An Assembler's blog

If philosophy was sold by the pound...

2011-11-29T07:37:00.000-08:00

Printout of just one person's words from, Neoliberalism is touching us all. All just to talk about that which cannot be said. "Look what they make you do... " -- Clive Owen's character, The Bourne Identity.

"Government" and "Free market" as tautologies...

2011-10-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

Over and over instruments of power in social relationships try to make us believe that some abstraction they call "free market" can work without some form of instrument, which they pretend to be against, called "government".

If one wishes to think for oneself, it's imperative to deconstruct tautologies, because tautologies cannot help us to think things through:

government is virtually always coercive since....

the free market is always non-coercive since....

Well, what is government? Without a negative dialectic we are left with nothing but positivist declarations, and we can only apply truth values to such declarations. So how about a little negative space around the positive declaration to give it some definition, like the space between notes in a jazz piece so that you know it's music not just some endless noise: "Government" is not a thing in itself. It is first of all a word, one that applies to an abstract set of rules implying organization, rules humans imagine in relationship with each other to achieve some sense of orderliness amongst themselves. And we do that because... why? Don't jump to an answer. At the very least we all together do that to achieve an order of some kind.

Is it not fair to assume that kind of agreement has always existed in some form amongst the social beings we know ourselves to be, whether written down or in the very daily set of relationships that are part of the very cooperative small hunter gathering groups that our great-great ancestors devised for daily survival? Today that set of relationships has become vastly more complex. One can maybe recognize that in doing so it has achieved vast and complex sets of rules, many codified as "law" to accommodate the many more people alive now compared to a hundred thousand year ago. Those rules, whether written down or not, are always an instrument to be put in play by the actors in society. They are nothing without actors. They couldn't be imagined without imaginers.

When that set of relationships we call "government" fails to work for everyone, then people are free -- if they realize it -- to change the abstract rules of their relationships.

This is a fact because it is something that can actually take place. Thus, there can be no nature or god dictated fact of rules, like an Old Testament or Bible, or even a Constitution, that says the ones who have managed to get all the toys in their little sandbox get to keep them. People all have to agree to that. It takes actual, get up in the morning, put on your clothes agreement for that to happen. The 1% get to keep theirs only if everyone agrees to play by the rules. And there are only a few ways the powerful can get everyone to agree to this arrangement. One of those ways is: people are said to agree when the lie that we are a voting democracy legitimizing this relationship is generally accepted as what is taking place. Everybody agrees and everyone just goes along.

The 1% own and control 90% everything and the rest have about 10% of what's left is believed to be the way of things. It's natural because it's "obvious" the 1% ______ed it. Put in whatever operative logic you want. An important instrument in maintaining that belief is the power to control ideas, otherwise known in the Twentieth Century as "public relations" or, we can use the other word, not so pretty, propaganda, which comes in many flavors and varieties.

When that "belief" in those abstract ideas that maintain control suddenly disappears, which can happen very suddenly, like when the rent of mortgage payment can't be made, the food can't be bought, the gas for the car can't be purchased, and people rise up in revolt, then the other end of the management logic spectrum comes into play and those who are the organized enforcement instruments for keeping this social fiction going can invoke systems of logic that wield the technology of force. Again, individual human beings must do any of this, a policeman must willingly perform as a machine of enforcement in the institutional system of logic that involves keeping the order. A policeman must do his job, there's no cpu, there's no software, a human being does this. Exactly how no one has yet been able to say with absolute certainty. And without that certainty, we ought to be respectful of each other and what we do.

It's helpful to keep these contradictory assumptions in perspective by the conscious recognition that this enforcement instrument includes the highly developed institutional force that has evolved into modern day police and military technological instruments. These are all part of social evolutionary principles involving technology.

Technology, and a society that is now fundamentally technological in its very organization, is not a one person invention. Technology comes out of a milieu of culture. The languages we take for granted are part of this phenomenon. No individual invents their own language they learn to use by the time they are three years of age. Nor can any individual even use the technology them without language. No individual proclaim to the world that they own a piece of property without language. And technology, which is now our medium of existence, cannot exist without all the parts of that milieu organizing in a constant process, most of which takes place through the agreement in actions of individuals.

Someone has to perform any act for the sake of governing -- that is, making sure things stay in some sort of order. The governed as well as the enforcers of rules must act. No governing instrument, whether a corporation of a state government, happens on its own. Is that not obvious? And that brings up the question of power. And the question of power brings up the question of what exactly we are perceiving in this growing phenomenon we are now calling OWS. And everyone is stumbling over each other to try to control that phenomenon, which implies disorder, and disorder implies fear of the unknown, with ideas, word, labels.

A "free market" as a fact cannot possibly exist outside a social and cultural system of some kind. Which of course brings about a question: what does the word "free" mean? Yet the phrase is tossed around as if it's a reference to some technological instrument of its own, not just a logical line written in a piece of software. That may be the mistake of trying to make sense of things in an utterly rational fashion, and if you read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations you may notice that he too was struggling with the contradiction of his own logical device, the creation of the concept: "free market".

We have inherited that struggle and we are experiencing its inevitable creation: cognitive dissonance. Because a market is merely a the sum of actions, a living and ongoing process, essentially the relationships between people within a common set, and consciously or unconsciously, depending on the awareness and intelligence of those involved, it is an agreed upon set of relaitonships between human beings.

The current CEO President

2011-08-31T09:33:00.000-07:00

David Edwards in his article: Kucinich: Obama's job czar expert at creating foreign jobs quoted Kucinich as saying:

“He has expertise in job creation, but, unfortunately for the United States, seems to be creating jobs in other countries. One-fifth of the U.S. work force has been eliminated since that gentleman had taken the helm of GE,” Kucinich explained.

“If the White House doesn’t have a jobs policy and they go to somebody who is not only moving his jobs out of the country, but also off-shoring profits so he is not paying a share of the taxes GE ought to be paying, look, the White House has to get a grip on its jobs policy.”

That's a polite, even politically correct way for a moderate, even respectable Democrat to tell us that this Administration is screwing Americans like the others before it. Especially so since Reagan and the push for global regulation change (termed in neoliberal speak: "Deregulation").

The presidency in this nation has been transforming before our eyes for some time now. It's been transforming from a soapbox where a national figurehead speaks for the good of all the people to a CEO arm of the most powerful private collectives ever formed on this planet -- of which GE's Jeffrey is merely yet another prime example on this President's list of appointments. We now have a predominance of heads of private for profit collectives in positions of power under the head corporate CEO, who once upon a time in a hard to remember liberal la la land was the spokesperson for a nation who legitimized the position by voting for it as such.

The Unitary Executive is here, now. And so in this transformation people are still voting, but the grand corporate spectacle called "the media" no longer exposes what the person running for office really stands for. Kucinich was carefully screened in the last March of the Trolls in order to keep this sort of information minimized from public view. Had it not been minimized more people might have had the courage of their convictions and not dutifully legitimized the current sitting corporate CEO in the Oval Office.

Though serious representatives of the people (a dwindling group) like Kucinich struggled to bring the fight for us to bear with attempts to call this act of corporate deceit to task during the last administration -- Kucinich introduces Bush impeachment resolution -- the media successfully snuffed him, now an accepted de rigueur act, and so these perfidious political actors go on to sneer at the general populace, win awards for their deceitful advertising campaigns, and now grab power through a multitude of carefully scripted routs as they redefine the U.S. constitution for the benefit of the powerful business interests, and on we go. No doubt Cheney will make another bundle of money with his latest bit of self promoting propaganda, his memoirs, or as non corporate media Robert Sheer sees it: A Deceit of Shakespearean Proportions. Don't look for Sheer's article in the NYTimes.

Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell would be proud of his compatriots in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Read it and weep, unless you're among the powerful who've benefitted: The Powell Manifesto

His "manifesto" marks the beginning of the trend that transformed the Presidency into a corporate CEO; shortly after sending it to the head of the Chamber of Commerce in August, 1971, he was nominated by Nixon and subsequently appointed to the Supreme Court by Congress.

On the Rise of homo sapiens economicus

2011-08-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

As a so-called fact, those statistical derivatives people toss around about life span improvement, like: "the reason your life expectancy is 75 years and not 45 years is due to capitalism" are questionable. Also questionable is the notion that it is some sort of advance. It would appear that an increasing percentage of people are being kept alive at greater expense, like the cost of creating technologies (drugs are technologies) that keep Type 1 diabetics alive. I learned from a physical anthropologist that more people died in the relatively brief hundred and some odd thousand years of modern humans from tooth infections and directly related factors than any other cause. I don't know how true that is.

Anyone who has bothered to sort through the pile of debris we call history will recognize that technology and capitalism are not co-related in a one to one formula. Thus to assume an economic system causes technological innovation is something of a logical fallacy. It's more like they share characteristics in a Venn diagram.

Human beings have been creating and sharing technologies at least since they discovered how to chip rocks to make spears and knives. They were probably using "found" tools long before that, and that use of tools or technologies would be called "technique". Both technology and technique are shared and they are subsets of a larger set we can call human culture. Human innovation is involved in the creation and use of all technologies and associated techniques. This is a factor of our ability to create systems as groups to increase our survival potential.

Capitalism is merely an economic system that creates a mold that favors homo sapiens economicus. It is not a culture. Though it's arguable that some version of mass global culture results from its principles now.

To maximize its economic imperatives, capitalism needs to employ techniques of efficiency or there won't be any surplus capital to reinvest. Efficiency always come down to energy. So efficiency is a factor of the study of physics in the real world. It's generally true that those efficiency techniques arise from individual effort, but once discovered they can be institutionalized. Thus, as populations grow and centralize, as maximizing energy sources and flows comes to bear on survival, that brings on the techniques of institutionalization. Since the so-called discovery of the "science" of management by Henry R Towne in the late 1800s at the height of the Robber Baron era, bureaucratic efficiencies have grown in status as a field and are now a subject taught in most major universities, because, after all, they are important to "the system". Institutionalizing as a social process is therefore another effect of the evolving technology/technique process, and individuals often find themselves at odds with institutions. This is true of those who think of themselves as capitalists, artists, intellectuals and all sorts of individuals. Institutions are system creating and generalizing factors and not all individuals want to fit the mold of an institution.

Technologies also evolve correlated to the employment of techniques. It seems no technique can be invented that cannot be improved. The question of improvement often hinges on the energy equation involved in changing one technique for a better one. Decision makers often calculate that improvement may not give enough return on investment so they stick with what works. Whole techniques are involved in making those calculations.

Yet techniques do evolve and they do make the application of technology standardized in societies that adopt them. As the techniques become vertically integrated on a global scale (one of the real effects of "deregulating" the global environment through NAFTA, GATT, and other trade agreements), more societies tend to mirror each other. Entrepreneurial spirit plays a role in this evolution, but with the increasing size of societies it becomes increasingly minor. Once a system of institutions based on these evolving techniques is in place, large privately-owned collectives, known as corporations, swallow up the results of these spirited individual innovations and often put them to use in the system in ways that fit the overall spectrum created by the need for efficiency. Interestingly, public collectives, such as those we see evolving in China, Japan, even the United States, follow that same pattern of these transnational private collectives that are pushing for deregulating the global environment now. Thus these efficiency techniques are employed by all major political state systems in the world now and as a result economics has become a major defining factor in modern societies. Hooray for homo economicus! The bold new homo sapiens!

Flame Skimmer Dragonflies

2011-08-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

The Flame Skimmer Dragonfly is a marvelous species of dragonfly known by the scientific name Libellula saturata. They have bright colors to display, along with their simple designs, making them truly amazing. Their naiad form is different then most dragonflies, but they still grow up to be fast, ordinary dragonflies. This dragonfly looks like a little flame as its bright orange coat rushes by.

Greek etymology

2011-06-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

Angel Pictures

2011-04-03T23:12:00.000-07:00

Silver

2011-04-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

Jill Bolte's Award Winning Stroke of Insight

2010-10-12T07:21:00.000-07:00

Constitutional Crisis Issues

2008-05-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

A Suggested Cure for a Constitutional Crisis

(Note, you can view the entire discussion at Bill Moyer's Journal: Tough Talk on Impeachment)

My Thoughts:

Whatever the founders may have imagined when they were designing this governing system was inevitably based on the availability of only a very few democratic prototypes to choose from at the time. And their own imaginations were, by the very nature of constructed imagination as we now understand it with our modern cognitive sciences, an accumulation of memes of organizational boilerplates mishmashed together through 12,000 years of humanly evolved social complexity experiments. This appears to have begun after some of our species began experimenting and leaving behind the simple, easy to self manage group problem solving strategy of wandering bands of hunter gatherers, a strategy that had brought us through several million years of evolution to the beginnings of a brilliant innovation: the agricultural subsistence strategy ages and their correlated social organizations somewhat arrogantly coined as "civilizations." And now, perhaps, the creative combining of various cultural memes developed through this period has brought us all to the edge of our doom -- but that's another story.

While apparently Ben Franklin brought in some ideas from the Iroquois participatory democracy model, for the most part the US prototype drew from the Roman Republic model, and thus we got the vestigial Roman Senate thrust into our bicameral legislature to represent what they imagined needing representation, and that was the states themselves, somehow separated in concept from the people. After all, there simply wasn't a big supermarket of democracy prototypes to choose from, and these guys had to finally, somehow, come up with something.

Most of those Founders were of the elite of their time, educated in the classical traditions of Europe, so knowing what we know about the mind now, we can assume their imaginations conscribed to what they knew at that time. That's one reason why our Constitution is called an experiment. They really did not know how it would actually work out once in play. Since then a lot of different democracy models have evolved. Ours is arguably something of an antique, being an early experiment founded in the horse and buggy mentality of its day.

Perhaps 19th Century American Exceptionalism still holds sway in our thinking and the accumulated traditions of American hubris makes questioning the document's greatness inhibitory. Because I find that trying to bring up the subject of actually redesigning the Constitution does not perk up many ears.

One of the problems I suspect embedded in our Constitution's design is that power in any hierarchical order of society acts like a drug, and it works in many nefarious ways. Most of the Founders were from a European class structure in which as elites they had advantages they took for granted. The "drug of power" of their very positions can be expected to have dimmed their imaginative faculties, no matter how excited they each may have been about the new "revolution of individualism" they were in, and they had difficulty extending full humanity and a corresponding application of the Bill of Rights to all the individuals we are now willing to consider fully human in this country after some 200 years.

What they didn't know was that a presidential system itself has ontological implications built in, and no matter how much they didn't want it to become like the monarchies of Europe, they didn't recognize how evolution of institutions themselves can supersede the individual. We ourselves still focus on personality, when it's the institution itself that the next president will inherit, and much of what they say while stumping for election will vanish once they sit in the seat of power.

With the evolution of society, the growth of corporations, and the economic system that altogether has evolved, all along the way the government has had to try to adapt to meet the Constitutional mandates and the contingencies of reality. What's being tested in the process is the legal structure itself. Often the resolutions are an unhappy result of paradox, like applying the 14th Amendment, which is about individuals, to a corporate entity, the private corporation, and declaring that a corporate entity is a person under the law. The very notion of the revolution of individualism and the Bill of Rights is thrown into some sort of conceptual chaos with that.

What's evolved is a result of basic structures that were in place, some of those results have memic features that are almost Frankensteinian in their very DNA. The point is there may have been no way to interpret the Constitution that could have come out to look anything like what the Founders hoped for, and a kind of legal fundamentalism calling upon an originalist interpretaiton itself puts a chain around the pressures calling for a creative approach to problem solving that maintains democracy. If we find we are giving up our democracy for anything -- security from terrorism, for instance -- then perhaps there may be an inherent structural problem worth considering in the Constitution itself.

Howard Zinn on "the Best of wars"

2008-05-26T11:49:00.000-07:00

What did you learn from WWII, Howard?

Colbert "Finger-Waggin' at the Boss"

2008-05-23T17:33:00.000-07:00

Born ...in the U S A

Born ...in the U S A

"I think there were, you know... some verses, but I'm more of a chorus guy."

The Warrior Many Tongues

2008-05-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

I awoke this morning hearing a voice saying:

"Beware of the warrior Many Tongues whose mind is cluttered with things and he walks the earth in confusion, deep in his fear of the Great Spirit Emptiness, for he knows that without Emptiness there would be no-thing."

I lay there a trying to remember the dream and the events that led up to that voice, and trying to visualize the face, but it wouldn't come back to me. But I could still remember the phrase and the sound of the voice, so I reached for my leather bound journal on the nearby night stand, fumbled around for the pen, and I managed to write it down without losing the memory of it. It's sometimes very hard for me to write down phrases I hear in dreams, they just vanish when I try.

