipulation and the threat of death. Nothing has really changed throughout the entire time… only the tools to manage the masses.
Do not let historians or histories of the founding of this ‘republic’ fool you. It was all a bunch of wealthy merchants, land owners, lawyers and charlatans with political clout that created a set of laws and documents to steal whatever they could from the indigenous populations here, and enrich themselves while importing slaves from Europe and Africa to tend their fields and work their machines. Furthermore, those documents and laws are always subject to hermeneutic revision, repeatedly revised and reinterpreted in order to satisfy the requirements of the managers and owners today. That is the nature of the beast we face. And they can rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite as long as they like… it is built in to the system… And so while the tribal elders in Pakistan sit down to discuss the meaning of things in their communities… our leaders redefine the meaning of the law, so as to allow them to murder those tribal elders by drone, and to do so without reprisal. We are the executioner!
SC118-4
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/our-intersubjective-pyschosis/
Our Intersubjective Pyschosis
At this point in our inglorious, star-mangled history, I am not quite sure which is the more psychotic behavior of empire: 1) its willful ignorance, even public denial, of human induced climate change, 2) its belligerent efforts to control all remaining global resources, 3) its relentless destruction of the natural world and its delicate ecosystems, 4) its determination to mitigate global over-shoot through a violent RIF of the ‘unwashed masses’, or 5) its perserve attempts to protect the sanctity and secrecy of its own conspiratorial mischief in these and other matters.
There seem to be more regular folk now coming out to challenge imperial designs. They are not just academics or random anarchists, they are among the regular rank-and-file of the first world, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, John Kiriakou. And wouldn’t you know it, they are all white males, with Anglo-European names, the very bread and butter of imperial majesty. But, why would these sorts push so hard against against the court of the crimson king; surely they jest. Indeed, they are among its chosen ones; those who could otherwise contribute mightily to empire building, and succeed in this world that kings did convene. Why would they suddenly cut and run? These were not vagrants, beggars, bums, or lazy no-good-nicks.
Why, as well, would the likes of Guy McPhearson, a respected tenured professor at Arizona State University walk away from the ‘goodlife?’ Why does Snowden or Manning jeopardize ‘promising’ careers serving the hegemon? And why are random acts of violence becoming more frequent in the streets of the land of good-and-plenty, with the rampant murder of innocents, and why are these acts apparently carried out largely by white men, again, the bedrock of empire?
Why, furthermore, does empire continue to whittle away at the presumed freedoms upon which this nation-State was based? What is everybody so damned mad about? What is happening to this society, and to its world? Or was it always in a potential state of chaos, founded upon the mistaken illusion that use of the word ‘democracy’ could of itself take us over the hump of hierarchy with its rational objectification of everything that is ‘other.’
Why is the likes a Chris Hedges, an award winning and respected war journalist, well-educated and articulate, on an unrelenting tear to stop this monster in its tracks? Why are the blogs of Kunstler, Orlov, Greer, Ruppert, and LeaverGirl so popular? I am afraid the first-world as it has been built and rolled out to the globe is beginning to look rather unseemly, untenable, perhaps because it is grounded on questionable assumptions.
Whether its the biggest fire in Colorado’s history, the greatest flood Germany has seen in the last 500 years, the largest most destructive series of tornados in Oklahoma ever witnessed, the costliest terror attack on American soil, the longest war against an unidentified enemy with mostly ignored collateral damage; we see none of this in any way related to how we live our lives here in empire, how we belligerently assert our rights around the globe and into the body and soul of (mother) nature. We do not want to understand that our need to consume, our need for novelty, for progress and expansion, for technological and territorial ascendency, that these are root causes of our current crises, natural or otherwise. We refuse to admit the obvious because once you have gone down this road it is nearly impossible to turn back… just ask those who were late to the party – the Russians, the Chinese and the Indians, for example.
The disarming of Iran, the arming of Syria… of course, we only desire world peace, as long as we maintain control of all the pieces. And, of course, now we have cyber-terrorists, computer-hackers, data-jackers and digital-thiefs… but what do we call the assholes who simply tap the providers on the shoulder and say, send us a backdoor link, we need CONTROL? Who then is the real terrorist on the block? Do we need to be worried about Bradley, or perhaps it is smarter to worry about Barry? Who is the more dangerous threat to human life and the health of the planet? Of course, they are telling us the correct answer to these questions as they have defined the realities, and so we agree because we share the self-same delusions.
Yet, to assume the objective reality of the world as presented in our particular cultural costume might merely be an instance of grand intersubjective psychosis, where we are all insanely following some ‘big men’ as we are led down a primrose path to perdition, a path we simply cannot recognize for what it is, or rather, that if it is pointed out to us, it is the messenger that is seen as delusional, for we have already agreed on what’s really real.
How to break through to the other side of this hypnosis is the fundamental problem of our age, perhaps of any age. It is not an easy task, because the landscape we seek to describe and the words we have to describe it are inadequate to the task. The very logic of control, the assignment of guilt, the appeal to natural rights or human nature… all the words are fraught with significance within the system itself, and their use militates against breaking down the collective (intersubjective) psychosis that entraps us all. So, the answer they give us is simple… ‘these are all sick and deluded criminals who must be stopped in the name of objective reality.’ Remember Daniel Elsberg, ‘the most dangerous man in America,’ the man who unleashed The Pentagon Papers; now a people’s hero for disclosing the horors of the day. But, then he was a madman, a criminal, who must be stopped.
Any alternate reality or heterodox description of reality, must be wrong, because only our reality provides really concrete results and is therefore self-justifying. Anyone contradicting the standard narrative is delusional or criminal or both. But, of course, it is the standard narrative, revised according to need, that serves as cover for their own delusional, criminal activity.
Our Intersubjective Pyschosis
At this point in our inglorious, star-mangled history, I am not quite sure which is the more psychotic behavior of empire: 1) its willful ignorance, even public denial, of human induced climate change, 2) its belligerent efforts to control all remaining global resources, 3) its relentless destruction of the natural world and its delicate ecosystems, 4) its determination to mitigate global over-shoot through a violent RIF of the ‘unwashed masses’, or 5) its perserve attempts to protect the sanctity and secrecy of its own conspiratorial mischief in these and other matters.