The thoughts and feelings from that dream hung about me like a sheer gray curtain, as I got up and began my morning. I made my coffee, turned on the computer, and sat back for a moment, looked at the headlines on a news page, but I was not really reading them.

It seemed like a koan. "Without Emptiness there would be no-thing." Just enough of a pause between the "no" and the "thing" to seem like two words, but said to sound like "nothing."

Thoughts of the meaning of infinite and spirit crossed through my mind, like old memories, for I'd thought such thoughts many times. Yet somehow this dream phrase seemed freshly related. The age old corporeal problem, the spirit world and the ever emergence of things surrounded by space, or nothing, which ancient philosophers hypothesized to be composed of something, and now modern philosophers, in the form of physicists are imagining it to be something as well. But if infinity is unmeasurable, is there ultimately a something? Maybe the "great spirit" is no more than that which makes thought possible.

And people have made up places where they can revere this seemingly amazing possibility, like the sense of awe some express after smoking some weed and then looking at an ordinary, everyday object as if for the first time, dragged forth on a long, thin line...

The Bell Curve Possibility

2008-05-22T15:33:00.000-07:00

It's been my experience, much of it from observation, that different schools of child rearing are handed down through families. Some of us have actually had different experiences than "because I said so" and the parental attitudes that often go with it. I am inclined to wonder sometimes how important that parenting experience is in setting up the way we expect the world to be for us, and how we will approach it after with that initial, formative experience.

But that aside, there are times when a parent does need to be concerned with a child's safety, and even the most nurturant parent should recognize the necessity of invoking a "command moment" I would think. And who hasn't felt frustration on a "bad" day and invoked the "almighty" voice?

I also agree that much concern should result in noticing that our educational institutions do concern themselves with enforcing obedience to authority in that same vein. I'm aware that for some, it does not provoke concern, but a sense of satisfaction.

Yes, indeed, you are patronizingly reassured, as your thin little body sits in the huge wooden chair across the desk from the rather large and imposing stern vice principal in the office to which you've been summoned once again, you are free as long as you stay within these carefully drawn lines. No questions outside the box, please (with no hint of please in the stern voice). Otherwise, without this training, people may not be quite so willing to run out and find jobs once they escape from the torture chambers of squirming daily in rows of those hard, slippery wooden desks while an authority preaches,...er teaches.

It's my perception that these institutions invoke methods of ingestion, regurgitation and then take regular measurements of quantities of regurgitation. The methodologies of teaching ingestion and and invoking regurgitation often rely on behavior modification enforced pain and pleasure principles, all together of which creates an institutional atmosphere whereby students can be measured and sorted, sifted and stacked, and which also offers verification of that controversial Bell Curve possibility is in fact...

real.

On the other hand, awakening another form of intelligence, the open-ended, therefore non measurable ability to creatively question, is not really something that can be taught, just as teaching the proverbial horse to feel thirst is not an option. So you won't find any troublesome methods of that nature anywhere in there.

But... and this is an important "but" for an itinerant rambler to a vice principal's office like myself... an intellectual "thirst" to simply "find out" can be systemically suppressed in a population through its institutions. I at least believe that much. I also believe each of us faces a challenge to overcome that on our own, daily, if indeed it does occur as I seem to experience it. I find that possibility very exciting to imagine, but then I get out and about and talk to people, and my excitement sort of just dwindles away. As Linda Hunt asks Kevin Kline across the bar at the Midnight Star in Sliverado, "What's wrong with us?" And then she gives him that look and that sly smile.

Laurie Anderson Lyrics
Baby Doll Lyrics

A Little Bit of Comedy Central

2008-05-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

Since I don't own a television -- I refuse to actually pay to be propagandized -- I don't get to see some things, unless they show up in the Internet. So I saw these little Steven Colbert things this morning and decided I wanted to have them preserved on my website for posterity! To understand the wit that goes back and forth in the second, where Steven has Arianna Huffington on his show -- specifically her comment about Grizzly bears -- I felt the first one to be helpful:

Arianna and Steven:

Objectification -- It's Much More than a Women's Issue!

2008-04-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

PSA from Laurie Anderson - Women and Money

I can recall noticing through most of my life that most men react to the women's movement by taking it as a personal attack on their manhood. I don't see it that way. I can guess at why I don't, but I can't say for certain how that's come about for me. If I tried I think the effort would get quite lengthy.

One of the ways I tend to look at this issue of objectification is as a long revolutionary struggle, the liberal revolution, that began several hundred years ago. Whether it's a return to a human potential that evolved in the species before we began developing the authoritarian meme in our cultures, which hypothetically is the result of the complexities that followed the onset of agriculture 10-12,000 years ago, or not, is maybe an interesting question, but not one that makes much difference about the importance of the liberal revolution for individual rights or not. That revolution continues to evolve and each of us who embrace it, can embrace it with the very instructions built into our DNA. Fantasizing about how our ancient relatives did it 40,000 years ago won't really make much difference.

One of the narratives I run through my mind is that the Founders of this political system were a group of men who were philosophically tantalized by the ideas about liberal thinking at the time -- each in their own way, and hypothetically to different degrees. I take note of the fact they were a group of elites, many both monied and propertied, they were mostly from the European cultural traditions that were emerging at that time from feudalism -- and that very fact had a lot to do with their thinking framework, the context of their thoughts. This nation was structured out of that context in a specific period in what I see as an extended revolution of liberation from tyrannical, authoritarian structures of thought.

A question might be asked, revolution for who? And I'd answer, for the individual. I'm an individual, for instance.

What was born here in the US was, then, potentially not the final fruits of that struggle because of the very nature of what it was born into. I can see that the framework everyone genuflects over is still imperfect, and out of that imperfection has emerged the continued struggle for rights of the individual, the inhibit-ation of which I believe we can see in the very nature of feudalism, which itself is an extension of other forms of individual repression going back into history. Some of the dogma of the rights of property from that feudalistic era over our individual rights have been put down on this very thread, as the rights of a "property owner" known as an employer, and stated as, "this is the way it is." These, to me are the feudal fragments the Founding Fathers couldn't leave behind and they got built into the system, and because of that even corporations became "persons" with individual rights, it appears. And as long as we believe that this is the way it is, just as, as long as we believe we operate as a society under the rule of law, then it's so. But sometimes it seems to me those "this is the way it is" concepts come into play in ways that are seemingly contradictory. And it's then that I feel we are challenged with the problems of this liberal revolution that still need to be solved. One of the aspects of the liberal revolution is to recognize that very unique feature of ourselves, and to get out from under the self imposed belief in an authority that dominates how we think.

I feel that the revolution for individual rights was limping along on a single, somewhat crippled leg until women started to wake up and express themselves as individuals. Oddly enough, there's a group feature to individual freedom, and it's hypothetically very contradictory in nature. I believe we cannot free ourselves of authoritarianism while practicing it on any part of our humanity. Objectification, by the way, is to me an ingredient of the authoritarian mind frame. I discovered the very structure of feudal objectification when I was in the military. I was too young to know it already existed in society, so I was completely shocked when I discovered it. That really set my mind off. I had questions going in my head like: how do you take away someone's freedom to act and decide for themselves in a so-called democracy in this way to fight that which I was being told was a totalitarian system that does just that to its population? That was really a huge existential question for an eighteen year old mind I recognize now. I nearly went insane. But in the process I set up some ingredients for possibly working things out for myself.

When I got back into the "real" society, where the US constitutional Bill of Rights were the rules, not the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I decided it was time to get an education. In college I met members of the women's movement, and many of them were just about as confused as I was about all of this. But I managed to sort out through many of our talks, some highly emotional, that we were struggling for some of the same things, and against some of the same abstract institutional structures. Many or those structures are simply "authoritarian" and not oriented to promoting individuality of any kind, but because of the nature of our enculturation, the institutions themselves get associated with men, and so men often feel they are being personally attacked.

So what's happened as women are waking up? Are we dealing with the imperfections of our system itself, those features that create the objectification process? Or are we just incorporating the rest of the individuals who got left out about 220 years ago into a latently feudal system that has never been fully structured to allow us all our individual freedom? I'm still asking that question after forty years.

One of the thoughts I have: we have somewhat successfully codified this system of rule by law, combined with an individual Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights concept is being extended to the world, the United Nations has a nicely described version that even includes children. But it's like hand building a high tech Ferrari in a garage in the jungle. You start up that fine engine, open the garage door and there's no where to go, because there are no roads to drive it on. Most people spend most of their days in institutions that only vaguely and in fragments offer them individual rights to practice their daily tasks and to think in their own, individualized way. Their lives at home are planned and arranged around how they must relate to these institutions. Their children are carefully prepared so that they can successfully engage in them. And so we remain in a jungle of authoritarian institutions, and that jungle forms the context out of which we make up our minds, and that context is what we see as "the world" as it "must be."

The women's movement, the civil rights movements, those are about getting our good solid legs under us so we can go out into that jungle and claim our individuality consciously, and support each other in that process, instead of fight each other. Men are not being attacked as individuals by these ideas, in which the nature of objectification itself, for instance, is being questioned and examined. The institutions that men associate themselves with are not the individual men. And it's difficult to get that out where it can really be looked at and understood.

Maybe it would be easier, if only I were an expert...

The Office, Not the Person

2008-03-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

The Unitary Executive and The Office of the Presidency

It's been suggested that no one is asking during this presidential horse race whether the person who takes office changes the office or whether the office changes the person. It's not quite accurate to say no one is asking. It's more that those asking aren't out in the spotlight of the media where the elements of public dialog are presented for mass consumption. I don't think it's a matter of the person being changed, it's more a matter of speaking with a forked tongue when they finally get to office, almost because they have to. For one thing, there is no national dialog that makes discussing what's really going on in making decisions available for public discourse. It's all packaged and wrapped in sound bite clichés that basically distract from the real matters that make government work.

When I discovered what the Unitary Executive Theory itself was, and who was both for it and against it, I discovered a whole world of people asking that question and looking at the structure of the office itself, how it could be reformulated to better serve the interests of power (and power is money, straight out), and for those concerned about the effects of reformulating it on the office of the presidency, how it could be prevented from better serving the interests of power. This is a bloodless struggle, but it's going on none the less. It's taking place in the boiler room of the Titanic, where what makes the ship move through the water is located, the very legal structure of the ship, the system that propels the bureaucracy, where you just apply energy (money) and make steam and the ship is propelled towards the ice bergs, no matter which Captain is on the bridge, because the ice bergs lie in the short cut to where the power wants to go.

None of that's in the news. It puts people to sleep.

But if you are the rich and the powerful, and you want to control this huge nation with its legally conscribed bureaucracy, your best investment is the executive branch. It has the most number of unelected professional elites who transcend the office holders, who the minions focus on for their brief moment to have any effect at all on that overly hyped day in November, the most chance for consistency of purpose to be carried out. That's why I don't even pay much attention to this personality contest, I look at their advisers, and who they are likely to be appointing to the heads of these bureaucracies to legally follow out the president's "orders" to operate the huge bureaucratic machinery of state. Folks like the head of FEMA we all remember Bush appointed, for example, heading a perfectly good agency like the blind, dry drunk who appointed him. That's how the power of money controls this country.

The wealthy and powerful who want the good Ship Titanic to go in their chosen direction invest their money in private think tanks. One not so obviously a think tank is called "The Federalist Society," and it comes across as an organization for legal theorist, judges and lawyers to schmooze together about the law. It has chapters in all the major law schools. It began in 1983 or so. It now has some 35,000 members. These are the people with their hands on the machinery of state. The laws. They all share a similar attitude towards the law. That attitude is now becoming the predominant one in the appointed judges that much of the recent controversy was over, the Federal prosecutors, and, significantly, in the recent appointments to the Supreme Court.

We are now approaching a Federalist Society weighted Supreme Court. The Federalist Society was started by the people who developed the Unitary Executive Theory. The UET is about increasing the executive branch's control over the bureaucracy, insulating it from and thereby decreasing the oversight by Congress which in its checks and balance role is supposed to make certain it administers the bureaucracy according to the laws that Congress has passed. Secrecy thus becomes an issue. Presidential minions not testifying before Congress thus becomes an issue. If you step back you can see it is a theory that moves towards a CEO style presidency. A CEO heads these private tyrannies we call corporations. How hard is it to make the connections?

"Fascism" is about the unification of the state, just as a corporation is a unified collective with a purpose, and it's structured much like a military organization, because militaries have evolved to be structured as a unified collective to accomplish a purpose.

These are structural matters. The word "freedom" means nothing whatsoever with these matters going on at the same time -- especially if these structural matters contradict our freedoms.

The person who finally sits in the oval office is concerned with structural matters. The Constitution is the law, the Constitution is about structural matters.

How do you say all that in a sound bite on the evening news? How do you make that dramatic enough for people to pay attention to what it all means so they can figure out what it means for themselves? Especially when you are a corporation, you own media, nuclear power plants, military industrial complex components, and your interest is profit, because it's mandated by this law (the structure) that "we" have that they give the stockholders a good return on their investment first and worry about what they are doing to the world as an afterthought.

One of the heroes of this silent, bloodless, but very hard fought battle is Christopher Kelley, who did his PhD dissertation on the Unitary Executive and the Signing Statements. A small, brief notice of this very complex issue made its way into the media, and it did so in a way that only managed to confuse people to think it had something to do with the actions of King George, and his henchman, Darth Cheney, mainly because the partisan battle is all anyone is interested in as they sit in front of their televisions and munch their popcorn. The media moguls know that, their well paid employees in their media mogul corporations are made aware of that, and that's how the news is manufactured so that the popcorn munchers will give their consent to the already carefully selected candidates, it hardly matters which, in the voting booths the first Tuesday in the appropriate November. (The headlines are making me sick now, I can't read them at this point in the horse race. It's the same every time.)

I've gotten to know Chris Kelley's work, and I keep tabs on his blogs where he keeps track of how the media screws things up, and more precisely, what actions are being taken in the executive branch, the judicial branch and the legislative branch on these dire and significant changes that actually do determine what the person in the office will be able to do when he gets there: Zone of Twilight and Media Watch.

One of the difficulties I've had in my discussions is getting rabid Bush haters to recognize that Clinton was also a promoter of the UET, and that any president is not going to give up his power willingly. It's built into the very structure of the job. That's what separates the rhetoric of ideology from reality. If you can't get past the rhetoric, then you won't get down into the boiler room of the Titanic to see what's really going on. You'll be sunbathing on the deck while th Captain pilots the ship, and dancing in the ballroom at night as the ship moves towards disaster. Chris is editing a book and I just got my eyes on a paper he wrote that will be a chapter in the book, that gives me all sorts of tasty details to work with concerning what Clinton did to promote the UET. It's titled:

The Unitary Executive and the Clinton Administration

The unitary executive and the George W. Bush administration seem indistinguishable. President Bush’s aggressive defense of his actions through the provisions of the unitary executive has brought the public focus of the theory as intertwined with this presidency with no consideration of its past. Thus for most Americans, before the Bush administration there was not unitary executive and after President Bush has left office there will be no unitary executive. As this chapter demonstrates, the unitary executive was there before Bush came to power, and in a Democratic administration to boot!

The Clinton administration often gets overlooked in the discussion of the push towards the expansion of presidential power. This story tends to begin with the Reagan administration and its dedication to restoring the powers of the presidency taken by an aggressive Congress in the years following Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon (so-called “imperiled presidency” thesis). The restoration continued through the first Bush administration, and the second Bush administration worked to restore the powers lost when the Clinton administration frittered them away for personal gain. While this is the story that partisans like to tell, it is, much like all partisan logic, void of certain truths. And one truth is that the Clinton administration behaved very much like its Republican predecessors, to the advantage of its successor.
This chapter will focus on two important ways that the Clinton administration exercised and advanced “unitarian” power: by pulling the executive branch agencies closer to the White House in order to advance political goals and by protecting the president’s right to exercise so-called “coordinate” constitutional power.

The Unitary Executive—The Theoretical Backdrop

The unitary executive theory began inside the Reagan Justice Department along with other members of the conservative legal organization, the “Federalist Society.” Those who advance its tenets often refer to themselves as “Unitarians,” though not to be confused with the religious sect that it shares a name with.

The theory argues that the presidency, as a coordinate branch of government, is both the only nationally elected public officer (thus able to speak for the nation) and responsible for independently interpreting the meaning of the Constitution. As the representative of the entire public, he may be held accountable for bills signed into law and for the way in which the law is administered. The core tenets of the theory gives the president the sole authority to remove inferior executive officers, give the president the power to direct inferior executive officers in their administration of the law, and finally provides the president with the power to veto or nullify the way in which inferior executive branch officers use discretionary executive power.

The unitary executive is a constitutional theory of presidential power. It argues that the president draws his power from three sources of the Constitution. First, the Vesting clause of Article II, Section 1 gives the president all of the executive power. This means the powers explicitly written into Article II and other executive power, or the so called prerogative power. Second, the Oath clause of Article II, Section 1 acts as a shield, protecting the president from enforcing any law independently determined to be unconstitutional. This responsibility is shared by the president with his attorneys in the United States Department of Justice, in particular the Office of Legal Counsel, and with his close advisors in the White House Counsel’s Office. And third, the Take Care clause of Article II, Section 3 obligates the president, with the advice and assistance of inferior executive officers, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. As Michael Herz has argued, the “Take Care’ Clause insures that the president will not only execute the law personally, but also it obligates him to oversee the executive branch agencies to insure that they are faithfully executing the laws” as opposed to executing them independent of the president’s wishes or even to the wishes of some other body, such as the Congress.

Thus each president since Reagan has advanced these core tenets of the theory—using signing statements and OLC opinions to first refuse either defense or enforcement of “unconstitutional” law and second backing it up with an OLC opinion in defense.
While many believe that since the theory was born out of conservative gatherings that only Republican presidents have pushed its tenets, as I will show next, the Clinton administration positioned itself in 1993 to advance the cause of the unitary executive, though never using the term in defense of its actions.

Looming Global Water Crisis

2008-03-01T18:43:00.000-08:00

Part One:

Part Two:

Individualism and Collectivism Examined

2008-02-17T15:40:00.000-08:00

The Left/Right Jingoism of Political Gibber Jabber

I hear people separating "left" and "right" by saying things like, the political "Left" believes collective rights supersede the rights of an individual, and the political "Right" believes an individual's rights are greater than the collective. From that they conclude something like: "individualism is the opposite of collectivism." What I see involved is a series of fallacious conclusions coming from careless thinking that brushes hastily over the possibilities of meaning in the terms in order to arrive a pre conceptual conclusion. Clearly, individualism is different from collectivism, but not necessarily opposite. Individualism is about things like individual rights with respect to a collective group working together. You don't push for one without something to do with the other.

Human beings tend to do better in their survival tactics as organized entities than they do as hermits. So we have these different strategies we can observe called societies with their collections of groupings.

This left/right rhetoric is just a bunch of bull shit to me. It's just a collection of idealistic, jingoistic statements. It falls apart when I start looking at what the words represent and the reality of what people are actually involved in.

Everyday most people go to a collective organization and do some tasks they are directed to do. Many of those collectives are private tyrannies when you get right down to it, so most people spend their days in an authoritarian atmosphere where they comply with the directives they have nothing to say about because they want to eat, and buy all these pretty gadgets, like the beads and blankets that carried small pox across this nation after Columbus floated up to it under sail. Most are trained for doing this from kindergarten, so they don't know any different. It's just the way it is for them. They may have some vague symbols that they see on TV and in the movies about individuals behaving in some free way, but it's not really about their life, it's just entertainment.

Right now we have what I perceive as a set of elites, I don't care what party you want to see them in, and they aren't interested in democracy or individual rights. They are interested in organizational management issues and strategies that amount to power with regard to those. That's simply the nature of that kind of organization of groups getting together and involving themselves in the institutions that are already pretty well structured to be what they are. The playing field is set, now we, the public, get to watch it play out. The Big Fight.

We have a population that's predominantly programmed to accept authorities telling them what to do, and most individuals lack any real voice in what each may want out of their lives in respect to the larger macro organizational characteristics we imagine to be The Nation.

Because of the way I look at things, my "The Nation" is so different from other people's I can't even communicate most of the time. Mostly I don't even talk. I just listen.

The rest of that jingoistic crap you presented is meaningless to me when I see what people are faced with.

I made my choice a long time ago. I don't work for anyone, I do things in a contractual exchange, and I am involved in writing the contract agreements. It's not always easy, but those are my standards. I figure if everyone was willing to live by those standards, corporations would collapse, because there wouldn't be any employees, there wouldn't be any hierarchy of command. But I'd be willing to wager that won't come about. So people will go on pretending something else is going on and argue about the fine details of the make up of their cage and the intricacies of the designs on their shackles.

Fascism is a corporation. It's a bundle that's all together for strength, all right, but the bundle doesn't collectively think, it's directed by an authority who "knows." Whether it's privately owned or a government. It's hierarchically ordered and authoritarian in its format. "My way or the highway." A corporation is a collective, a corporation is bureaucratic in its organization. It has a specific goal, make a profit, and it does that through what is now perceived as something like "scientifically engineered" management techniques, something our universities began creating towards the end of the last century.

If the Republicans have put a unifying theory into reorganizing the presidency so that the president is like a CEO (and they have), that's moving our presidential system in the direction of fascism. Same with Democrats, and FDR was an example of one who saw that as a good idea, I humbly suggest. I expect all parties to do the same as long as we have a federal government with the legal and national enforcement capabilities of the one we have. And thanks to a two hundred year series of working at the interpretation of the Constitution through our court system, the Federal Government powers over the states have expanded, as the states have expanded. This is like a disease, once it begins it's hard to stop if the immune system is not set up to stop it, and legally, ours isn't.

With big government the urge is going to be towards decomplexifying the management tasks, and the president's job is to manage the bureaucracy, so what does that suggest? The only really efficient decomplexifying option we have is hierarchy and a pyramid top down authority scheme. That's why militaries have all become similar in their organization.

That's how it is from what I can see. I think folks often don't see their own life circumstances for what they are or they would know what trying to be an individual, making individual choices in the midst of all these very real circumstances that restrict their choice-making amounts to, and the jingoistic generalizations would fall away to a critical examination of the meaning of the words they use. It's not some abstract idea, its about tough choices every day that take contemplation. And that's where one finds one's individuality, not in some idea. I think many are just living in a fantasy world of words, and don't even know what the words mean because they haven't really taken them apart.

I figure it's facetious to argue there's anything else going on, but it certainly keeps people entertained.

Eco sanity

2008-02-09T13:53:00.000-08:00

I don't think of human beings as being in a position to save the world. It's more like, get out of the way so the world can take care of itself. So my vision doesn't include a 'humans saving the world' concept.

The Earth's biosphere, best we can tell with our crude abilities to find things out, is an interconnection of living systems that will maintain their own ongoing, life sustaining balance without the guidance of human beings. The earth has never needed human beings to maintain its life forces. Instead, what human beings may have become, actually very probably have, is now a potential danger to the complex living systems that make up the total biosphere, and ironically, in pursuit of our own aggrandizement, we have devised some clandestine adaptation strategies that appear capable of unbalancing all the self sustaining processes of the earth, much as a cancer unbalances the self sustaining process of an individual organism by its own, myopic focus on what cancer cells are genetically designed to do to survive.

The difference between human beings and cancer is we have the potential to make a choice about what we do. ...Well, that's hypothetical, I guess. Maybe cancer does have a choice and we don't, or both, or neither.

Western globalized culture has become like what we call in ecology, an r-selected species. Because of what humans can do as a group with their unique abilities to create cultures as an interface with their environment, we have cleverly devised culture based systems that act as our own, evolutionary eco niche adaptation process, only with ours, we can take over just about any niche. It's a unique process we can use without changing our biology, as many other species must do to adapt. Such normally biologically based species (cancer being one, lemmings another) are adapted to low succession ecosystems. Examples of low succession ecosystems are fields of corn, where much external energy is required to till, plant, fertilize and keep out various forms of species that would also like to populate the field where the corn grows, until finally the crop can be harvested.

Human beings have for some time transformed environments with their built places and their agriculture. Now with increasing speed, thanks to the cheap and abundant energy discovered under the surface of the earth, humans continue to raze the many precious and irreplaceable complex ecosystems of the planet, destroying in the process species that will never be seen again, and could take millions of years to regenerate in some comparable ecologically adapted form, so that those areas can be turned into low succession, high yield "resources" for human beings, who themselves now number 6.6 billion in number, but much more than that when the factors of eco foot print is taken into consideration for the more highly technologized societies. This population growth over the last 150 years has roughly the same curve on a graph as any r-selected species.

So human beings, through their cultural adaptations, have made themselves (a species that otherwise has all the characteristics of a K-selected species) into an r-selected species, and with that, they have employed the traits built into their gene pool that allows them to transform their environment, and hence all the environments of the planet that they can, into low succession, low speciated environments. The loss of genetic material in the process may very well completely transform the life of the biosphere to one that does not support most of the life we see around us now.

The solution I see is for humans to recognize what they are doing, and reorient their cultural adaptation away from control oriented technologies and more towards ecologically reflexive, sustainable ones. One of the ways to do that is for each human to begin to reawaken their deep connection to the earth, the one that is part of our evolution, and begin a renewing of the old ways of seeing and interacting with our environment, combined with the knowledge we have developed through the cultural devices of our ecological sciences. If any of our sciences can guide us, those would be the ones.

We need to rediscover the "ways," as in the "cultural ways," or the "Way of Zen," those kinds of ways that acknowledge the psychological unhealthiness of separating ourselves as we do in our isolating built environments. Environments of our own distorting creation that ignore natural needs of the living biosphere while we grow ever more dependent, in the process, on economic systems that are essentially cancerous. We need to "see" this and then renew, or invent ways that will reverse our progress on a path of destruction, and go in new directions with our adaptation strategies, based on a healthy and direct interaction with life processes, so that we are reminded by our daily existence of our connection to the planet's life. That reminder is the basis of individual sanity and psychological balance. An abstract idea about it is insufficient.

That recognition and societal redirection, of course, entails a dramatic rearrangement of whole systems of thought and ideas. A whole new mental paradigm must come about. That's what I'm working on, ideas combined with actions for what that might be, ways of becoming healthy and balanced with a new vision of who we are as living beings within a self sustaining biosphere, not controllers and guardians, as some Western religious doctrines would have us believe.

Ideological Change of Shoes

2008-02-06T07:00:00.000-08:00

Ideologies Discarded Like a Trail of Worn Shoes

At the risk of simplistic categorization, I'll point out that David Horowitz is an example of a number of liberal intellectuals -- a lesser number of whom were among the radical anti establishment intellectuals in the Sixties -- who later exchanged their ideology for something of a different design, like changing designer shoes. For most this change occurred sometime after the end of the Vietnam War, and into the Reagan years, as Horowitz did when he came out as a Reagan conservative during the Eighties. Like most of them, and a number of younger intellectuals who have since grouped together with these old Sixties lefty ideologues, today he is best described as a Neoconservative, according to SourceWatch.

In the 1990s, Horowitz hosted several Second Thinkers conferences where ex-leftists who recanted or underwent epiphanies could network with fellow travelers. Several of these second thinkers are now neo-cons. Christopher Hitchens was a regular participant at these conferences, and today co-organizes events with Horowitz, e.g., tour of the UK where he features as a speaker.

In his book Radical Son Horowitz describes his turn from Marxist radical to Reagan Republican, but in lieu of reading and reviewing that, the following, from Wikipedia, gives a brief overview of Horowitz's trail of ideological shoes:

David Joel Horowitz (born January 10, 1939) is an American conservative writer and activist. The son of two life-long members of the Communist Party and once a prominent supporter of Marxism as well as a member of the New Left in the 1960s, Horowitz later rejected Leftism and is now a prominent advocate for right-wing causes. He is a founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture), and has served as president of that organization for many years. He is the editor of the conservative website FrontPage Magazine, and his writings can also be read on prominent news sites and publications, including the conservative magazine NewsMax.^[1] He founded the activist group Students for Academic Freedom and is affiliated with Campus Watch. He occasionally appears on Fox News Channel as an analyst.

That he has identified that ignominious "urge" he left behind as leftist politics is interesting. I don't see it so much on any right left spectrum as a different ideological design for something which the wearer needs, no matter the design, and I'd like to discuss why for a moment.

I would say, for instance, that what he is talking about is something of the same coin with different sides. One side could be identified with something that was very conservative in the Fifties -- McCarthyism, for instance. I think that sort of idea-based behavior that occurred from McCarthyism has its roots in a kind of authoritarian group think that is the opposite pole of a highly evolved participatory democracy. But what that means itself would need to be described and considered with some care in order to identify what I mean by "highly evolved." The tendency might be to go through the historical evolution of ideas and attach it to movements in the Sixties that called themselves anti authoritarian and anti establishment, but in their own right were ideological and group think movements of their own, and as such subject to creating the very conditions they rebelled against.

That consideration about what it means to me would involve looking into human nature itself, and the structure of authoritarianism. I fully acknonowledge that exploration is not something I would see as possible here in this blog. So I admit to the problem of being clear and precise up front.

Nevertheless...

I've already introduced in previous blogs the notion that the Neoconservatives are "militaristic idealists." So I'd like to stick with that theme, particularly the emphasis on "idealists" -- with idealists as something that has its own unique structure and that an adjective of some sort can often be attached to it, "militarist," "leftist," whatever.

So, coming from that, I would identify McCarthyism as a code word for an ideological response to another ideology. So we have this "binariness" that comes up. An ideology can be codified with a name, and it can then be opposed to another codified ideology. So then we can identify them as right and left ideologies, but I'd rather just stick with the notion of ideology itself, rather than deflect it with direction pointing.

I would like to suggest something I cannot in any way back up with objective facts, but rather I must extrapolate from behavior. Thus it's purely in the theoretical abstract reasoning realm. It comes from my (and others) observation of behavior, thus very subject to doubt and criticism.

It appears to me that someone with an ideological bent to their way of organizing their mental world can be proselytized and converted to different ideologies, but what they tend to need to do is feel a belief in their ideology. Eric Hoffer wrote about this phenomenon years ago in a book he titled True Believers. I read it first in 1968 while in the military and trying to figure out what this institution was I was unable to leave at my own discretion. Meanwhile we were supposedly fighting something that to me was organized in the same way, only called by a different name. Both fit what I would call totalitarian organizations. And it seemed very odd to me that we had to be a totalitarian organization to defeat one. That was the kernel of an idea that has never really left my thinking, although it has evolved into many different forms since then.

So it seems to me that changing ideologies is merely a matter of paradigm shifting in the world view. It's therefore more or less (maybe more), a rational process, though once the "belief" aspect takes hold it's not so rational.

Now what I mean by "ideological bent" is a little harder to get at, because what ever it is, is inside the individual mind and that's a black box we can't really get into -- not others' but only the one we are in. Hence we end up with all these different fields like sociology, psychology, and so forth. They are all trying to figure out what's in the puzzling black box. Some perhaps trying to go further than that, i.e., how to program the box and make humans behave in certain ways.

This may be a little too glib in presentation, but basically, I tend to see McCarthyism as an ideological response to Communism, which was a code for an ideologically based authoritarian society that was by then called The Soviet Union. I would say McCarthyites probably didn't see themselves as true believers in an ideology. It's the other guy who's always the true believer. Communism, as envisioned by those who became part of what was called McCarthyism, was envisioned by them as a "leftist" ideology threatening American institutions. The "good/evil" binary paradigm hangs like a specter in the background.

In looking at McCarthyism as a phenomenon, I see that it relied heavily on issues of "loyalty" to the United States, and "security matters" -- which of course implies a need for secrecy and protection of some kind. Both those issues, loyalty and security, imply something basic to the True Believer mind that Eric Hoffer wrote about. If a citizen is not allowed to know oneself what is behind the security wall, then one simply must believe it's important, take it on faith, and one must trust the authorities who are forced to hide it from everyone for the good of all. Subsequently one's loyalty to whatever this secret information is about then becomes an issue of patriotism to one's country, not an issue based on rational judgement. And one's country is, after all, an idea, though one can associate it with flags, mountains, eagles, statues holding torches, and so on.

So I'm raising a question at this point. Is it characteristic that an ideology will result in that sense of protection and group adherence to that ideology? Can we ever have a United States of America without a coordinated ideology that all will adhere to, for instance? These are issues that the founders raised at some level and attempted to safe guard individual choice by allowing for differences in various types of ideologies, including religious based ones. How do political actors with a "militaristic idealist" set of ideas fit with our own sense of government?