There seem to be more regular folk now coming out to challenge imperial designs. They are not just academics or random anarchists, they are among the regular rank-and-file of the first world, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz, John Kiriakou. And wouldn’t you know it, they are all white males, with Anglo-European names, the very bread and butter of imperial majesty. But, why would these sorts push so hard against against the court of the crimson king; surely they jest. Indeed, they are among its chosen ones; those who could otherwise contribute mightily to empire building, and succeed in this world that kings did convene. Why would they suddenly cut and run? These were not vagrants, beggars, bums, or lazy no-good-nicks.
Why, as well, would the likes of Guy McPhearson, a respected tenured professor at Arizona State University walk away from the ‘goodlife?’ Why does Snowden or Manning jeopardize ‘promising’ careers serving the hegemon? And why are random acts of violence becoming more frequent in the streets of the land of good-and-plenty, with the rampant murder of innocents, and why are these acts apparently carried out largely by white men, again, the bedrock of empire?
Why, furthermore, does empire continue to whittle away at the presumed freedoms upon which this nation-State was based? What is everybody so damned mad about? What is happening to this society, and to its world? Or was it always in a potential state of chaos, founded upon the mistaken illusion that use of the word ‘democracy’ could of itself take us over the hump of hierarchy with its rational objectification of everything that is ‘other.’
Why is the likes a Chris Hedges, an award winning and respected war journalist, well-educated and articulate, on an unrelenting tear to stop this monster in its tracks? Why are the blogs of Kunstler, Orlov, Greer, Ruppert, and LeaverGirl so popular? I am afraid the first-world as it has been built and rolled out to the globe is beginning to look rather unseemly, untenable, perhaps because it is grounded on questionable assumptions.
Whether its the biggest fire in Colorado’s history, the greatest flood Germany has seen in the last 500 years, the largest most destructive series of tornados in Oklahoma ever witnessed, the costliest terror attack on American soil, the longest war against an unidentified enemy with mostly ignored collateral damage; we see none of this in any way related to how we live our lives here in empire, how we belligerently assert our rights around the globe and into the body and soul of (mother) nature. We do not want to understand that our need to consume, our need for novelty, for progress and expansion, for technological and territorial ascendency, that these are root causes of our current crises, natural or otherwise. We refuse to admit the obvious because once you have gone down this road it is nearly impossible to turn back… just ask those who were late to the party – the Russians, the Chinese and the Indians, for example.
The disarming of Iran, the arming of Syria… of course, we only desire world peace, as long as we maintain control of all the pieces. And, of course, now we have cyber-terrorists, computer-hackers, data-jackers and digital-thiefs… but what do we call the assholes who simply tap the providers on the shoulder and say, send us a backdoor link, we need CONTROL? Who then is the real terrorist on the block? Do we need to be worried about Bradley, or perhaps it is smarter to worry about Barry? Who is the more dangerous threat to human life and the health of the planet? Of course, they are telling us the correct answer to these questions as they have defined the realities, and so we agree because we share the self-same delusions.
Yet, to assume the objective reality of the world as presented in our particular cultural costume might merely be an instance of grand intersubjective psychosis, where we are all insanely following some ‘big men’ as we are led down a primrose path to perdition, a path we simply cannot recognize for what it is, or rather, that if it is pointed out to us, it is the messenger that is seen as delusional, for we have already agreed on what’s really real.
How to break through to the other side of this hypnosis is the fundamental problem of our age, perhaps of any age. It is not an easy task, because the landscape we seek to describe and the words we have to describe it are inadequate to the task. The very logic of control, the assignment of guilt, the appeal to natural rights or human nature… all the words are fraught with significance within the system itself, and their use militates against breaking down the collective (intersubjective) psychosis that entraps us all. So, the answer they give us is simple… ‘these are all sick and deluded criminals who must be stopped in the name of objective reality.’ Remember Daniel Elsberg, ‘the most dangerous man in America,’ the man who unleashed The Pentagon Papers; now a people’s hero for disclosing the horors of the day. But, then he was a madman, a criminal, who must be stopped.
Any alternate reality or heterodox description of reality, must be wrong, because only our reality provides really concrete results and is therefore self-justifying. Anyone contradicting the standard narrative is delusional or criminal or both. But, of course, it is the standard narrative, revised according to need, that serves as cover for their own delusional, criminal activity.
Monday, June 10, 2013
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/10-2
The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning
The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.” And this is what has happened.
Manning is also barred from presenting to the court his motives for giving the website WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and videos. The issues of his motives and potentially harming national security can be raised only at the time of sentencing, but by then it will be too late.
The draconian trial restrictions, familiar to many Muslim Americans tried in the so-called war on terror, presage a future of show trials and blind obedience. Our email and phone records, it is now confirmed, are swept up and stored in perpetuity on government computers. Those who attempt to disclose government crimes can be easily traced and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Whistle-blowers have no privacy and no legal protection. This is why Edward Snowden—a former CIA technical assistant who worked for a defense contractor with ties to the National Security Agency and who leaked to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian the information about the National Security Council’s top-secret program to collect Americans’ cellphone metadata, e-mail and other personal data—has fled the United States. The First Amendment is dead. There is no legal mechanism left to challenge the crimes of the power elite. We are bound and shackled. And those individuals who dare to resist face the prospect, if they remain in the country, of joining Manning in prison, perhaps the last refuge for the honest and the brave.
Coombs opened the trial last week by pleading with the judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, for leniency based on Manning’s youth and sincerity. Coombs is permitted by Lind to present only circumstantial evidence concerning Manning’s motives or state of mind. He can argue, for example, that Manning did not know al-Qaida might see the information he leaked. Coombs is also permitted to argue, as he did last week, that Manning was selective in his leak, intending no harm to national interests. But these are minor concessions by the court to the defense. Manning’s most impassioned pleas for freedom of information, especially regarding email exchanges with the confidential government informant Adrian Lamo, as well as his right under international law to defy military orders in exposing war crimes, are barred as evidence.
Manning is unable to appeal to the Nuremberg principles, a set of guidelines created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations after World War II to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles make political leaders, commanders and combatants responsible for war crimes, even if domestic or internal laws allow such actions. The Nuremberg principles are designed to protect those, like Manning, who expose these crimes. Orders do not, under the Nuremberg principles, offer an excuse for committing war crimes. And the Nuremberg laws would clearly condemn the pilots in the “Collateral Murder” video and their commanders and exonerate Manning. But this is an argument we will not be allowed to hear in the Manning trial.