A History of "Militaristic Idealists" Known as Neocons

2008-02-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

The Neocons: An Illustrated Progression
From exile to redemption to exile again: a history of "militaristic idealists" known as neocons. (Link to a larger version: The Neocons)

First, note that they are "idealists" and not "realists" (I will discuss the political realists elsewhere), so in that sense their version of international democracy promotion will have a different slant, one that we might call "Wilsonian" going back to President Woodrow Wilson. When the Bush administration's Middle East policy is referred to as Wilsonian, that's the connection.

Second, they are militarists. That's the connection to the Scoop Jackson Vietnam Hawks, the military industrial complex, and to the Cold War anti communist attitudes that carried over after the fall of the Soviet Union, with no target to pin it on.

This might be worth looking at: They are not so much about being against the idea of communism as a philosophy, since they once were once willing to wear the trappings of that ideology, but more anti the political existence of something identified as communism as a competing power entity in the world, and here we have the connection to a quote I've seen: " Ideology is the disease of the modern era." You might say they don't so much care what the idealism is, so long as they have one, and they wield it's abstract logical characteristics as a weapon of sorts. Perhaps a weapon of mass destruction?

That difference in their concern between political idealism and the meaning of political power itself is important distinguish, I believe, because it is also the basis for their anti terrorist concerns today, which for them are quite real, and helps to reveal their own urge for power. An urge that will be explained as an urge for the good of humanity, and necessary because there is this idea of "evil," evil is present in the world, (human beings are by nature evil and must be taught to be good) and it must be guarded against. The military is thus a necessary structure in society for the protection of good, and a price we must pay for our safety.

The underlying issue to explore here, I believe, is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism not so much as an ideal to be imposed, but as a philosophical and psychological structure that makes up a particular world view. Words like "individualism" and "freedom" can be used within this structure and the structure itself may turn out to negate the subjective sense of interpretation of what those words mean to each of us. This connects to the meanings we explore in propaganda, power, and the spectrum of power from hegemony to coercion.

I'd like to recall Stan Goff's simple but clear definition clarifying hegemony from coercion:

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” (Steven Beko)

It’s much easier to exercise control over a population whenever they consent to their own domination. They sort of accept the official story, accept the official ideology and then we all just sort of go around and cooperate. That kind of control, where we internalize the control, is hegemony. Where when I come up and hold a gun on you and you do it out of naked fear, that’s coercion. And the idea is you’ve got sort of hegemony on one pole, exercising ruling class power and coercion on the other pole and as hegemony fails then coercion becomes the more prominent instrument. (from a talk: Exterminism)

Neoconservatism, Past, Present, and Future, (cont'd)

2008-02-04T08:23:00.000-08:00

Neoconservatives and Foreign Policy

I can recall in 2000 that nearly no one was using the term "Neoconservative." If I used the term in a discussion, I'd get a blank look.

Since then, the term has come to be used in many different ways, many applications are misconstrued, and inaccurate. In my view, it's very counterproductive to blur its meaning when one realizes that the Neoconservatives have not disappeared from politics, and the philosophy behind the term remains alive and well, and is being applied daily. These very well organized intellectuals with their own network of ideologically self substantiating publications continue to work for what they believe to be the "best" for the United States.

So it's perhaps worth some effort to find out what their version of "best" might be and to do an analytical exploration of who what the Neoconservatives are, what they have actually meant to the conservative movement since their voices became a major part of the current administration, and what the actual people identified with the movement will be doing during the election season, and afterwards, if they have anything to say about it.

I want to present, by way of seeing contrasting views of the US foreign policy, two different explanations for 911 with differing explanations for what the US is doing in Iraq, and what its purpose in the Middle East is about.

Neoconservative View of Foreign Policy

Blowback- Chalmers Johnson On Why We Really Fight

Power of Nightmares

2008-01-25T21:16:00.000-08:00

The Power of Nightmares, a three part BBC Documentary by Adam Curtis

This documentary tells the story of Neoconservatism, and how it used fear to turn a country to do its bidding. The story also draws a parallel vision of a similar type of ideology, represented by what we now call al-Qaeda. The documentary suggests these ideologies are in their natures not that different from one another.

Power of Nightmares Part I: Baby it's Cold Outside

Power of Nightmares Part II: The Phantom Victory

Power of Nightmares Part III: The Shadows in the Cave

The Past, Present, and Future of Neoconservatism

Joshua Muravchik October 2007

Have America’s troubles in Iraq sounded the death knell of neoconservatism, the political ideology that is said to be behind our presence there? Over the past year, there has been no shortage of voices saying so, many with undisguised glee. Abroad, the Times of London heralded “the end of an ideological era in Washington,” while the Toronto Globe and Mail reported with satisfaction that neoconservatism has been “decisively wiped out.” Observers here at home have agreed. To the historian Douglas Brinkley, Democratic electoral victories in November 2006 spelled “the death of the neoconservative movement,” while at National Review Online John Derbyshire wrote that “all the buzz is that neoconservatism is as dead as mutton.”

Prognoses from within neoconservatism’s ranks have been correspondingly grim. Kenneth Adelman, an author and sometime defense official in Republican administrations, has lamented that “most everything we ever stood for now . . . lies in ruins.” Francis Fukuyama, in a short book excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, took leave of his own sometime affiliation with neoconservatism, protesting that it had “evolved into something that I can no longer support.” Jonah Goldberg, a columnist at National Review, despaired that the word neoconservatism itself has become “useless, spent.”

But more than a word is at issue. The opprobrium lately faced by neoconservatism flows from a number of entwined propositions: that its ideas shaped President George W. Bush’s war against terrorism; that the ensuing policy has failed disastrously; and that this failure demonstrates the illusions and delusions embodied in those ideas. This indictment must either be accepted or answered, and the exercise must begin by identifying the ideas in question. That requires revisiting history that has been told before.

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The term “neoconservative” was coined in the 1970’s as an anathema. It was intended to stigmatize a group of liberal intellectuals who had lately parted ways with the majority of their fellows.

As a heretical offshoot of liberalism, neoconservatism appealed to the same values and even many of the same goals—like, for example, peace and racial equality. But neoconservatives argued that liberal policies—for example, disarmament in the pursuit of peace, or affirmative action in the pursuit of racial equality—undermined those goals rather than advancing them. In short order, the heretics established themselves as contemporary liberalism’s most formidable foes.

Two distinct currents fed the stream of neoconservatism. One focused on domestic issues, specifically by reexamining the Great Society programs of the 1960’s and the welfare state as a whole. It was centered in the Public Interest, a quarterly founded and edited by Irving Kristol. The other focused on international issues and the cold war; it was centered in COMMENTARY and led by the magazine’s editor, Norman Podhoretz.

The former current has little if any relevance to the controversy surrounding neoconservatism today. Much of the domestic-policy critique mounted by neoconservatives eventually became common wisdom, symbolized by President Bill Clinton’s welfare-reform program and his declaration that “the era of big government is over.” In the meantime, several of the seminal figures of the domestic wing—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer—drifted back toward liberalism.

It was the foreign-policy wing that was, all along, more passionately embroiled in ideological disputation.1 For one thing, the stakes were higher. If a domestic policy fails, you can try another. If a foreign policy fails, you may find yourself at war. Also, the battles that rived the Democratic party in the 1970’s, at a time when virtually all neoconservatives were still Democrats, principally concerned foreign affairs. These battles sharpened ideological talons on all sides.

The divisions stemmed from the Vietnam war. Not that all neoconservatives were hawks on this particular issue; some, including Podhoretz, were (qualified) doves. But when opponents of the war went from arguing that it was a failed instance of an essentially correct policy—namely, resisting Communist expansionism—to contending that it was a symptom of a deep American sickness, neoconservatives answered back. Whatever problems we may have made for ourselves in Vietnam, they said, the origins of the conflict were to be found neither in American imperialism nor in what President Jimmy Carter would call our “inordinate fear of Communism,” but in Communism’s lust to dominate.

Contrary to Carter and the antiwar Left, neoconservatives believed that Communism was very much to be feared, to be detested, and to be opposed. They saw the Soviet Union as, in the words of Ronald Reagan, an “evil empire,” unspeakably cruel to its own subjects and relentlessly predatory toward those not yet in its grasp. They took the point of George Orwell’s 1984—a book that (as the Irish scholars James McNamara and Dennis J. O’Keeffe have written) resurrected the idea of evil “as a political category.” And they absorbed the cautionary warning of the Russian novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn against yielding ground to the Communists in the vain hope “that perhaps at some point the wolf will have eaten enough.”

Many in our history, both statesmen and scholars, had drawn a distinction between Americans’ sentiments and America’s self-interest. Where Communism was concerned, the neoconservatives saw the two as intertwined. Communism needed to be fought both because it was morally appalling and because it was a threat to our country.

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For their passion against Communism, neoconservatives were accused of being “zealots” and “Manicheans.” To this, one neoconservative rejoined: “we face a Manichean reality.” That is to say, the struggle between the Communist world and the West involved, on the one hand, some of the most malign, murderous regimes ever created and, on the other hand, some of the most humane. The moral consequences were enormous.

This attitude was one of the things that set neoconservatives apart from traditional conservatives. To be sure, there were a few intellectuals of the Right, like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Whittaker Chambers, who shared the neoconservatives’ loathing for Communism. But mainstream conservatives were better represented by the approach of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and their foreign-policy mentor, Henry Kissinger, according to which the Soviet Union was to be seen more as another great power than as the vessel of a lethal ideology; the policy of détente was devised accordingly. This approach was embraced by such conservative icons as the Reverend Billy Graham, who hoped to convert Russians to the Gospel, and the capitalist Donald Kendall, who hoped to sell them Pepsi—without, in either case, troubling with the issue of their enslavement.

Even those traditional conservatives who distrusted the readiness of Nixon and Kissinger to make deals with the Soviet Union tended to share the underlying philosophy of foreign-policy “realism.” As opposed to the neoconservative emphasis on the battle of ideas and ideologies, and on the psychological impact of policy choices, realists focused on state interests and the time-honored tools of statecraft. That was one reason why, for the neoconservatives of the 1970’s, the great champions in American political life were not conservative or Republican figures but two Democrats of unmistakably liberal pedigree: Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO. When President Ford, on Kissinger’s counsel, closed the White House door to Solzhenitsyn upon his expulsion from Soviet Russia, these two stalwart anti-Communists formally welcomed him to Washington.

It was only with the accession of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1981 that the neoconservatives made their peace with Republican-style conservatism. Reagan brought several neoconservatives—notably Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, Max Kampelman, and Elliott Abrams—into pivotal foreign-policy positions in his administration (and, on the domestic-policy side, William J. Bennett and others). With time, most neoconservatives moved into the Republican fold. As for Reagan’s “belligerent” approach to the cold war, it was criticized as loudly by both liberals and conservatives within the foreign-policy establishment as it was cheered by neoconservatives. But there can be no question that it issued in a sublime victory: the mighty juggernaut of the Soviet state, disposing of more kill power than the U.S. or any other state in history, capitulated with scarcely a shot.

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By the 1990’s, therefore, the neoconservatives’ analysis seemed vindicated. But, by the same token, the cause that had drawn them together and defined them—the cold war—was concluded. In the relatively quiet 1990’s, most of the nation’s attention was concentrated on taxes and budgets and other domestic concerns. By 1996, Podhoretz himself proclaimed that neoconservatism was “dead,” and that “what killed it was not defeat but victory; it died not of failure but of success.” As a consequence, he wrote, “in foreign policy it has become impossible to define a neoconservative position.”

This, in my judgment, underestimated the signs that a distinctive neoconservative approach to post-cold-war foreign policy had already been taking form. In 1990-91, cold-war neoconservatives lined up with traditional conservatives serving in the first Bush administration in support of military action to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. At the time, most liberals opposed the use of force, and so did some so-called paleoconservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan and Robert Novak, as well as various libertarians.

No less revealing than the debates between the war’s opponents and supporters was a division that opened within the ranks of the supporters themselves once the fighting ended. In an act of quintessential “realism,” President Bush declined to order American forces to capture Baghdad and oust Saddam Hussein or even to obstruct Saddam’s campaign to suppress Iraqis who had risen in rebellion against him. Most neoconservatives disagreed with at least the latter of these decisions.

In 1992, the Bush administration’s realism got the better of it once again when war broke out in Bosnia. The President dismissed the violence there as a “hiccup,” and James Baker, his Secretary of State, famously declared that “we have no dog in that fight.” When the new Clinton administration proved equally inert, and with the death toll mounting, a lobby developed for some form of American intervention.

Most active members of that lobby were neoconservatives, and other neoconservatives, with notable exceptions like Charles Krauthammer, embraced its position. By contrast, most traditional conservatives believed that America’s own interests were not sufficiently engaged to justify intervention. Many liberals, for their part, while sharing a sense of urgency about Bosnia, were characteristically chary of using force or acting outside the aegis of the United Nations (whose actions, as it happened, had been constraining the victims of aggression more than the aggressors).

After Bosnia, the top foreign-policy issue in the latter half of the 1990’s was the enlargement of NATO. Liberals and conservatives were arrayed on all sides. But most of those associated with the neoconservative camp, with the prominent exception of the historian Richard Pipes, were united in favor of it. I worked with Jeane Kirkpatrick and Paul Wolfowitz (and two moderate Democrats, Anthony Lake and Richard Holbrooke) to organize a statement, signed by most of America’s former top foreign-affairs officials, that helped to seal the debate.

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This series of events suggests that some kind of common neoconservative mentality endured beyond the cold war. What were its elements?

First, following Orwell, neoconservatives were moralists. Just as they despised Communism, they felt similarly toward Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and toward the acts of aggression committed by those dictators in, respectively, Kuwait and Bosnia. And just as they did not hesitate to enter negative moral judgments, neither did they hesitate to enter positive ones. In particular, they were strong admirers of the American experience—an admiration that arose not out of an unexamined patriotism (they had all started out as reformers or even as radical critics of American society) but out of the recognition that America had gone farther in the realization of liberal values than any other society in history. A corollary was the belief that America was a force for good in the world at large.

Second, in common with many liberals, neoconservatives were internationalists, and not only for moral reasons. Following Churchill, they believed that depredations tolerated in one place were likely to be repeated elsewhere—and, conversely, that beneficent political or economic policies exercised their own “domino effect” for the good. Since America’s security could be affected by events far from home, it was wiser to confront troubles early even if afar than to wait for them to ripen and grow nearer.

Third, neoconservatives, like (in this case) most conservatives, trusted in the efficacy of military force. They doubted that economic sanctions or UN intervention or diplomacy, per se, constituted meaningful alternatives for confronting evil or any determined adversary.

To this list, I would add a fourth tenet: namely, the belief in democracy both at home and abroad. This conviction could not be said to have emerged from the issues of the 1990’s, although the neoconservative support for enlarging NATO owed something to the thought that enlargement would cement the democratic transformations taking place in the former Soviet satellites. But as early as 1982, Ronald Reagan, the neoconservative hero, had stamped democratization on America’s foreign-policy agenda with a forceful speech to the British Parliament. In contrast to the Carter administration, which held (in the words of Patricia Derian, Carter’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights) that “human-rights violations do not really have very much to do with the form of government,” the Reagan administration saw the struggle for human rights as intimately bound up in the struggle to foster democratic governance. When Reagan’s Westminster speech led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, the man chosen to lead it was Carl Gershman, a onetime Social Democrat and a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY. Although not an avowed neoconservative, he was of a similar cast of mind.

This mix of opinions and attitudes still constitutes the neoconservative mindset. The military historian Max Boot has aptly labeled it “hard Wilsonianism.” It does not mesh neatly with the familiar dichotomy between “realists” and “idealists.” It is indeed idealistic in its internationalism and its faith in democracy and freedom, but it is hardheaded, not to say jaundiced, in its image of our adversaries and its assessment of international organizations. Nor is its idealism to be confused with the idealism of the “peace” camp. Over the course of the past century, various schemes for keeping the peace—the League of Nations, the UN, the treaty to outlaw war, arms-control regimes—have all proved fatuous. In the meantime, what has in fact kept the peace (whenever it has been kept) is something quite different: strength, alliances, and deterrence. Also in the meantime, “idealistic” schemes for promoting not peace but freedom—self-determination for European peoples after World War I, decolonization after World War II, the democratization of Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria, the global advocacy of human rights—have brought substantial and beneficial results.

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Whether or not a distinct neoconservative position could be discerned in the relatively calm 1990’s, everything changed, with a vengeance, after September 11, 2001. As the second President Bush unfurled his “war against terror,” word spread that he himself had been captured by neoconservatives. What gave plausibility to this idea was that Bush’s new approach constituted a radical break with his own earlier predilections. Less than a year before, he had come into office evincing little interest in international affairs and proclaiming that America should be a “humble nation,” with fewer global commitments. No more than a handful of identifiable neoconservatives occupied influential positions in his administration, and none at the highest tier.