Manning has admitted to 10 lesser offenses surrounding his leaking of classified and unclassified military and State Department files, documents and videos, including the “Collateral Murder” video, which shows a U.S. Apache attack helicopter in 2007 killing 12 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and wounding two children on an Iraqi street. His current plea exposes him to penalties that could see him locked away for two decades. But for the government that is not enough. Military prosecutors are pursuing all 22 charges against him. These charges include aiding the enemy, wanton publication, espionage, stealing U.S. government property, exceeding authorized access and failures to obey lawful general orders—charges that can bring with them 149 years plus life.
“He knew that the video depicted a 2007 attack,” Coombs said of the “Collateral Murder” recording. “He knew that it [the attack] resulted in the death of two journalists. And because it resulted in the death of two journalists it had received worldwide attention. He knew that the organization Reuters had requested a copy of the video in FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] because it was their two journalists that were killed, and they wanted to have that copy in order to find out what had happened and to ensure that it didn’t happen again. He knew that the United States had responded to that FOIA request almost two years later indicating what they could find and, notably, not the video.
“He knew that David Finkel, an author, had written a book called ‘The Good Soldiers,’ and when he read through David Finkel’s account and he talked about this incident that’s depicted in the video, he saw that David Finkel’s account and the actual video were verbatim, that David Finkel was quoting the Apache air crew. And so at that point he knew that David Finkel had a copy of the video. And when he decided to release this information, he believed that this information showed how [little] we valued human life in Iraq. He was troubled by that. And he believed that if the American public saw it, they too would be troubled and maybe things would change.”
“He was 22 years old,” Coombs said last Monday as he stood near the bench, speaking softly to the judge at the close of his opening statement. “He was young. He was a little naive in believing that the information that he selected could actually make a difference. But he was good-intentioned in that he was selecting information that he hoped would make a difference.”
“He wasn’t selecting information because it was wanted by WikiLeaks,” Coombs concluded. “He wasn’t selecting information because of some 2009 most wanted list. He was selecting information because he believed that this information needed to be public. At the time that he released the information he was concentrating on what the American public would think about that information, not whether or not the enemy would get access to it, and he had absolutely no actual knowledge of whether the enemy would gain access to it. Young, naive, but good-intentioned.”
The moral order is inverted. The criminal class is in power. We are the prey. Manning, in a just society, would be a prosecution witness against war criminals. Those who committed these crimes should be facing prison. But we do not live in a just society.
The Afghans, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis and the Somalis know what American military forces do. They do not need to read WikiLeaks. They have seen the bodies, including the bodies of their children, left behind by drone strikes and other attacks from the air. They have buried the corpses of those gunned down by coalition forces. With fury, they hear our government tell lies, accounts that are discredited by the reality they endure. Our wanton violence and hypocrisy make us hated and despised, fueling the rage of jihadists and amassing legions of new enemies against the United States. Manning, by providing a window into the truth, opened up the possibility of redemption. He offered hope for a new relationship with the Muslim world, one based on compassion and honesty, on the rule of law, rather than the cold brutality of industrial warfare. But by refusing to heed the truth that Manning laid before us, by ignoring the crimes committed daily in our name, we not only continue to swell the ranks of our enemies but put the lives of our citizens in greater and greater danger. Manning did not endanger us. He sought to thwart the peril that is daily exacerbated by our political and military elite.
Manning showed us through the documents he released that Iraqis have endured hundreds of rapes and murders, along with systematic torture by the military and police of the puppet government we installed. He let us know that none of these atrocities were investigated. He provided the data that showed us that between 2004 and 2009 there were at least 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians, and that coalition troops were responsible for at least 195 civilian deaths in unreported events. He allowed us to see in the video “Collateral Murder” the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad. It was because of Manning that we could listen to the callous banter between pilots as the Americans nonchalantly fired on civilian rescuers. Manning let us see a U.S. Army tank crush one of the wounded lying on the street after the helicopter attack. The actions of the U.S. military in this one video alone, as law professor Marjorie Cohn has pointed out, violate Article 85 of the First Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the targeting of civilians, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires that wounded be treated, and Article 17 of the First Protocol, which permits civilians to rescue and care for wounded without being harmed. We know of this war crime and many others because of Manning. And the decision to punish the soldier who reported these war crimes rather than the soldiers responsible for these crimes mocks our pretense of being a nation ruled by law.
“I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this, it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Manning said Feb. 28 when he pleaded guilty to the lesser charges. He said he hoped the release of the information to WikiLeaks “might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counterterrorism while ignoring the situation of the people we engaged with every day.”
But it has not. Our mechanical drones still circle the skies delivering death. Our attack jets still blast civilians. Our soldiers and Marines still pump bullets into mud-walled villages. Our artillery and missiles still raze homes. Our torturers still torture. Our politicians and generals still lie. And the man who tried to stop it all is still in prison.
The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning
The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.” And this is what has happened.
Manning is also barred from presenting to the court his motives for giving the website WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and videos. The issues of his motives and potentially harming national security can be raised only at the time of sentencing, but by then it will be too late.
The draconian trial restrictions, familiar to many Muslim Americans tried in the so-called war on terror, presage a future of show trials and blind obedience. Our email and phone records, it is now confirmed, are swept up and stored in perpetuity on government computers. Those who attempt to disclose government crimes can be easily traced and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Whistle-blowers have no privacy and no legal protection. This is why Edward Snowden—a former CIA technical assistant who worked for a defense contractor with ties to the National Security Agency and who leaked to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian the information about the National Security Council’s top-secret program to collect Americans’ cellphone metadata, e-mail and other personal data—has fled the United States. The First Amendment is dead. There is no legal mechanism left to challenge the crimes of the power elite. We are bound and shackled. And those individuals who dare to resist face the prospect, if they remain in the country, of joining Manning in prison, perhaps the last refuge for the honest and the brave.
Coombs opened the trial last week by pleading with the judge, Army Col. Denise Lind, for leniency based on Manning’s youth and sincerity. Coombs is permitted by Lind to present only circumstantial evidence concerning Manning’s motives or state of mind. He can argue, for example, that Manning did not know al-Qaida might see the information he leaked. Coombs is also permitted to argue, as he did last week, that Manning was selective in his leak, intending no harm to national interests. But these are minor concessions by the court to the defense. Manning’s most impassioned pleas for freedom of information, especially regarding email exchanges with the confidential government informant Adrian Lamo, as well as his right under international law to defy military orders in exposing war crimes, are barred as evidence.