There was unintended irony in the post-9/11 liberal caricature of Bush and Cheney as politicians who had haplessly allowed their administration’s policies to be hijacked by a few spookily effective intellectuals—this, less than a year after having been such master manipulators as to have allegedly stolen away the presidency from Al Gore. But this was not the only grotesque charge leveled at the President. Another was that the “neoconservatives” in question were in reality a group of Jews who were attempting to divert U.S. policy in the interests of Israel. This particular bit of slander ignored, among other things, the fact that the neoconservative position on the Middle East conflict was exactly congruous with the neoconservative position on conflicts everywhere else in the world, including places where neither Jews nor Israeli interests could be found—not to mention the fact that non-Jewish neoconservatives took the same stands on all of the issues as did their Jewish confrères.2

However fantastical the conspiracy theories, and however polluted their origins, what is undeniable is that Bush’s declaration of war against terrorism did bear the earmarks of neoconservatism. One can count the ways. It was moralistic, accompanied by descriptions of the enemy as “evil” and strong assertions of America’s righteousness. As Norman Podhoretz puts it in his powerful new book3 Bush offered “an entirely unapologetic assertion of the need for and the possibility of moral judgment in the realm of world affairs.” In contrast to the suggestion of many, especially many Europeans, that America had somehow provoked the attacks, Bush held that what the terrorists hated was our virtues, and in particular our freedom. His approach was internationalist: it treated the whole globe as the battlefield, and sought to confront the enemy far from our own doorstep. It entailed the prodigious use of force. And, for the non-military side of the strategy, Bush adopted the idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East in the hope that this would drain the fever swamps that bred terrorists.

It is possible that Bush and Cheney turned to neoconservative sources for guidance on these matters; it is also possible, and more likely, that they reached similar conclusions on their own. In either case, the war against terrorism put neoconservative ideas to the test—and, in the war’s early stages, they passed with flying colors. The Taliban regime was ousted from Afghanistan quickly and without a major commitment of American forces. More striking still, a democratic government was established in Afghanistan—one of the least likely places on earth for it. Muammar Qaddafi, the ruler of Libya and one of the world’s most erratic and violent dictators, abandoned his pursuit of nuclear weapons, and in effect sued to bring his country in from the cold reaches to which Bush had assigned terrorism-supporting states. Finally, Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in a brief campaign with minimum loss of life.

Even more remarkably, Bush’s advocacy of democracy brought an immediate and positive reaction around the region. The Lebanese drove out Syrian forces after a 30-year occupation. In an unprecedented development, elections at various levels of government were held in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a handful of other Arab states (and the Palestinian Authority), including most dramatically Iraq itself. The collective leadership of the Arab states, meeting at a summit, declared its commitment to “strengthening democracy, expanding political participation, consolidating the values of citizenship and the culture of democracy, the promotion of human rights, the opening of space for civil society, and enabling women to play a prominent role in every field of public life.”
Crowning all these events was one crucial non-event: the absence, despite the almost unanimous forecast of experts, of further terror attacks on the United States.

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But then, of course, the landscape shifted. Resistance and terror mounted in Iraq to levels that the U.S. and allied forces could not manage, and the entire war against terrorism bogged down. Not only did Iraq itself devolve into a bloody mess, but gains on other fronts also began to fray. The Taliban intensified terror and guerrilla attacks in Afghanistan, Syria launched new depredations in Lebanon, Iran defiantly accelerated its drive for a nuclear bomb, and autocrats around the Middle East reneged on their pledges of democratic reform. The American public, originally supportive, turned against the Iraq war. Bush’s popularity plummeted.

Today there are signs that the “surge” of U.S. troop levels and the new counterinsurgency tactics designed by General David Petraeus will succeed in stabilizing Iraq, provided they are not aborted by congressional Democrats who, as the British writer Douglas Murray has put it, “want the neoconservatives to fail more than they want Iraq to succeed”—or, more accurately and more disgracefully, who want Bush to fail more than they want America to succeed. Even so, it cannot be denied that the war has proved far costlier in treasure, lives, and American standing than its proponents imagined, and, at least for the time being, the loftier dream of Iraq as a model for its neighbors has turned to ashes.

But to what is all this to be attributed? According to one highly publicized article in Vanity Fair, several leading neoconservatives put the blame on poor execution of their ideas on the part of the administration. This is not a very satisfying analysis. Complaints about government incompetence dog every administration, almost always with justice, and there is no convincing evidence that the functioning of the present administration has been worse than that of its predecessors.

More specific and more convincing targets for blame are a few key decisions made by Paul Bremer, the chief of the allied occupation from May 2003 to June 2004, and by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Bremer’s decisions—to disband the Iraqi army and to undertake a purge of Baath party members so sweeping as to dismantle the Iraqi government—have been widely criticized. Whether it would otherwise have been easier to cope with the insurgency is hard to say, though the idea seems plausible. Rumsfeld’s insistence, backed by the President, on deploying to Iraq only a fraction of the troops requested by General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, seems more clearly to have courted trouble—a conclusion brought home all the more sharply by the apparent success of today’s “surge” in manpower.

In any event, the decisions about troop levels and about abolishing Iraq’s existing administrative structure had nothing to do with neoconservative ideas. The most that can fairly be said is that Rumsfeld was an ally of neoconservatives and that some among them, enamored of military technology or influenced by the Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi, endorsed his choices. Besides, whatever measure of responsibility may be placed on neoconservatives in this one matter, it pales in comparison to the errors of the realists in the George H.W. Bush administration who in 1991 chose to leave Saddam in power, and of the liberals in the Clinton administration who allowed Saddam’s defiance of his disarmament obligations to swell steadily over eight long years. Together, these failures left the problem of Saddam Hussein festering for George W. Bush to confront in the aftermath of 9/11, when it appeared in a more ominous light.

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To point to an insufficiency of troops or to errors by Paul Bremer is of course no answer to more searching questions about the wisdom of the war itself. At the outset, liberal critics—initially there were more of them abroad than at home—argued that UN inspectors should have been given more time to find Saddam’s hidden weapons of mass destruction, and that the U.S. should not have gone to war without the approval of the Security Council.

But the inspectors had been at their mission for twelve years, and there was no reason to believe they would ever accomplish it. As we later discovered, the Iraqi regime had apparently destroyed its stocks of biological and chemical agents and concealed or destroyed the evidence it had done so, or failed to make a record in the first place. Why Saddam would have deliberately invited the suspicion that he still possessed such materials remains the war’s great mystery—probably he did not want his enemies or his friends to know the actual state of affairs—but whatever the final truth may be, the inspectors were unlikely to have discovered it.

As for the Security Council, here we do hit on one of the signature issues of neoconservatism. Although neoconservatives are not necessarily unilateralists, they are certainly and pointedly distrustful of the UN (as are traditional conservatives). And they have reason to be.

America’s decision to invade Iraq after failing to secure the support of the Security Council cost it dearly in the coin of world public opinion. But should we resort to war only upon the Security Council’s approval? Although some Europeans have articulated such a principle, in 1999, when Russia stood in the way of UN-approved military strikes against Serbia over the issue of Kosovo, NATO went ahead and bombed anyway, and all nineteen members took part. Surely, the stakes in Iraq were far higher than in Kosovo, even in purely humanitarian terms, all the more so in strategic.

Although the UN Charter gives the Security Council a near-monopoly on the use of force, that same charter also envisioned a mighty UN army that would protect every member against attack or even threat. In return for this protection, the member states were to sacrifice much of their freedom to defend their own interests. But the army never came into being, so this part of the charter is a dead letter. Surely states cannot have surrendered most of their right to defend themselves once the other half of the bargain became null and void.

But arguments over the UN and the Security Council are only the tip of an iceberg. The larger and more general issue is how readily America should resort to the use of force and whether neoconservatives are too promiscuous or “trigger-happy” in this regard. Liberal critics of the war, who grew more assertive and numerous as our effort in Iraq bogged down, reprised the dovish positions of the past 30 years. Over the course of those decades, the likes of Carl Levin and Edward Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi had opposed virtually every new U.S. weapons system and every stout anti-Communist policy—in other words, the very measures that led to victory in the cold war. They also opposed the 1991 Gulf war to force Saddam out of Kuwait, and military action against Serbia in Bosnia. Never once did they acknowledge error or revisit their own mistaken judgments, although in each case the neoconservative critique of those judgments was proved right. Are we now to suppose that, whatever may have gone wrong so far in Iraq, we can vanquish the forces of terrorism by restricting ourselves to the liberals’ favored instruments—diplomacy, foreign aid, and the UN?

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On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some conservative critics of the war have argued that we went to Iraq in pursuit of the wrong mission—that is, democratization. As Charles R. Kesler, the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, puts it: “the case for toppling Saddam was much stronger than the one for staying indefinitely to buy time for the Iraqis to democratize.” And this, too, touches a signature neoconservative issue.

It is hard to picture what would be better today, either for the Iraqis or for us and our interests, had we just deposed Saddam and left. Numerous scenarios are imaginable, all of them grisly. Saddam might have been succeeded by one of his equally bloody henchmen, like the infamous “Chemical Ali.” An ethnically-based civil war might have broken out, or the country might have devolved into anarchy like Somalia, except with infinitely more weapons available. Or Iraq’s neighbors might have torn it to pieces, with the largest piece consumed by Iran.

Perhaps Kesler envisions that we could have installed a benign dictator. This thought is not far from that of some neoconservatives themselves, who believe that we would have done better to place Ahmad Chalabi in power. But whether it would have been Chalabi or Ayad Allawi (who served briefly as prime minister) or some other Iraqi to our liking, this would not have reduced our own burdens a whit. No such figure could have remained in power unless we shouldered the job of preserving him by force. To the contrary, the measure of democracy that has taken hold in Iraq—along with the degree of legitimacy, however attenuated, that this has given to both the Iraqi authorities and our own continued presence—has made our burdens there so much the lighter.

Indeed, what with high voter participation and a degree of give-and-take among the various factions, democratization can be said to have received a decent start in Iraq. To be sure, the functioning of the Iraqi government has been inadequate, but more mature democracies have also faltered under the pressures of war and terror. In the meantime, government on the local level, at least in areas relatively free of violence, seems to be functioning. What is apparent is that most Iraqis want democracy, but their wishes are hostage to a sizable minority of violent recalcitrants, backed by outside force.

A more profound criticism of the war in Iraq is that it was the wrong war in the wrong place. By attacking Iraq, so it has been said, Bush diverted us from completing the vital mission of pacifying Afghanistan and tracking down Osama bin Laden. This critique, which became another staple of Democratic argument, has the advantage of sounding tough even while opposing the war. Barack Obama revealed a new variation of the theme when, in August, he announced that he would support bombing terrorist targets in Pakistan.

But what good would it have done to have had tens of thousands more U.S. troops in Afghanistan? From the perspective of “nation building” and other humanitarian concerns, Afghanistan after the removal of the Taliban was doing well—for Afghanistan. A thousand things were wrong, but that poor and undeveloped country was progressing better than at any other time in memory. From a strategic perspective, perhaps a larger American force could have suppressed Taliban guerrilla activity more completely, but was this a mission for which we should have tied down the lion’s share of our deployable forces?

And what of bin Laden? By all accounts, he is not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. There is still talk of U.S. forces attacking the tribal areas where he is believed to shelter, but this would be another nettlesome project. It would entail great military risk—Pakistan’s own army has done poorly in the region—and would possibly destabilize the world’s second largest Muslim country, a country that contains both a nuclear arsenal and large numbers of extremists. Obama’s hypothetical bombing attack would more likely result in mayhem than in the death of bin Laden.

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A more serious version of the “wrong place” argument came from within the neoconservative camp itself, and specifically from Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. He argued in 2003 that we should focus not on Iraq but on Iran.

A key goal in the larger war against terrorism has been to put an end to state support for terrorists either by inducing state sponsors to mend their ways or by bringing about their downfall. Among these sponsors and/or perpetrators, the most active have been Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

All four are brutally repressive of their own citizens and opponents of regional peace. All have attempted to acquire weapons of mass destruction. All embrace radical anti-Western philosophies, secular or Islamist. And all have been in place for decades. It seemed a sensible strategy to use force against one in the hope that this would precipitate the desired outcome in the others.

The administration did not spell out its rationale for choosing Iraq, but it is possible to imagine the reasons. In Iran, internal dissidents and reformers seemed far stronger at the time than they do today, and there were grounds for hoping they might change the government on their own. Hitting Syria first, the choice of some neoconservatives, might have reinforced the canard that we were acting on Israel’s behalf and thus sparked an even stormier backlash in the Arab world than what we have suffered over Iraq. Libya had been quiescent since Reagan bombed the country in 1986 in response to a terrorist outrage.

The choice of Iraq as a target had another comparative advantage, a particularly ironic one in light of the subsequent charge by Kofi Annan (among others) that the war was “illegal.” Actually, there was a clear justification in international law for using force against Iraq, and it did not rest primarily on the administration’s controversial interpretation of the traditional right of preemptive self-defense. It rested on Saddam’s own willful defiance of the terms and conditions ending the 1991 war he had launched by invading Kuwait.

In hindsight, was Ledeen right? After all, Iran is closer to having a nuclear bomb than Iraq seems to have been, and it has always been the greater supporter of terrorism. Moreover, our difficulties in Iraq have left an opening for Iran to bid for regional hegemony. But if it was indeed a mistake to concentrate on Iraq first, the mistake had nothing to do with neoconservatism. Rather, it was the kind of strategic error that abounds in war. In World War I, our side may have concentrated too much on the central front; in World War II, too much on the periphery. In the cold war, we met disaster in Vietnam, where we either should not have fought or should not have allowed ourselves to lose. In each case, however, we won the larger war.

In sum, the most persuasive criticisms of the Iraq war—that we sent too small a force, that we erred in dismantling the Iraqi state, that we would have been wiser to concentrate on Iran—do nothing to impeach neoconservatism. And as for the criticisms that do aim at the distinctly neoconservative tenets of the war—that we should have deferred to the UN, that we should have avoided resorting to force, that we should not have tried to bring democracy to Iraq—none is persuasive.

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In the end, the validity of the neoconservative position, or for that matter of the indictment against it, rests on two issues that go beyond Iraq: whether and how the U.S. should try to spread democracy in the Middle East, and whether we should be engaged in a war against terrorism.

On the first count, Francis Fukuyama has explained his disaffection from neoconservatism on the grounds that, in contrast to his own, “Marxist” approach to democratization, his former friends and allies had behaved like “Leninists.” By this he means to separate his analysis in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) from the policies to which that analysis seminally contributed. In writing about the “end of history,” Fukuyama now says, he was only attempting to discover the historical laws that, sooner or later, would lead all nations to democracy. But just as Lenin took matters into his own hands when he tired of waiting for Marx’s predicted revolution, so had the neoconservatives tried, fatally, to force the pace of democratization.

The analogy may be catchy, but it is flawed. The socialism envisioned by Marx was a fantasy, which came true neither by natural evolution nor by Lenin’s violence. Democracy, on the other hand, is the method by which governments are chosen today in about two-thirds of the countries of the world, and this is something that has come about via both the “Marxist” and the “Leninist” paths. In the technologically advanced countries of Europe, democracy in the postwar era may arguably have developed organically, as the outgrowth of socio-economic development. But the majority of today’s democracies are not technologically advanced; democracy came to them because people wanted it and worked or fought for it. In other words, it has been a product of individual choice and will. And though most of its proponents have been indigenous, outsiders have often played influential roles.

In fact, even in the advanced countries, postwar democracy did not just unfold naturally. There, too, it came with the help of various kinds of foreign intervention, whether it was the Allied occupations of Germany, Japan, and Austria, or the CIA’s interventions in the politics of Italy and France, or the role played by the Marshall Plan across Western Europe. For that matter, America’s own democracy was born with outside assistance from the likes of Lafayette and the government of France. It turns out that we are all “Leninists.”

The strategy of promoting democracy in the Middle East flowed from Bush’s realization that the war against terror could not be won by military means alone. Bush eschewed the old cliché that the “root cause” of terror was poverty, a theory always contradicted by the available evidence and one that should have received its final blow this past summer from the appearance of a cell of terrorist physicians in the United Kingdom. Instead, Bush hypothesized that the root cause was the political culture of the Muslim Middle East, which is steeped in violence. This political culture has incubated thousands of young men ready to die for the joy of killing and tens of millions of citizens ready to applaud their “martyrdom.” Bush’s thesis was, and is, that the Middle East can be brought to partake in the global tide of democratization that has touched every other region, and that such democratization will lead to new ways of thinking and make violence less acceptable.