Manning is unable to appeal to the Nuremberg principles, a set of guidelines created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations after World War II to determine what constitutes a war crime. The principles make political leaders, commanders and combatants responsible for war crimes, even if domestic or internal laws allow such actions. The Nuremberg principles are designed to protect those, like Manning, who expose these crimes. Orders do not, under the Nuremberg principles, offer an excuse for committing war crimes. And the Nuremberg laws would clearly condemn the pilots in the “Collateral Murder” video and their commanders and exonerate Manning. But this is an argument we will not be allowed to hear in the Manning trial.
Manning has admitted to 10 lesser offenses surrounding his leaking of classified and unclassified military and State Department files, documents and videos, including the “Collateral Murder” video, which shows a U.S. Apache attack helicopter in 2007 killing 12 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and wounding two children on an Iraqi street. His current plea exposes him to penalties that could see him locked away for two decades. But for the government that is not enough. Military prosecutors are pursuing all 22 charges against him. These charges include aiding the enemy, wanton publication, espionage, stealing U.S. government property, exceeding authorized access and failures to obey lawful general orders—charges that can bring with them 149 years plus life.
“He knew that the video depicted a 2007 attack,” Coombs said of the “Collateral Murder” recording. “He knew that it [the attack] resulted in the death of two journalists. And because it resulted in the death of two journalists it had received worldwide attention. He knew that the organization Reuters had requested a copy of the video in FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] because it was their two journalists that were killed, and they wanted to have that copy in order to find out what had happened and to ensure that it didn’t happen again. He knew that the United States had responded to that FOIA request almost two years later indicating what they could find and, notably, not the video.
“He knew that David Finkel, an author, had written a book called ‘The Good Soldiers,’ and when he read through David Finkel’s account and he talked about this incident that’s depicted in the video, he saw that David Finkel’s account and the actual video were verbatim, that David Finkel was quoting the Apache air crew. And so at that point he knew that David Finkel had a copy of the video. And when he decided to release this information, he believed that this information showed how [little] we valued human life in Iraq. He was troubled by that. And he believed that if the American public saw it, they too would be troubled and maybe things would change.”
“He was 22 years old,” Coombs said last Monday as he stood near the bench, speaking softly to the judge at the close of his opening statement. “He was young. He was a little naive in believing that the information that he selected could actually make a difference. But he was good-intentioned in that he was selecting information that he hoped would make a difference.”
“He wasn’t selecting information because it was wanted by WikiLeaks,” Coombs concluded. “He wasn’t selecting information because of some 2009 most wanted list. He was selecting information because he believed that this information needed to be public. At the time that he released the information he was concentrating on what the American public would think about that information, not whether or not the enemy would get access to it, and he had absolutely no actual knowledge of whether the enemy would gain access to it. Young, naive, but good-intentioned.”
The moral order is inverted. The criminal class is in power. We are the prey. Manning, in a just society, would be a prosecution witness against war criminals. Those who committed these crimes should be facing prison. But we do not live in a just society.
The Afghans, the Iraqis, the Yemenis, the Pakistanis and the Somalis know what American military forces do. They do not need to read WikiLeaks. They have seen the bodies, including the bodies of their children, left behind by drone strikes and other attacks from the air. They have buried the corpses of those gunned down by coalition forces. With fury, they hear our government tell lies, accounts that are discredited by the reality they endure. Our wanton violence and hypocrisy make us hated and despised, fueling the rage of jihadists and amassing legions of new enemies against the United States. Manning, by providing a window into the truth, opened up the possibility of redemption. He offered hope for a new relationship with the Muslim world, one based on compassion and honesty, on the rule of law, rather than the cold brutality of industrial warfare. But by refusing to heed the truth that Manning laid before us, by ignoring the crimes committed daily in our name, we not only continue to swell the ranks of our enemies but put the lives of our citizens in greater and greater danger. Manning did not endanger us. He sought to thwart the peril that is daily exacerbated by our political and military elite.
Manning showed us through the documents he released that Iraqis have endured hundreds of rapes and murders, along with systematic torture by the military and police of the puppet government we installed. He let us know that none of these atrocities were investigated. He provided the data that showed us that between 2004 and 2009 there were at least 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians, and that coalition troops were responsible for at least 195 civilian deaths in unreported events. He allowed us to see in the video “Collateral Murder” the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad. It was because of Manning that we could listen to the callous banter between pilots as the Americans nonchalantly fired on civilian rescuers. Manning let us see a U.S. Army tank crush one of the wounded lying on the street after the helicopter attack. The actions of the U.S. military in this one video alone, as law professor Marjorie Cohn has pointed out, violate Article 85 of the First Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the targeting of civilians, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which requires that wounded be treated, and Article 17 of the First Protocol, which permits civilians to rescue and care for wounded without being harmed. We know of this war crime and many others because of Manning. And the decision to punish the soldier who reported these war crimes rather than the soldiers responsible for these crimes mocks our pretense of being a nation ruled by law.
“I believed if the public, particularly the American public, could see this, it could spark a debate on the military and our foreign policy in general as it applied to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Manning said Feb. 28 when he pleaded guilty to the lesser charges. He said he hoped the release of the information to WikiLeaks “might cause society to reconsider the need to engage in counterterrorism while ignoring the situation of the people we engaged with every day.”
But it has not. Our mechanical drones still circle the skies delivering death. Our attack jets still blast civilians. Our soldiers and Marines still pump bullets into mud-walled villages. Our artillery and missiles still raze homes. Our torturers still torture. Our politicians and generals still lie. And the man who tried to stop it all is still in prison.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
SC118-2
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
The Scheduled Death of God
There's a mordant irony in the fact that a society as fixated on the future as ours is should have so much trouble thinking clearly about it. Partly, to be sure, that difficulty unfolds from the sheer speed of social and technological change in the age of cheap abundant energy that’s now coming to an end, but there’s more to it than that.
In the civil religions of the modern world, the future functions as a surrogate for heaven and hell alike, the place where the wicked will finally get the walloping they deserve and the good will be granted the promised benefits that the present never quite gets around to providing them. What Nietzsche called the death of God—in less colorful language, the fading out of living religious belief as a significant force in public life—left people across the Western world flailing for something to backstop the sense of moral order in the cosmos they once derived from religious faith. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a great many of them found what they wanted in one or another civil religion that projected some version of utopia onto the future.
It’s crucial not to underestimate the emotional force of the resulting beliefs. The future of perpetual betterment promised by the faith in progress, and the utopia on the far side of cataclysm promised with equal fervor by the faith in apocalypse, are no less important to their believers than heaven is to the ordinary Christian, and for exactly the same reason. Every human society has its own conception of the order of the cosmos; the distinctive concept of cosmic order that became central to the societies of Europe and the European diaspora envisioned a moral order that could be understood, down to the fine details, by human beings. Since everyday life pretty clearly fails to follow such an order, there had to be some offstage location where everything would balance out, whether that location took the form of heaven, humanity’s future among the stars, a future society of equality and justice, or what have you. Discard that imagined place and, for a great many people in the Western world, the cosmos ceases to have any order or meaning at all.
It was precisely against this sense of moral order, though, that Nietzsche declared war. Like any good general, he sent his forces into action along several routes at once; the assault relevant to our theme was aimed at the belief that the arithmetic of morality would finally add up in some other place or time. He rejected the idea of a utopian world of past or future just as forcefully as he did the concept of heaven itself. That’s one of the things his doctrine of eternal return was intended to do: by revisioning the past and the future as endless repetition, Nietzsche did his level best to block any attempt to make the past or the future fill the role once filled by heaven.
Here, though, he overplayed his hand. Strictly speaking, a cycle of eternal return is just as imaginary as any golden age in the distant past, or for that matter the glorious future come the Revolution when we will all eat strawberries and cream. In a philosophy that presents itself as a Yes-saying to life exactly as it is, his reliance on a theory of time just as unprovable as those he assaulted was a massive problem. Nietzsche’s madness, and the resolute effort on the part of most European intellectuals of the time not to think about any of the issues he tried to raise, left this point among many others hanging in the air. Decades passed before another German thinker tackled the same challenge with better results. His name, as I think most of my regular readers have guessed by now, was Oswald Spengler.
Spengler was in his own way as eccentric a figure as Nietzsche, though it was a more stereotypically German eccentricity than Nietzsche’s fey Dionysian aestheticism. A cold, methodical, solitary man, he spent his entire working life as a schoolteacher, and all his spare time—he never married—with his nose in a polymath’s banquet of books from every corner of scholarship. Old Kingdom Egyptian theology, traditional Chinese landscape design, the history of the medieval Russian church, the philosophical schools of ancient India, the latest discoveries in early twentieth century physics: all these and more were grist for his highly adaptable mill. In 1914, as the impending fall of the British empire was sweeping Europe into a vortex of war, he started work on the first volume of The Decline of the West; it appeared in 1918, and the second volume followed it in 1922.
The books became immediate bestsellers in German and several other languages—this despite a world-class collective temper tantrum on the part of professional historians. Logos, one of the most prestigious German scholarly journals of the time, ran an entire special issue on him, in which historians engaged in a frenzy of nitpicking about Spengler’s historical claims. (Spengler, unperturbed, read the issue, doublechecked his facts, released a new edition of his book with corrections, and pointed out that none of the nitpicking addressed any of the major points of his book; he was right, too.) One study of the furore around Spengler noted more than 400 publications, most of them hostile, discussing The Decline of the West in the decade of the 1920s alone.
Interest in Spengler’s work peaked in the 1920s and 1930s and faded out after the Second World War; some of the leading figures of the "Beat generation" used to sit around a table reading The Decline of the West out loud, and a few other figures of the 1950s drew on his ideas, but thereafter silence closed in. There’s an ironic contrast here to Nietzsche, who provided Spengler with so many of his basic insights; Nietzsche’s work was almost completely unknown during his life and became a massive cultural presence after his death; with Spengler, the sequence ran the other way around.
The central reason why Spengler was so fiercely if inconclusively attacked by historians in his own time, and so comprehensively ignored since then, is the same reason why he’s relevant to the present theme. At the core of his work stood the same habit of morphological thinking I discussed in an earlier post in this sequence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who launched the study of comparative morphology in the life sciences in the eighteenth century, remained a massive cultural presence in the Germany of Spengler’s time, and so it came naturally to Spengler to line up the great civilizations of history side by side and compare their histories, in the same way that a biologist might compare a dolphin’s flipper to a bat’s wing, to see the common patterns of deep structure that underlie the surface differences.
Such comparisons are surprisingly unfashionable in modern historical studies. Most other fields of study rely on comparisons as a matter of course: the astronomer compares one nebula to another, just as the literary critic compares one experimental novel to another, and in both fields it’s widely accepted that such comparisons are the most important way to get past irrelevancies to an understanding of what’s really going on. There are historical works that compare, say, one revolution to others, or one feudal system to another, but these days they’re in the minority. More often, historians consider the events of some period in the past by themselves, without placing them in the context of comparable periods or events, and either restrict themselves to storytelling or propose assorted theories about the causes of those events—theories that can never be put to the test, because it’s all but impossible to test a hypothesis when you’re limited to a sample size of one.
The difficulty with a morphological approach to history is precisely that a sample size of more than one turns up patterns that next to nobody in the modern industrial world wants to think about. By placing past civilizations side by side with that of the modern industrial West, Spengler found that all the great historical changes that our society sees as uniquely its own have exact equivalents in older societies. Each society emerges out of chaos as a decentralized feudal society, with a warrior aristocracy and an epic poetry so similar that an enterprising bard could have recited the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh in an Anglo-Saxon meadhall without anyone present sensing the least incongruity. Each then experiences corresponding shifts in social organization: the meadhalls and their equivalents give way to castles, the castles to fortified towns, the towns to cities, and then a few of the cities outgrow all the others and become the centers in which the last stages of the society’s creative life are worked out.
Meanwhile, in the political sphere, feudal aristocrats become subject to kings, who are displaced by oligarchies of the urban rich, and these latter eventually fall before what Spengler calls Caesarism, the emergence of charismatic leaders who attract a following from the urban masses and use that strength to seize power from the corrupt institutions of an oligarchic state. Traditional religions rich in myth give way to rationalist philosophies as each society settles on the intellectual projects that will define its legacy to the future—for example, logical method in the classical world, and natural science in ours. Out of the diverse background of folk crafts and performances, each culture selects the set of art forms that will become the focus of its creative life, and these evolve in ever more distinctive ways; Gilgamesh and Beowulf could just as well have swapped swords and fought each other’s monsters, for example, but the briefest glance at plays from ancient Greece, India, China, and the Western world shows a wholly different dramatic and aesthetic language at work in each.