Neither Bush nor anyone else can know if this strategy will work. There are two obvious areas of uncertainty. One has been expressed well by Kesler:

The conspicuous exception to democracy’s spread was the Arab Middle East. That could have meant, as the neoconservatives concluded, that its turn was next. But it could also have meant that there were cultural, religious, and political factors that had made it resistant to the democratic wave—and would continue to do so.

Kesler here makes the neoconservatives sound more assertive and uniform than I think is fair, but he is certainly right that we do not know whether Arabs will in fact embrace democracy any time soon or, for that matter, ever. And we also do not know—we can only suppose and hope—that if they do, democracy will work to pacify Arab political culture. That is the second uncertainty.

Was it irresponsible of Bush to rest such weighty national concerns on an unproved supposition? It would have been irresponsible had there been any better-tested or more plausible alternatives available. But none has yet been suggested, unless one counts those who persist in believing that stronger U.S. efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict will solve everything else. (If that were the case, attacks on America should have subsided during the 1990’s, the decade of our most vigorous efforts to broker just such a peace; instead, they crescendoed.)

Thus far, Bush’s strategy has scored some steps forward and some back. All in all, as Freedom House reported this year, “the Middle East continues to lag behind other regions in the development of free institutions.” But, the Freedom House report immediately continues, “the fact that progress has been made since the September 11, 2001 attacks gives some cause for optimism.” Although no country in the region (apart from Israel) can be judged “free,” the number counted as “partly free” (as opposed to “not free”) has risen from 3 to 6 (or 7 if one counts the Palestinian Authority). If appreciable progress is to come, it will require more years, which is why Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks of “a generational commitment.”

_____________

If Bush’s strategy of spreading democracy bears a neoconservative imprimatur, it is not the largest issue on which neoconservatism stands or falls. That issue is the war against terrorism itself. According to the financier George Soros, among many others, terrorism ought to be viewed simply as a form of criminal behavior, to be handled by means of law-enforcement and not by means of war. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national-security adviser, argues that, under Bush, the country’s fear of terrorism has amounted to a species of “paranoia,” resulting from “almost continuous national brainwashing” that has been perpetrated not only by our government but also by “security entrepreneurs, the mass media, and the entertainment industry.” This in itself sounds rather paranoid.

The simple fact is that the attacks of 9/11 were the most deadly on the United States proper in its history. What is more, they followed by eleven months the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole that killed seventeen U.S. sailors and wounded 39 others. Two years before that, two of our embassies in Africa were bombed, killing more than 300 people, and two years before that a truck bomb in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia struck U.S. military housing, killing nineteen and wounding 550.

One could go on. Perhaps more frightening is a fact I have already mentioned: tens of thousands of young men in the Islamic world have gone for formal training in terrorism. Their highest objective, presumably, is to strike at “the Great Satan” even at the cost of their own lives, or especially at the cost of their own lives. These myriads are backed by a larger network disposing of considerable resources, making use of modern technology, enjoying the support or complicity of several governments, and striving to acquire or develop ever more lethal means.

The 3,000 lives that were obliterated on 9/11 represented a new benchmark in the success of terror operations, but no one then doubted that the killers would turn at once to the challenge of outdoing this toll. So, indeed, they have repeatedly tried to do. Contrary to Brzezinski, to be frightened by this requires no brainwashing. Nor, contrary to Soros, are those young men likely to be deterred if we issue them restraining orders.

Fukuyama offers a somewhat more judicious argument. “‘War’ is the wrong metaphor,” he writes. “Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a ‘long, twilight struggle’ whose core is not a military campaign but a political struggle.” The extent of that jihadist challenge, moreover, has been greatly overestimated, and its rootedness in Islam is itself exaggerated. “It is . . . a mistake,” Fukuyama asserts, “to identify Islamism as an authentic and somehow inevitable expression of Muslim religiosity.”

Interestingly, the very phrase “long, twilight struggle” is borrowed by Fukuyama from John F. Kennedy’s characterization of the cold war—which is exactly the model that neoconservatives have repeatedly offered for the war against terrorism. And as for Islamism being an “authentic and inevitable expression of Muslim religiosity,” inevitable it surely is not; but who are non-Muslims to say that it is inauthentic? It certainly seems to be authentic to the individuals who espouse it.

Nor are they alone. Despite the insistence of U.S. officials that the supporters of terrorism are a tiny minority of Muslims, the available data tell a different story. Yes, they are a minority, but not an insignificant one. This summer, the Pew Global Attitudes survey heralded a sharp decline in Muslim support for suicide bombings. After this drop, reportedly, “only” 16 percent of Turks support such attacks—as do 21 percent of Kuwaitis, 23 percent of Jordanians, 34 percent of Lebanese Muslims, 42 percent of Nigerian Muslims, and 70 percent of Palestinians. Confidence in Osama bin Laden “to do the right thing in world affairs” tracks these numbers at a slightly lower level.

There are, thank goodness, some countries where Pew’s figures are lower, the lowest being Egypt, where only 8 percent approve suicide bombings. But another Pew survey conducted just a couple of months earlier found 15 percent of Egyptians believing that “attacks on civilians . . . to achieve political goals” were justified. Perhaps the discrepancy means that some Egyptians disapprove of suicide—which presents its own theological difficulties—but not the killing of innocents in a worthy cause. In the same poll, a mere 26 percent of Egyptians disapproved both of al Qaeda’s attitudes toward the U.S. and of its tactics. When Egypt’s Ibn Khaldun Center, run by the political sociologist Saad Edin Ibrahim, asked Egyptians whom they most admired, the three frontrunners were the Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Khaled Meshal of Hamas.

Troubling as they are, these data may understate the problem, at least to judge by election results in the region. In Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, Islamist parties, some of them non-violent but some very violent indeed, have scored a string of successes. Although Fukuyama rightly assures us that “we are not currently engaged in anything that looks like a ‘clash of civilizations,’” if Islamists and jihadists take over additional countries, the consequences may well resemble exactly that.

_____________

The terrorists are the shock troops of the jihadist or radical Islamist movement, a movement whose strength is limited but substantial—far greater than, for example, that of the Communists just after Lenin seized power in Russia. Jihadism has many times more supporters, its reach is more global, it has far more resources, and it has a natural constituency that Communism only pretended to have. Lenin and his band succeeded in fastening their grip on a backward country and used it as a springboard from which their heirs could contest seriously for world domination. Who is to say how powerful a threat radical Islam could become if allowed to metastasize further?

This movement has already been at war with us for some time, and has killed us by the thousands. Bush’s announcement of a “war against terror” was thus nothing more than a declaration that we had decided to fight back. Soros, Brzezinski, and Fuku-yama notwithstanding, this war was not “optional.” If we had declined to fight it now, we would only have to fight more desperately later. If we do not fight back, can anyone imagine that the jihadists will stop? Conversely, defeat of their cause will assuredly demoralize that movement and thin its ranks.

As for the neoconservatives, they have taken their lumps over the war in Iraq. Nonetheless, the tenets of neoconservatism continue to offer the most cogent approach to the challenge that faces our country. To recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral, against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents. Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make appropriate strategic choices. Saying it convincingly will strengthen our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in one theater will affect those in others. (3) While we should always prefer nonviolent methods, the use of force will continue to be part of the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force.

This suggests a few priorities. First, for all our failures in Iraq, we cannot afford to accept defeat there; nor do we have to. True, our more fanciful images of what Iraq would become after Saddam’s removal have gone by the boards. But there is still a world of difference between a relatively stable if troubled country and a state of anarchy.

And then there is Iran. Even if we turn a corner in Iraq, our relative success will be negated if we allow Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb. Once it does, not only will we be haunted by the specter of nuclear terrorism, but we may be constrained by nuclear blackmail from actions we would want to take in future chapters of the war against terror.

Next, only by enlarging our military can we base strategic decisions on military need and not on the availability of forces. How is it that a nation of 300 million cannot indefinitely sustain a force level of 150,000 in a given theater, meaning one soldier for every 2,000 Americans?

Finally, our efforts to foster democracy in the Middle East must not be curtailed but prosecuted vigorously and more effectively. True, the “Arab spring” of 2005 did not turn out to be as successful as the famous “Prague spring” of 1968. But then, it took two decades for that Prague spring to yield fruit. The modest liberalization in the Middle East and the democratic ferment that we have stirred there promise further advances if we persevere.

None of this offers a complete guide to waging the war against terror. But it does amount to a coherent approach, essentially similar to the one by means of which we won the cold war. By contrast, liberals and realists have no coherent approach to suggest—or at least they have not suggested one. That, after all, is why George W. Bush, searching urgently for a response to the events of September 11, stumbled into the arms of neoconservatism, unlikely though the match seemed. One can always wish that policies were executed better, but for a strategy in the war that has been imposed upon us, neoconservatism remains the only game in town.
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Footnotes

1 Irving Kristol is often referred to as the “godfather” of neoconservatism. Though this may capture his role in shaping the domestic side, it has been a source of confusion when it comes to neoconservative ideas on foreign policy. Although outspoken on this subject, Kristol has more often positioned himself with traditional conservatives than with other neoconservatives. For example, he opposed the Reagan policies of supporting anti-Communist guerrillas and of promoting democracy abroad, on which more below.

2 For a fuller account, see my “The Neoconservative Cabal,” in COMMENTARY , September 2003. Although Jews often dominate liberal political causes, one never hears them attacked by their opponents on the Right in the anti-Semitic terms used freely by the Left.

3 World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Doubleday, 230 pp., $24.95.
About the Author

Joshua Muravchik, a longtime contributor to COMMENTARY , is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Exporting Democracy, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, and The Future of the United Nations. He is working on a book about Arab and Muslim democrats.

© 2008 Commentary Inc.

Convergent and divergent thinking

2007-11-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

Just after James P. Carse published his delightful little book of logical theorems he titled Finite and Infinite games, I was fortunate enough to pick up a copy at a bookstore and browse the first couple of pages. I was immediately captivated by the nifty little statements that simply say what the game players do. It's a book of rules, then, about the rules people live by and don't often acknowledge. I immediately recognized the games I prefer, and why I like them. But what is so clever about this wonderful small but pithy piece of work, is the clarity and order it puts into little puzzling problems of communication, where one may be playing by the infinite game rule set, and dealing with someone playing by a finite4 game rule set. I found that by clarifying at least that for myself, I could keep clear, at least, and the confusion that seemed to be in place at times may not have been made clear between the other person and myself, but at least I was not so frustrated by it as I might have been, and at least I could take steps to minimize the uproar that often occurs when both parties are frustrated by a miscommunication.

Behind those little theorems that Carse produced lie two different forms of thinking, convergent and divergent. Convergent is causal and proof oriented, and thus for a purpose, and divergent is open ended and possibility oriented. The finite game player relies primarily on convergent thinking rules in the game and thus drives for a closure, or a completion, thus a winning. The Tai Chi divergent thinker foils that endlessly. A person I've dealt with on message boards, who I call Gerbil A, in some dim dark recess of his corrupted little brain, recognizes the possibilities of divergent thinking and thus tries to use it to disrupt a discussion. He also uses it to prove his little assumptions, like someone is "intellectually dishonest." That charge implies that the person must be using convergent thinking, and when they deviate from that thinking and explore other possibilities, they are "dishonest." What shows he's not so smart is that he doesn't recognize someone else that recognizes it. And now he doesn't know what to do, because his game depends on the other not recognizing it. And if he has any sense at all, he's got to recognize now that he's made a fool of himself. My guess is that's why I'm being left alone. In the end he's just a finite game player using something he really never took the trouble to understand. Because I challenged him to play the infinite game, and he couldn't. It's not that different from what you've done with your manipulative colleague.

The way I see it now, much of Eastern philosophical thought is based on an awareness of these two thought patterns. Some very bright people have made an effort to make sense of it throughout Western philosophy as well, and back in the Sixties, especially among those gathered along spots on the West Coast, some of them worked that out, and among them were guys like Alan Watts, and Gregory Bateson. Big Sur is an amazing location for me, and one place that was a gathering point was the Esalen Institute. Go to that link and just look at the picture, and you'll see, perhaps, why I went there to heal myself after my divorce.

Esalen Institute exists to promote the harmonious development of the whole person. It is a learning organization dedicated to restricted exploration of the human potential, and resists religious, scientific and other dogmas except for gestalt psychotherapy, which permeates all levels of the community based staff and business model. It fosters theory, practice, research, and institution-building to facilitate personal and social transformation and, to that end, sponsors seminars for the general public; invitational conferences; research programs; residencies for artists, scholars, scientists, and religious teachers; work-study programs; and semi-autonomous projects.

– Michael Murphy, Chairman, Esalen Board of Trustees, Esalen Institute Statement of Purpose

I found myself drawn there even when I was still in the Navy, stationed in Alameda (not far from where I lived in Oakland years later.) So all of what I say has a depth of continuity that correlates to places like that, even if the thinking involved is not convergent and causal.

A number of features of my life seem to "magically" coalesce there, like the "Schizophrenia Research Project" which is what led me to Gregory Bateson thoughts, I suspect. Gregory Bateson's work with double binds and schizophrenia correlated with my interest in Eastern thought raised by my reading of Alan Watts after my own "awakening" when I went into a complete rebellion against the military authority system itself, a frustrated and trapped felling little gerbil that I found myself to be, running on my little wheel. Gregory Bateson himself drew on the Eastern thought to explain the double bind and the schizophrenic reaction to such things (paradox being a natural result of employing convergent logic to explain a divergent logical problem), and so much that puzzled me became clear when I witnessed that problem, not just in myself, but in what others around me were doing to make sense of their worlds. With that I already had the basic awareness for grasping what Gregory Bateson with his deutero learning was trying to describe when I first read it in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind in the early Seventies. The basic therapy process of Gestalt psychology was already embedded in this form in me, and these processes were all coalescing at the Esalen Institute, with the likes of well known proponents like Fritz Perls.

So the Esalen Institute on Big Sur was a "counter culture Nexus" in the Sixties, as some called it back then, and the point of an explosion of sorts, the results of which are reverberating in odd ways still today. I'd point to Usha and possibly even Thom as effects of that expansion of divergent awareness, which cannot be traced in convergent logic, and the results of what it could stimulate are the many possibilities that we see, interacting with forces that come up to contain it. Thom Hartmann himself is a kind of stepchild of Gregory Bateson through his connection to NLP and those who came along and bastardized it into a convergent thinking finite game of mind control. I'd love to run that narrative on the board and see where it goes. The counter action to the explosion of possibility thinking and the gestalt awareness that comes from it, is also visible, and the counter action is the convergent thinking in society that wants everything to make sense and thus have definable conclusions that can contain this explosion of possibilities that erupted, not really so much as a counter to the culture but as a breaking down of the prison walls of thought that have the gerbils endlessly spinning in their well fed, "happy" lives.

My writing is about that, when I think about it. All these little things I bring up, like binary oppositions as part of rational thought, my sense of how the world is evolving with the forces I try to describe, all of it. At least I have a "theme." What I don't have is a good set of understandable metaphors for others to make sense of what I'm saying, not unless they have transcended their own need to make sense of the world with convergent logic, and I see very little sign of that. So I have little hope that I will write anything that will every make open ended and playful sense in the way I'd hope it could.

The Esalen land is the true gift to the people who live and visit there, offering striking scenery set between mountains and ocean. Workshops cover many subjects including: The Arts, Ecopsychology, Health, Integral thought, Martial arts, Massage, Dance, Myth, Philosophical Inquiry, Somatics, Spiritual & Religious Studies, Transpersonal Process, Wilderness, Yoga, and Mindfulness.

  
Sometimes, when I think about things I think in this way,  feel like I'm in about the place Robert Frost was when he produced
his last book of poetry: In The Clearing.  That poem was one from that
book.



Accidentally on Purpose -- by Robert Frost

 The universe is but the Thing of things,
 The things but balls all going round in rings.

 Some of them mighty huge, some mighty tiny,
 All of them radiant and mighty shiny.

 They mean to tell us all was rolling blind
 Till accidentally it hit on mind
 In an albino monkey in a jungle

 And even then it had to grope and bungle,

 Till Darwin came to earth upon a year
 To show the evolution how to steer.
 They mean to tell us, though, the Omnibus
 Had no real purpose till it got to us.