All this might have been forgiven Spengler, but the next step in the comparison passes into territory that makes most people in the modern West acutely uncomfortable. Spengler argued that the creative potential of every culture is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, everything worth bothering with that can be done with Greek sculpture, Chinese porcelain, Western oil painting, or any other creative art has been done; sooner or later, the same exhaustion occurs in every other dimension of a culture’s life—its philosophies, its political forms, you name it. At that point, in the terms that Spengler used, a culture turns into a civilization, and its focus shifts from creating new forms to sorting through the products of its creative centuries, choosing a selection of political, intellectual, religious, artistic, and social patterns that will be sustainable over the long term, and repeating those thereafter in much the same way that a classical orchestra in the modern West picks and chooses out of the same repertoire of standard composers and works.
As that last example suggests, furthermore, Spengler didn’t place the transition from Western culture to its subsequent civilization at some conveniently far point in the future. According to his chronology, that transition began in the nineteenth century and would be complete by 2100 or so. The traditional art forms of the Western world would reach the end of the line, devolving into empty formalism or staying on in mummified form, the way classical music is preserved today; political ideologies would turn into empty slogans providing an increasingly sparse wardrobe to cover the naked quest for power; Western science, having long since exhausted the low-hanging fruit in every field, would wind down into a repetition of existing knowledge, and most forms of technology would stagnate, while a few technological fields capable of yielding grandiose prestige projects would continue to be developed for a while; rationalism would be preserved in intellectual circles, while popular religious movements riddled with superstition would rule the mental life of the bulk of the population. Progress in any Western sense of the word would be over forever, for future cultures would choose their own directions in which to develop, as different from ours as ours is from the traditional Chinese or the Mayans.
Spengler didn’t leave these projections of the future in abstract form; he turned them into detailed predictions about the near future, and those predictions have by and large turned out to be correct. He was wrong in thinking that Germany would become an imperial state that would unite the Western world the way Rome united the classical world, the kingdom of Qin united China, and so on, though it’s fair to say that Germany’s two efforts to fill that role came uncomfortably close to succeeding. Other than that, his aim has proved remarkably good.
He argued, for example, that the only artistic forms that could have any vitality in 20th century Europe and America would take their inspiration from other, non-Western cultures. Popular music, which was dominated by African-derived jazz in the first half of the century and African-derived rock thereafter, is only one of many examples. As for politics, he suggested that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be dominated by a struggle pitting charismatic national dictators against a globalized oligarchy of high finance lightly concealed under a mask of democracy, a struggle that the financiers would eventually lose. Though the jury’s still out on the final outcome, the struggle itself is splashed over the news on a daily basis.
All these events took place in other times and places, and will take place in future societies, each in its own way. What distinguishes contemporary Western society from earlier urban civilizations, according to Spengler’s view, is not that it’s "more advanced," "more progressive"—every society goes in a different direction, and proceeds along that route until the same law of diminishing returns cuts in—but simply that it happened to take mastery of physical matter and energy as its special project, and in the process stumbled across the buried carbon we’re burning so extravagantly just now. It’s hard to think of any historical vision less flattering to the inherited egotism of the modern industrial West; it deprives us of our imagined role as the cutting edge of humanity in its grand upward march toward the stars, and plops us back down to earth as just one civilization among many, rising and falling along with the rest.
It’s in this way that Spengler proved to be Nietzsche’s heir. Where Nietzsche tried to challenge the imaginary utopia at the end of history with an equally imaginary vision of eternal return, Spengler offered a vision that was not imaginary, but rather rested on a foundation of historical fact. Where Nietzsche’s abandonment of a moral order to the cosmos left him staring into an abyss in which order and meaning vanished once and for all, Spengler presented an alternative vision of cosmic order in which morality is not a guiding principle, but simply a cultural form, human-invented, that came and went with the tides of history. Life was as much Spengler’s banner as it was Nietzsche’s, life in the full biological sense of the word, unreasoning, demanding, and resistant to change over less than geological time scales; the difference was that Nietzsche saw life as the abyss, while Spengler used it to found his sense of an ordered universe and ultimately his values as well.
It’s among the richest ironies of Spengler’s project that among the things that he relativized and set in a historic context was Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche liked to imagine himself as a figure of destiny, poised at the turning point of the ages—this was admittedly a common occupational disease of nineteenth-century philosophers. Spengler noted his debts to Nietzsche repeatedly in The Decline of the West, but kept a sense of perspective the older man lacked; in the table of historical parallels that finishes the first volume of Spengler’s book, Nietzsche has become one more symptom of the late, "Winter" phase of Western culture, one of many figures participating in the final disintegration of traditional religious thought at the hands of skeptical intellectuals proposing new systems of philosophical ethics.
When Nietzsche announced the death of God, in other words, he was filling a role familiar in other ages, announcing an event that occurs on schedule in the life of each culture. The Greek historian Plutarch had announced the death of Pan some eighteen centuries earlier, around the time that the classical world was settling firmly into the end-state of civilization; the people of ancient Crete, perhaps recalling some similar event even further back, used to scandalize Greek tourists by showing them the grave of Zeus. Every literate urban society, Spengler argued, followed the same trajectory from an original folk religion rich in myths, through the rise of intellectual theology, the birth of rationalism, the gradual dissolution of the religious worldview into rational materialism, and then the gradual disintegration of rational materialism into a radical skepticism that ends by dissolving itself; thereafter ethical philosophies for the intellectuals and resurgent folk religion for the masses provide the enduring themes for the civilization to come.
It’s a stark vision, especially painful to those who have been raised to see the most recent phases of that process in our own culture as the heralds of the bright new era of history presupposed by the Joachimist shape of time, or the initial shockwaves of the imminent apocalypse presupposed by its Augustinian rival. Defenders of these latter viewpoints have accordingly developed standard ways of countering Spengler’s challenge—or, more precisely, defenders of both have settled on the same way of doing so. We’ll discuss their argument, and place it in its own wider context, in next week’s post.
The Scheduled Death of God
There's a mordant irony in the fact that a society as fixated on the future as ours is should have so much trouble thinking clearly about it. Partly, to be sure, that difficulty unfolds from the sheer speed of social and technological change in the age of cheap abundant energy that’s now coming to an end, but there’s more to it than that.