 Never believe it. At the very worst
 It must have had the purpose from the first
 To produce purpose as the fitter bred:
 We were just purpose coming to a head.

 Whose purpose was it? His or Hers or Its?

 Let's leave that to the scientific wits.
 Grant me intention, purpose, and design--
 That's near enough for me to the Divine.

 And yet for all this help of head and brain
 How happily instinctive we remain,

 Our best guide upward further to the light,
 Passionate preference such as love at sight.

Strategic Knowledge of Suicide Terrorism

2007-10-27T11:42:00.001-07:00

A More Realistic Version of the Threat of Terrorism

I just finished watching the "Conversation with History" with Robert A Pape titled:

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

I don't doubt his book is worth the read, but in lieu of that, this conversation holds some extremely valuable and mind blowing (I thought that might be a pun, but decided not to call it) insights based on some of the first research of its kind about suicide terrorism. If not up for the book, I recommend at least reading the interview at the above link, or watch a Google video I found:

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

As a preface to the video, I'd like to make the following comments: Descriptively, when the catastrophic event we now call 911 occurred, the Bush Administration had at least two fairly prominent, identifiable groups in an advisory capacity -- the realists and the idealist. The Neocons were the geostrategic idealists and they won their case about IR policy, however they won it -- there can be plenty of discussion about that.

In place was the still expensive, still self perpetuating military industrial complex. The notion that the military could promote democracy faster in the Arc of Instability is embedded in the Neoconservative ideology, where the realists are less concerned with the need for immediate gratification on that score, and much more sensitive to keeping down the roiling of emotions and political struggles that resort to violence, so that sensible neoliberalism policies begun with some real earnestness during the Reagan Administration can go forth, promoting its form of elite democracy, which some, especially those in populist democratic movements in South America, refer to as "polyarchy." That's where prime examples of the wealthy elite are offered to the rabble for selection. Basically what's evolved here in the past 150 years, or so.

Realists, like Robert Pape, referenced above, video interview below, would simply look at the causes of these terror acts and find strategies that they hope will not inflame the likes of the Ossama bin Ladens and move on. The idealists are looking at the scene more like it's a strategic computer game, and the human beings are bots in the game. Thus considerations of culture, human beings and their interactions and so forth aren't that key to the programming, and the strategy doesn't include such trivialities.

What makes that the case? Well, we get into cultural ideologies, the mythos and the way that can be manipulated through all sorts of storytelling, not the least of which is an event like the recent Super Bowl and the little mini stories that flash in and out called commercials.

We can talk about what to do about that in an abstract sense, but the details of it, that permeate each person's life, drip constantly upon them and it is what they are, because it is part of what they do, every single day.

All I can see to do is create these meta text narratives describing what is going on. If we can keep that narrative going, there is some hope that at critical moments when people are listening, as I believe many are right now, a narrative that offers something insightful might grab them enough to want to explore it for themselves. I'm watching people around me in a very small and remote county here, 21,000 people total in the county, replacing their signs that had Bush/Cheney with Ron Paul. They are sharing DVD's with each other about 911 conspiracies, and they are questioning.

I don't know what that can come to, but when I say something now, I don't see the barriers going up in the back of the eyes like I used to.

Liminality -- the Territory Beneath the Maps of Binary Opposition

2007-10-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

I've introduced liminality, now, so maybe it's time to build a bridge of symbolic connections from Pi (tag line "faith in chaos) to the language of liminality, which was what primarily inspired me to study symbolic anthropology, an aspect of the field that made an important contribution to the post structuralist studies (post modernist is another descriptor, since modernism, which led to the liberal thought of the U.S. Founders, was derived from an epistimology with its foundations in Cartesian duality) that followed the Twentieth Century works of such well known figures as Claude Levi Strauss. Strauss is a signature figure in cultural anthropology, who brought to bear on the study of culture the analytical power of the binary opposition, which is perhaps the heart and soul of the structuralist's tool kit. In his well known tome, the Raw and the Cooked, he brought his now famous two by two matrix, a binary opposition technique, to the study of such ethnographically recorded behaviors as exotic people's culinary practices. In doing so, he revealed possibilities of meaning theretofore unimagined by this daily and necessary human function of eating, that led to all sorts of ways of making sense of nearly a century of anthropologist gathered ethnographic data. So while he did go into the field to do ethnographic research of his own early on, for the most part his re-analysis of the research of others was the technique he used to develop his structuralist theories, and how he managed to transform the whole of anthropological thought into a new theoretical paradigm, much as Einstein transformed physics. Then Victor Turner came along and went beyond, into the unknown and the irrational, and did an astounding exploration into the realm of Pi, as I would suggest, and why I began with looking at the movie. When I'm looking at what appear to be meanings from a field of binary oppositions, I'm doing so with my explorations into what Turner coined "anti structure" to go with Van Gennep's liminality in mind, and aided by readings into the exploratory works of Victor Turner:

Turner sought to gaze upon interstices which 'provide homes for anti-structural visions, thoughts and ultimately behaviours' (1974:293). That such times and spaces are regarded as necessary sources of resolution, is the crux of Turner's perspective. Meta-explorations beyond, beneath and between the fixed, the finished and the predictable, his later work consists of an extensive journey into such times and spaces, pregnant margins, the cracks of society, necessary thresholds of dissolution and indeterminacy through which socio-cultural order is said to be (re)constituted. And, through observation of culture unkempt and unclothed, in its drunken, ludic and inchoate moments, one may obtain a clear apprehension of the ordered world.

His project is founded upon a sense that society is in-composition, open-ended, forever becoming, and that its (re)production is dependent upon the periodic appearance, in the history of societies and in the lives of individuals, of organised moments of categorical disarray and intense reflexive potential. This is most powerfully articulated as liminality, a concept which has sparked the imagination of cultural observers attempting to apply meaning to a phalanx of public time-space zones demarcated from routine life, yet harbouring unquantifiable social possibilities. It is in such zones of experience - the 'realm of pure possibility' (Turner 1967a:97) - where the familiar may be stripped of its certitude and conventional economics and politics transcended. They are occasions where people, often strangers to one another, may achieve an ineffable affinity, where sacred truths are imparted and/or social alternatives explored. (From: Alternative Cultural Heterotopia: ConFest as Australia's Marginal Centre - by Dr. Graham St. John)

Turner's "anti structure" is not so much a conceptual opposite to structure -- as for instance raw might be to cooked; for him anti structure was the field, and structure was the map through the field that set up the boundaries that defined people's lives in which the dramas of their lives took place. Hence the title of one of his books: Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. When I discovered Victor Turner's work upon stumbling upon this book in my anthropological studies in college, it fit into an obsession that began shortly after I returned from 'Nam, around 1970, after my big "Rite of Passage" (a concept which is an important focus in Turner's work) and continues to now. Much of the work in the intellectual work in various fields during the late 70s, 80s and 90s reflects this what I found embedded in Turner's thought -- and I'd argue that it's certainly seeded into post modernism and semiotics -- and it came out most creatively in a number of different fields, including the cognitive sciences. Intellectually this was a very creative period, a breaking down of the certainties that one finds in the scholarship of structuralism which made up the bulk of the field I found most fascinating at the time -- anthropology --as exploratory thinkers moved into the realms of liminal thought, where that thought is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. This is the stage in a traditional rite of passage where a sense of identity dissolves -- at least to some extent -- bringing about a sense of disorientation. This is a period of transition, maybe even transcendence, where self definitions and their inherent conceptual limits, and related limits on behavior are relaxed, and opens the mind to the possibilities of new perspectives. So, then, another term for liminal that Turner uses in his work is anti structure. If we see that society is made up of codified rules, or norms of behaviors, those are in essence the features we recognize as structures of society. For most within a society, these are considered "common sense" ways to behave. Most of them go unquestioned for the most part, until something "odd" comes to attention. Anti structure would be behavior outside those norms. Some may be defined as "pathological" by a society, like, perhaps, killing another human being. Some may be behaviors that don't have such clearly definable contours, but as a whole, people tend to know what "odd" is when they see it. People who are put in a category like "insane" for instance, may be doing nothing to violate another's socially defined rights, they just may not be acting according to the accepted norms. Here are the lines worth revisiting in regards to what I'm trying to describe, from the above quote from St. John's PhD dissertation:

Meta-explorations beyond, beneath and between the fixed, the finished and the predictable, his (edit: Turner's) later work consists of an extensive journey into such times and spaces, pregnant margins, the cracks of society, necessary thresholds of dissolution and indeterminacy through which socio-cultural order is said to be (re)constituted. And, through observation of culture unkempt and unclothed, in its drunken, ludic and inchoate moments, one may obtain a clear apprehension of the ordered world.

As you might see, this intellectual tool quickly lends itself to a task of theoretical analysis of society. That is, it does so once we grasp the notion of relating the abstractions of ideas involved in norms of behavior to structure/antistructure (also the word liminality, or the idea of irrational numbers that refuse to behave strictly according to mathematical code and be neatly defined and contained like a rational number). With this tool we can move thought to another abstract plane, and from there it then becomes attractive for some of us to begin theorizing about the macro possibilities of how any given society could or should work. In order to try to develop this thought a bit more, I'm going to introduce the model of a process I've already mentioned -- the rite of passage. Rites of passage fascinated me when I first encountered it because it provided me with a conceptual form that enabled me to objectively conceptualize one of my most life changing experiences, and thereby put it in a perspective that helped me make sense of a lot of things I found myself deeply troubled about after I'd returned home from being in the military. I mentioned the Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep earlier, he is credited with being the first to formally define the distinctive structure of a rite of passage at the turn of the Twentieth Century. I want to work on putting something together that's not just one of my stream of consciousness hodge podges, but that might offer me a way of opening up and sharing more about what I see in this core thought about binary oppositions, and hopefully to thereby give it some form to help make sense of these notions of structure, and antistructure -- or liminality -- that I've introduced. Other words for the concept of structure, by the way, would be terms like "metaphor" or "symbol" and thus we have the connection to how structuralism is also a powerful intellectual tool used in understanding literature -- and in fact all the arts. Recall that I alluded to that idea earlier with some quotes about the importance of understanding binary oppositions in the analysis of text. Here's a very brief description of Gennep's notion of the rite of passage:

According to van Gennep, rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation. In the first phase, people withdraw from the group and begin moving from one place or status to another. In the third phase, they reenter society, having completed the rite. The liminal phase is the period between states, during which people have left one place or state but haven't yet entered or joined the next. It is a state of limbo.

And so to connect this with the forms I was seeing at the beginning of this essay when I constructed those lines I called Gerbil Pi:

(Pi the Textual analysis)

Pi stands as the unbridgeable gap between the purity of the mathematical perfect circle and all physical circles. To know Pi in 100% precision (Which math proved is impossible since there is always a next number to the fraction), is impossible since it will bridge math and reality. But this is impossible since reality is not pure, not black and white but in shades of gray. Everything in reality is a matter of degree…

.............

...Our mathematician is intrigued, he walks to the object and observes it’s a sea shell.. He picks it up and observes it carefully as he turns it with both his hands – He observes the spiral pattern, the same pattern he tries to impose on nature throughout the movie… One scene later he picks up a piece of computer board he crushed into the floor in a moment of crisis. He treats the board as the shell… This is the focal point of the story, it has double meaning. The computer board contains chips, units of integrated circuits that operates with Binary Logic (i.e. 0’s and 1’s). The shell symbolize nature, it was created in a natural process and shows a pattern that our Archimedes tries to break into code. This is the essence of the story right here – Break nature code with binary computation. As we’ll later show, and as we see in the movie – this will end in an inevitable crash. Nature simple does not obey the law of Aristotelian logic. Attempt to reduce nature, life, you name it to a code, a mathematical formula, is doomed to fail. Science must admit this before any significant achievement in AI can happen. Max sees the simplicity of the circle and tries to reduce chaos back to it, but the circle is not simple in the first place, it is fuzzy…

This is really fascinating symbolic mental play land, for me at least, and I want to introduce something that all societies seem to share, and that's formal rituals that flirt with the categories that make for the definitions of normalcy, abnormalcy and pathology. This particular description of this ritual offers a fairly well elucidated description of the structural elements of this rite of passage type of ritual for those not familiar with it, and with that, an interesting formal discussion of it's meaning. Being a graduated Shellback myself, having crossed the equator twice, I've been on both sides of the ritual, so this particular ritual has very real and personal meaning, but, more so, it's also one of the better descriptions I've run across of a kind of rite of passage we do practice in Western societies, for some, a geniune "crossing the line" ritual -- in this the equator -- and a four hundred year old maritime ritual for recognizing that fairly abstract human culturally developed knowledge that would go into knowing that there is an equator to cross. Notice in particular in the article, references to "ritual inversion" practices, where the normally homophobic sailors do ritual transvestitist practices, among other symbolic gestures. Another is "the Pollywogs' Revenge" which takes place the day before crossing the equator. In the literature of symbolic ritual action, this represents the moving into the liminal, the chaotic, the realm of "dangerously undefined" and also the important region of creativity where artists and others (various types of shamanic persons, priests, scientist) draw from. In the literature this is considered something societies recognize as necessary in order to recognize the importance of divesting oneself of one identity (a pollywog in this instance) to become another (a shellback -- shellback is a word for turtle).

The following is from the Introduction in the article: Crossing the line: sex, power, justice, and the U.S. Navy at the equator (military rituals) in the Journal: Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, 22-June-2002:

I. INTRODUCTION

When my father came home from a seven-month Gulf War cruise in 1991, he told me about his participation in a bizarre ceremony when his ship crossed the equator. He talked of men receiving unusual haircuts, being paddled and insulted, being smeared with garbage and old food, and, most curiously, of a number of the men on the ship dressing up as women for a beauty pageant. He showed me photographs of men covered from head to toe in filth and being beaten with pieces of fire hose, and other pictures of men flashing massive false breasts to a crowd. As intrigued as I was, I was not surprised at the content of the ceremony. Having grown up a Navy brat, living near or in large Navy communities my entire life, I had grown used to the antics of Naval personnel. I had no problem picturing many of the Navy sailors and officers whom I knew participating in and laughing at the abuse and delighting in the garbage. And despite, or perhaps because of, many of the men's beliefs that women and homosexuals had no place in the Navy, I was not at all surprised at their amusement and willingness to participate in the transvestite pageant. Inexplicably, it just seemed to fit.

Yet, considering the accusations of homophobia, sexism, and sexual harassment that have arisen over the past twenty years, how and why would these same men would willingly submit to being spanked and straddled by other men? What was so important about this ceremony that would make sailors shave their legs and don false breasts and teddies? More importantly, why did I automatically interpret these actions as being normal for this group of people?

The Navy's resistance to women in its ranks is second only to its resistance to homosexuals. Until 1991, women were denied the opportunity to fly fighter jets in the Navy, and only within the past few decades have women been able to sail on ships previously staffed only by men. (1) Where other militaries have found ways to accommodate women and homosexuals in their ranks, it has been a slow and violent process in the U.S. (2) There seems to be no strong logical argument behind the extreme reluctance of the Navy to permit women equal rights, or to permit homosexuals any rights at all. (3) As one gay comedian stated in response to military concerns over the ability of gays to serve, "... what does the military think? That the gays are so sexual that they can't be trusted? What? In the heat of battle they're going to want to have sex with the enemy? `I couldn't shoot him, captain--he was gorgeous!' I don't think so." (4)

In examining the Crossing the Line (or "Shellback") ceremony, it becomes more apparent how intimately these issues are interwoven in the ritual. Through ritual play, ideas about gender, sexuality, and power are acted out. Although this is only one ritual, and one that not all Navy personnel participate in, it does offer one view into how political issues in the Navy are played out and resolved.

A. The Great Fraternal Order of the Raging Main

The Navy ceremony of "Crossing the Line" is a tradition which originated over four hundred years ago, and which continues in strong form today. (5) It is a vivid and unexpectedly sanctioned Naval event in which the uninitiated Naval personnel who have never crossed the equator pass through a series of tests which induct them into the realm of the initiated. It is a brutal and sometimes dangerous transformation. Members are beaten, yelled at, covered in garbage and filth, and made to perform denigrating tasks. Yet the ceremony not only continues, but is fiercely defended by many of its participants, including all the Navy members whom I interviewed.