In the civil religions of the modern world, the future functions as a surrogate for heaven and hell alike, the place where the wicked will finally get the walloping they deserve and the good will be granted the promised benefits that the present never quite gets around to providing them. What Nietzsche called the death of God—in less colorful language, the fading out of living religious belief as a significant force in public life—left people across the Western world flailing for something to backstop the sense of moral order in the cosmos they once derived from religious faith. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a great many of them found what they wanted in one or another civil religion that projected some version of utopia onto the future.
It’s crucial not to underestimate the emotional force of the resulting beliefs. The future of perpetual betterment promised by the faith in progress, and the utopia on the far side of cataclysm promised with equal fervor by the faith in apocalypse, are no less important to their believers than heaven is to the ordinary Christian, and for exactly the same reason. Every human society has its own conception of the order of the cosmos; the distinctive concept of cosmic order that became central to the societies of Europe and the European diaspora envisioned a moral order that could be understood, down to the fine details, by human beings. Since everyday life pretty clearly fails to follow such an order, there had to be some offstage location where everything would balance out, whether that location took the form of heaven, humanity’s future among the stars, a future society of equality and justice, or what have you. Discard that imagined place and, for a great many people in the Western world, the cosmos ceases to have any order or meaning at all.
It was precisely against this sense of moral order, though, that Nietzsche declared war. Like any good general, he sent his forces into action along several routes at once; the assault relevant to our theme was aimed at the belief that the arithmetic of morality would finally add up in some other place or time. He rejected the idea of a utopian world of past or future just as forcefully as he did the concept of heaven itself. That’s one of the things his doctrine of eternal return was intended to do: by revisioning the past and the future as endless repetition, Nietzsche did his level best to block any attempt to make the past or the future fill the role once filled by heaven.
Here, though, he overplayed his hand. Strictly speaking, a cycle of eternal return is just as imaginary as any golden age in the distant past, or for that matter the glorious future come the Revolution when we will all eat strawberries and cream. In a philosophy that presents itself as a Yes-saying to life exactly as it is, his reliance on a theory of time just as unprovable as those he assaulted was a massive problem. Nietzsche’s madness, and the resolute effort on the part of most European intellectuals of the time not to think about any of the issues he tried to raise, left this point among many others hanging in the air. Decades passed before another German thinker tackled the same challenge with better results. His name, as I think most of my regular readers have guessed by now, was Oswald Spengler.
Spengler was in his own way as eccentric a figure as Nietzsche, though it was a more stereotypically German eccentricity than Nietzsche’s fey Dionysian aestheticism. A cold, methodical, solitary man, he spent his entire working life as a schoolteacher, and all his spare time—he never married—with his nose in a polymath’s banquet of books from every corner of scholarship. Old Kingdom Egyptian theology, traditional Chinese landscape design, the history of the medieval Russian church, the philosophical schools of ancient India, the latest discoveries in early twentieth century physics: all these and more were grist for his highly adaptable mill. In 1914, as the impending fall of the British empire was sweeping Europe into a vortex of war, he started work on the first volume of The Decline of the West; it appeared in 1918, and the second volume followed it in 1922.
The books became immediate bestsellers in German and several other languages—this despite a world-class collective temper tantrum on the part of professional historians. Logos, one of the most prestigious German scholarly journals of the time, ran an entire special issue on him, in which historians engaged in a frenzy of nitpicking about Spengler’s historical claims. (Spengler, unperturbed, read the issue, doublechecked his facts, released a new edition of his book with corrections, and pointed out that none of the nitpicking addressed any of the major points of his book; he was right, too.) One study of the furore around Spengler noted more than 400 publications, most of them hostile, discussing The Decline of the West in the decade of the 1920s alone.
Interest in Spengler’s work peaked in the 1920s and 1930s and faded out after the Second World War; some of the leading figures of the "Beat generation" used to sit around a table reading The Decline of the West out loud, and a few other figures of the 1950s drew on his ideas, but thereafter silence closed in. There’s an ironic contrast here to Nietzsche, who provided Spengler with so many of his basic insights; Nietzsche’s work was almost completely unknown during his life and became a massive cultural presence after his death; with Spengler, the sequence ran the other way around.
The central reason why Spengler was so fiercely if inconclusively attacked by historians in his own time, and so comprehensively ignored since then, is the same reason why he’s relevant to the present theme. At the core of his work stood the same habit of morphological thinking I discussed in an earlier post in this sequence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who launched the study of comparative morphology in the life sciences in the eighteenth century, remained a massive cultural presence in the Germany of Spengler’s time, and so it came naturally to Spengler to line up the great civilizations of history side by side and compare their histories, in the same way that a biologist might compare a dolphin’s flipper to a bat’s wing, to see the common patterns of deep structure that underlie the surface differences.
Such comparisons are surprisingly unfashionable in modern historical studies. Most other fields of study rely on comparisons as a matter of course: the astronomer compares one nebula to another, just as the literary critic compares one experimental novel to another, and in both fields it’s widely accepted that such comparisons are the most important way to get past irrelevancies to an understanding of what’s really going on. There are historical works that compare, say, one revolution to others, or one feudal system to another, but these days they’re in the minority. More often, historians consider the events of some period in the past by themselves, without placing them in the context of comparable periods or events, and either restrict themselves to storytelling or propose assorted theories about the causes of those events—theories that can never be put to the test, because it’s all but impossible to test a hypothesis when you’re limited to a sample size of one.
The difficulty with a morphological approach to history is precisely that a sample size of more than one turns up patterns that next to nobody in the modern industrial world wants to think about. By placing past civilizations side by side with that of the modern industrial West, Spengler found that all the great historical changes that our society sees as uniquely its own have exact equivalents in older societies. Each society emerges out of chaos as a decentralized feudal society, with a warrior aristocracy and an epic poetry so similar that an enterprising bard could have recited the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh in an Anglo-Saxon meadhall without anyone present sensing the least incongruity. Each then experiences corresponding shifts in social organization: the meadhalls and their equivalents give way to castles, the castles to fortified towns, the towns to cities, and then a few of the cities outgrow all the others and become the centers in which the last stages of the society’s creative life are worked out.
Meanwhile, in the political sphere, feudal aristocrats become subject to kings, who are displaced by oligarchies of the urban rich, and these latter eventually fall before what Spengler calls Caesarism, the emergence of charismatic leaders who attract a following from the urban masses and use that strength to seize power from the corrupt institutions of an oligarchic state. Traditional religions rich in myth give way to rationalist philosophies as each society settles on the intellectual projects that will define its legacy to the future—for example, logical method in the classical world, and natural science in ours. Out of the diverse background of folk crafts and performances, each culture selects the set of art forms that will become the focus of its creative life, and these evolve in ever more distinctive ways; Gilgamesh and Beowulf could just as well have swapped swords and fought each other’s monsters, for example, but the briefest glance at plays from ancient Greece, India, China, and the Western world shows a wholly different dramatic and aesthetic language at work in each.
All this might have been forgiven Spengler, but the next step in the comparison passes into territory that makes most people in the modern West acutely uncomfortable. Spengler argued that the creative potential of every culture is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, everything worth bothering with that can be done with Greek sculpture, Chinese porcelain, Western oil painting, or any other creative art has been done; sooner or later, the same exhaustion occurs in every other dimension of a culture’s life—its philosophies, its political forms, you name it. At that point, in the terms that Spengler used, a culture turns into a civilization, and its focus shifts from creating new forms to sorting through the products of its creative centuries, choosing a selection of political, intellectual, religious, artistic, and social patterns that will be sustainable over the long term, and repeating those thereafter in much the same way that a classical orchestra in the modern West picks and chooses out of the same repertoire of standard composers and works.
As that last example suggests, furthermore, Spengler didn’t place the transition from Western culture to its subsequent civilization at some conveniently far point in the future. According to his chronology, that transition began in the nineteenth century and would be complete by 2100 or so. The traditional art forms of the Western world would reach the end of the line, devolving into empty formalism or staying on in mummified form, the way classical music is preserved today; political ideologies would turn into empty slogans providing an increasingly sparse wardrobe to cover the naked quest for power; Western science, having long since exhausted the low-hanging fruit in every field, would wind down into a repetition of existing knowledge, and most forms of technology would stagnate, while a few technological fields capable of yielding grandiose prestige projects would continue to be developed for a while; rationalism would be preserved in intellectual circles, while popular religious movements riddled with superstition would rule the mental life of the bulk of the population. Progress in any Western sense of the word would be over forever, for future cultures would choose their own directions in which to develop, as different from ours as ours is from the traditional Chinese or the Mayans.
Spengler didn’t leave these projections of the future in abstract form; he turned them into detailed predictions about the near future, and those predictions have by and large turned out to be correct. He was wrong in thinking that Germany would become an imperial state that would unite the Western world the way Rome united the classical world, the kingdom of Qin united China, and so on, though it’s fair to say that Germany’s two efforts to fill that role came uncomfortably close to succeeding. Other than that, his aim has proved remarkably good.
He argued, for example, that the only artistic forms that could have any vitality in 20th century Europe and America would take their inspiration from other, non-Western cultures. Popular music, which was dominated by African-derived jazz in the first half of the century and African-derived rock thereafter, is only one of many examples. As for politics, he suggested that the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be dominated by a struggle pitting charismatic national dictators against a globalized oligarchy of high finance lightly concealed under a mask of democracy, a struggle that the financiers would eventually lose. Though the jury’s still out on the final outcome, the struggle itself is splashed over the news on a daily basis.
All these events took place in other times and places, and will take place in future societies, each in its own way. What distinguishes contemporary Western society from earlier urban civilizations, according to Spengler’s view, is not that it’s "more advanced," "more progressive"—every society goes in a different direction, and proceeds along that route until the same law of diminishing returns cuts in—but simply that it happened to take mastery of physical matter and energy as its special project, and in the process stumbled across the buried carbon we’re burning so extravagantly just now. It’s hard to think of any historical vision less flattering to the inherited egotism of the modern industrial West; it deprives us of our imagined role as the cutting edge of humanity in its grand upward march toward the stars, and plops us back down to earth as just one civilization among many, rising and falling along with the rest.
It’s in this way that Spengler proved to be Nietzsche’s heir. Where Nietzsche tried to challenge the imaginary utopia at the end of history with an equally imaginary vision of eternal return, Spengler offered a vision that was not imaginary, but rather rested on a foundation of historical fact. Where Nietzsche’s abandonment of a moral order to the cosmos left him staring into an abyss in which order and meaning vanished once and for all, Spengler presented an alternative vision of cosmic order in which morality is not a guiding principle, but simply a cultural form, human-invented, that came and went with the tides of history. Life was as much Spengler’s banner as it was Nietzsche’s, life in the full biological sense of the word, unreasoning, demanding, and resistant to change over less than geological time scales; the difference was that Nietzsche saw life as the abyss, while Spengler used it to found his sense of an ordered universe and ultimately his values as well.
It’s among the richest ironies of Spengler’s project that among the things that he relativized and set in a historic context was Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche liked to imagine himself as a figure of destiny, poised at the turning point of the ages—this was admittedly a common occupational disease of nineteenth-century philosophers. Spengler noted his debts to Nietzsche repeatedly in The Decline of the West, but kept a sense of perspective the older man lacked; in the table of historical parallels that finishes the first volume of Spengler’s book, Nietzsche has become one more symptom of the late, "Winter" phase of Western culture, one of many figures participating in the final disintegration of traditional religious thought at the hands of skeptical intellectuals proposing new systems of philosophical ethics.
When Nietzsche announced the death of God, in other words, he was filling a role familiar in other ages, announcing an event that occurs on schedule in the life of each culture. The Greek historian Plutarch had announced the death of Pan some eighteen centuries earlier, around the time that the classical world was settling firmly into the end-state of civilization; the people of ancient Crete, perhaps recalling some similar event even further back, used to scandalize Greek tourists by showing them the grave of Zeus. Every literate urban society, Spengler argued, followed the same trajectory from an original folk religion rich in myths, through the rise of intellectual theology, the birth of rationalism, the gradual dissolution of the religious worldview into rational materialism, and then the gradual disintegration of rational materialism into a radical skepticism that ends by dissolving itself; thereafter ethical philosophies for the intellectuals and resurgent folk religion for the masses provide the enduring themes for the civilization to come.
It’s a stark vision, especially painful to those who have been raised to see the most recent phases of that process in our own culture as the heralds of the bright new era of history presupposed by the Joachimist shape of time, or the initial shockwaves of the imminent apocalypse presupposed by its Augustinian rival. Defenders of these latter viewpoints have accordingly developed standard ways of countering Spengler’s challenge—or, more precisely, defenders of both have settled on the same way of doing so. We’ll discuss their argument, and place it in its own wider context, in next week’s post.
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