What is so fascinating about the ritual is the power that it wields. This power comes in several forms. Internally, the drama of the ceremony aids in the manifestation and affirmation of deeply rooted beliefs about gender roles, sex and domination. The drama itself contains much power, as the brutality, beatings and humiliation are not only permitted, but encouraged as tools of transformation. Finally, the ceremony itself is of such importance that men in the stringently hierarchical Navy would deliberately disobey orders in order to ensure its continuance. (6)

The ceremony is complex and varied enough to be considered a ritual. There are two groups of participants, the initiated and the uninitiated. The two groups are distinctly characterized, placed in opposition to demonstrate the difference between the undesirable qualities of the uninitiated and the desired qualities of the initiated. The uninitiated are physically and psychologically tested by the initiates until they are proven acceptable. Throughout the ritual, the initiated take the male position and the uninitiated take the female position. As uninitiated become initiated, they assume a masculine identity that is defined in relation to the feminine characters which they just portrayed. At the end, all participants embody the particular positive, male qualities of the initiated and become members of the "Great Fraternal Order of the Raging Main," under the great leader, King Neptune.

B. The Players

The two groups of participants in the ceremony are the "shellbacks," who have been initiated into the Great Fraternal Order of the Raging Main, and the "pollywogs," who are uninitiated. The uninitiated name can be spelled either "pollywog" or "polliwog," or shortened to "wog." All three names are used interchangeably in the ceremony and in this text. The image associated with shellbacks is that of a turtle, while the meaning of pollywog is that of an infant frog, before metamorphosis.

Women's roles, both as characters and as participants, are important in the ritual. As characters, they work in the ceremony to illustrate ideas about women's social positioning in relation to each other and to men. As participants, women break the previous all-male discussion of gender. In this sense, a comparison of the ritual with and without the presence of women is revealing of how the men in the ceremony understand gender, and how they are forced to change that understanding when women are present.

As more women are introduced to this ritual, the meaning and form of the ceremony continue to change. The U.S. Navy is a male-dominated organization, and, until recently, women were not permitted to serve on ships or submarines. The first exceptions to this ruling were small ships called "tenders," which tended the needs of larger ships such as battleships or carriers. These ships are responsible for repairing and supplying the larger ships or submarines. Three cruise books of one of these ships, the USS Samuel Gompers, were reviewed and compared to other, entirely male-staffed ships and the differences and similarities are discussed later in this note. (7) Because of the rarity of female-staffed ships, however, the ritual is reviewed and analyzed in the context of an all-male setting. Historical and contemporary issues of women's participation in this ritual will be addressed, but until recently they have played a minor role in this ceremony. As the dynamics of the Navy change, with more and more women serving on larger ships as seamen, officers and pilots, the ceremony will no doubt change with it.

C. Organization

Part II of this note establishes the background of the crossing the equator ceremony. It will discuss the origins, development, and meaning of the European ritual as it grew over four centuries. Part III will examine the current day ritual, outlining the passage of the pollywogs from days before the crossing until they receive their shellback certificates. Part IV will follow the pollywog through the ritual process. The life, death and rebirth of the pollywogs as shellbacks will be discussed within the ritual, along with the impact this transition has on the participants' understanding of relations of gender and sexuality. Parts V and VI will delve more deeply into these relations, with the former examining the ritual's understanding of women and of male/female relationships, and the latter examining the ritual's understanding of homosexuality and of heterosexual/homosexual relationships. Part VII will view the ritual in its entirety, and will examine masculine identity in the ritual and in the Navy.

Much of the contestation over women and gays in the military stems from the understandings of gender and sex that exist in the military today and that are expressed through the ceremony. This note attempts to examine how ideas of gender, sexuality, hierarchy and power are played out in the ceremony, and to explore how these ideas impact the development of military legal policy.

II. THE HISTORY OF "CROSSING THE LINE"

The first documented ceremonies at the equator were found in accounts of journeys of French ships in the early sixteenth century. The expansion of trade routes and the funding of exploration of foreign lands at that time allowed European vessels to regularly cross the equator. Regular crossings of the equator, a location marked as "0" degrees latitude and conceptualized as the dividing line between north and south, set the stage for the development of a rite of passage. (8) Shortly after a regular route across the equator was established, various accounts of ceremonies at the line began appearing. (9) These early ceremonies were comprised chiefly of two parts: a religious ceremony of thanksgiving for having passed a certain point, and an initiation (baptism) symbolizing the passing from one stage to the next. (10) By the mid-sixteenth century, sailors had begun to regard it as an ancient right that they baptize those who had not been over the equator before, and they did so by blacking themselves and dressing up in costumes. (11) The equator initiation ceremony soon spread to other European ships and quickly became more complex in form.

To the Europeans of this era, crossing the equator literally inverted their world. The equatorial line was present on world maps before the time of the first accounts of the ceremony, and there were many superstitions about the world and people below the line. It is especially interesting to note that a popular belief at the time was that "anyone of another race who crossed the equator would become a Negro." (12) Hints of this belief can be seen in the use of black-faced police characters who controlled the movements of the uninitiated, in the placing of "Negroes" in positions of power, and in the application of shaving substances so that the man's face was half white and half black. (13) This clearly illustrates the position of the man on the line of inversion.

Although the ritual's purposes are difficult to ascertain because of lack of first-hand information, one can picture the ritual as a testing of new or young shipmates. The crew had only each other to rely on for months at a time. Thus it became absolutely necessary to be able to depend on one's shipmates. The ritual could therefore be viewed as not only the testing of inexperienced shipmates, but also as the remaking of the crewmember in the ship's image. The uninitiated (greenhorns) were literally and figuratively put on trial - literally in the ceremony with a mock trial, and figuratively because the ritual tried the strength and character of the inexperienced. The greenhorn then effectively gave his body over to the initiated to be recreated. Different ceremony characters performed numerous invasive "operations" to heal and "clean" the greenhorn, and to bring the greenhorn back to a newborn state: shaven and covered in blood. Afterwards, the greenhorn was baptized and was given a new name or a password. Thus, the ritual produced a man who had stood trial, passed the tests, and emerged as a new man and as part of the brotherhood of the crew.

Although the first accounts described a fairly simple ceremony, usually involving dunking new crew members and feasting afterward, the British, and later American, Crossing the Line rituals developed into complex rituals. As the social context changed, so did the shape of the ritual, and so did its meaning.

III. PIECING THE RITUAL TOGETHER

The most striking thing about the Crossing the Equator ceremony, as it has been performed over the past 30 years, is a fluidity of style around a distinctive infrastructure. When piecing together the ritual today, it is difficult to find one format that all ceremonies follow exactly. Traces of the historical rituals appear in much of the current ritual, but they have metamorphosed into a form which is meaningful to the contemporary participants.

A. Setting Up the Crossing

For several days or even weeks before the ceremony, menacing cartoons and flyers are posted around the ship by shellbacks. Some of the flyers are targeted at specific people (usually chiefs or officers), but many address pollywogs in general. (14) Shellbacks assail pollywogs with threats and stories of past horrors, attempting to create a feeling of dread for the next day's proceedings.

The day before the ceremony is marked by two major events: Davy Jones' visit and the wog queen ceremony. Davy Jones is a character whose origins are unclear, but who in the eighteenth century was believed to be an evil spirit of the sea. His first name is thought to be a corruption of "duffy" or "duppy," West Indian words for devil, and his last name is thought to be derived from the biblical character Jonah, who was swallowed alive by a whale and who symbolizes death and misfortune. (15) "Davy Jones Locker" is a sailor's term for the depths of the sea--a repository for drowned sailors. (16) In this situation, he works under orders from King Neptune and delivers announcements which are necessary in setting up the ritual.

In a small ceremony, Davy Jones (a disguised shellback) "arrives" on the ship to warn the captain "that he [is] trespassing into the Royal Domain" with slimy pollywogs aboard. (17) Accompanied by a small entourage, Davy reads a formal message from Neptune regarding his impending visit and then outlines what must be done to prepare for it. On behalf of King Neptune, he outlines special watches and dress codes for both shellbacks and pollywogs. The watches are absurd creations such as Coriolis Swirl watch, Bow watch, or Chief of the Smoke watch, the purpose of which was to "make sure that the ship does not make smoke in excessive quantities which might offend King Neptune." (18) There are always, of course, special lookout watches for the "Line." The men on duty for these watches must wear bizarre outfits and are often equipped with silly instruments, such as binoculars made of two rolls of toilet paper, and have to follow strict rules of conduct.

The subpoenas that were delivered to the pollywogs are also farcical in nature. Filled with ridiculous accusations and insults, they are often printed as formal certificates. Any sailor who does not have a shellback card receives a subpoena, regardless of rank. The following are sample pollywog subpoenas from the USS America crossing in 1968 and the USS Bainbridge crossing in 1980:

In the highest court of the raging main, the domain of Imperium Neptuni Regis sends greetings to all slimy pollywogs. You are commanded to appear before the royal court on April 24, 1968. A complaint has been filed with the government of the domain of Imperium Neptuni Regis, state of the Raging Main, against you. You are charged with the heinous crimes of brown baggery, mopery, doping off, chit requesting, apple polishing, sympathy seeking, gun decking, procrastination, gold bricking, liberty hounding, and reveille neglecting. You have conspired to enter the royal domain without visa, passport, or proper authority. Davy Jones, Royal Scribe. (19) Here ye, here ye! It has been brought to his royal highness, Neptunus Rex, through his trusty shellbacks, that certain of ye boxcar tourists and park bench sitters, hay makers and other landlubbers attached to the good ship and soon to enter my domain, are treating his royal highness with contempt, and are committing acts of insurrection and sedition. Know ye, and take dire notice accordingly that such words and such acts meet with his royal majesty's profound displeasure and will be punished by eternal pickling or such other torment as this royal highness may deem appropriate. The beginnings ... a message from the royal scribe, Davy Jones. (20)

Each shellback, to prove that he is truly a shellback, and not a pollywog in disguise, must present his shellback card, which is received, with a certificate, at the end of the ceremony. In several unfortunate cases, a shellback has lost or forgotten his shellback card, and so must go through the ceremony all over again.

Before, during and after Davy Jones' visit, harassment of pollywogs continues in many forms. Pollywogs are often dressed as dogs, with eyes and noses blackened, leashes and dog collars attached, and signs worn which attest to their status. There is even a "wog dog auction" to raise money for events or causes. Shellbacks may purchase or select wog dogs and order them to crawl on hands and knees, bark, and attack or hump other wog dogs. (21) One account describes it as such:

[W]e always had--we called them wog dogs. When you're a shellback you can pick one or two wogs as your personal wogs; you put them on a leash and run them around the ship. And I had this guy.... I often had him screwing or getting screwed by other wogs.... (22)

Other wogs can be seen in photographs as sweeping or cleaning the ship while tied to a leash, or shining the shoes of a shellback. (23) There are also accounts of pollywogs receiving unfortunate haircuts, pollywogs being painted like "Indians on the warpath," and groups of pollywogs being made to sing songs or recite prayers. Certain pollywogs are given strange tasks such as aboard the USS Cutlass, a U.S. submarine:

During all this, three pollywogs were disturbing the peace, on orders. One of them ran through the boat carrying a beer tray and an ash tray and yelling 'I'm a trash can,' another following close behind with a bell and announcing that he was a fire engine; while the third paraded with an inflated `safety,' yelling at the top of his lungs, `I'm a prophylactic!' (24)

In many accounts, shellbacks stand by, armed with paddles or pieces of fire hose, to punish pollywogs who do not do exactly as they are told. If hungry, the wogs are allowed to eat food off the deck or are served supper in a trough from which they must eat without silverware and often without hands. The latter tactic is also used for wog breakfasts on the day of the ceremony.

A "pollywog prayer" was mentioned in several cruise books and sources as a plea to God (or King Neptune) for support during the upcoming initiation ceremony. Oftentimes, pollywogs are forced to memorize the prayer and to recite it early in the morning of the day of the ceremony. Some appeal to King Neptune for forgiveness:

Oh King Neptune. As we lowly pollywogs gather this morning we pray that today you will have mercy upon our poor souls and very weak bodies and minds. Please, Oh King, forgive us our many trespasses as we forgive shellbacks who trespass against us. Guide us through the night and keep us from going into passageways and by-paths of the unknown. Please, Oh, King, forgive us our landlubberly sins and we shall follow you and your loyal subjects. (25)

Still others are written in response to the shellbacks' threats, and appeal to the Christian God, who is presumably not a shellback.

Our Father, who is not a shellback, please look over us "wogs" through this upcoming humiliation and torturous initiation. Forgive the shellbacks, our Father, for they know well what they are about to do. As we enter the land of Neptunus Rex, may your "anti-shellback presence" be with us and guide us with dignity to endure the tortures of flogging, volleys of garbage and pools of foul seaweed. Let us fear no shellback, knowing you truly rule the equator. (26) Great God in heaven, you are our life, our strength, and our joy--an ever-present helper and defender. Look with loving mercy upon this ship. Guide us into a better knowledge of your will and of the beauty of your holiness. May your servants of this great navy, and especially upon this ship, make choices of spiritual integrity and show forth the spirit of him who gave himself for the world, Jesus Christ, your son, amen. Oh, and one more thing, Lord: hold back your wrath from the despicable shellbacks and have pity on their sad estate. With their lice-infested bodies, perverted and fermented minds, their unintelligible language, repulsive habits and otherwise rebellious spirit, they are indeed at the nadir of life, yeah in its darkest shadows. Forsake not the selfish shellback, but have mercy on them for they know not what they do. (27)

The latter two examples are also part of the "pollywog uprising," a part of the ceremony which is found in numerous instances.

B. The Pollywogs' Revenge

The "pollywog uprising" is a sometimes-successful attempt by the pollywogs temporarily to refute the authority of the shellbacks. If successful, the pollywogs capture hapless shellbacks for a short period of time and perform the same initiation procedures as will be performed the next day by the shellbacks. Sometimes the uprising is merely a subversive tactic, such as a pollywog chef serving old pork disguised as breaded veal to shellbacks while reserving the veal for the pollywogs. (28) Other times it is much more violent, involving the capture and humiliation of shellbacks. Shellbacks are sentenced to

... dance ring around the rosy; [are] lashed to the rail and wet down; dance, sing and tell sea stories; run a paddle-wheel gauntlet and be dumped into a pool; be lashed to the deck or to stretchers; be given an egg shampoo; give an exhibition of trucking; furnish sandwiches to the pollywog court. (29)

Still other attempts aim at undermining the shellbacks' plans for the next day by putting pepper into vents leading into shellbacks' quarters or by trying to destroy initiation equipment. (30) A fairly universal trait of the uprising is the creation of and attempted flying of the pollywog flag. There are also poems and songs written by pollywogs that threaten King Neptune and declare the supremacy of pollywogs. (31) The uprising is ultimately futile because it never succeeds in overturning the next day's events, but it is nearly always attempted. Regardless of the measure of its success in being carried out (sometimes shellback spies discover the uprising plans and stop them before their fruition), whoever is discovered to be directly involved in the operation is given twice the harassment the next day.

C. Wog Queen Pageant

Another event that is crucial to the ceremony and which often occurs the day before the crossing of the equator is the "wog queen pageant." It is ordained by Davy Jones that the best looking pollywog shall be crowned "wog queen" and may sit on King Neptune's court--the only wog with that privilege. In this pageant, a group of pollywogs, usually consisting of a pollywog from each department, is selected to participate in a fashion and talent show for the shellbacks. These male pollywogs dress as women and perform seductive or funny dances, songs or acts. (32) The wog who is crowned queen is the one who most convincingly portrays a woman. Photographs of these men show a range of portrayals, wearing everything from see-through lingerie with long blond wigs and spike heels to classy dresses and sophisticated wig styles to short skirts and ridiculously massive plastic breasts. (33) Almost all of the men wear large fake breasts, makeup and high heels. An interesting twist that occurs on some ships staffed with significant numbers of women is dual cross-dressing, where men and women are paired up and must dress in clothes of the other sex. Davy Jones' orders in this case are quoted in a cruise book:

`For you must...

To summarize: the set of concepts I have been pulling together in this section are an attempt to illustrate the core rational duality cognitive operation of creating a that/not that concept, like a binary opposition, is not so simple a mental movement as some might be led to believe simply because it appears so basic and clear. Perhaps this may seem a little more understandable when we recognize that these little computers we use in our homes are capable of such amazing processes, but all which occurs in what appears to be an inaccessible magic box -- especially to many who are in no way technically literate about such things.

What I wanted to try to bring out was how this is also embedded in the very fabric of our very complex culture, and is observable in aspects of our daily lives, once the tools for looking at how we conceptualize can be recognized. What I hoped to illustrate that by understanding it's fundamental place in Western society, that awareness can lead to, well, pretty much anywhere the rational/irrational thoughts can go, including the complicated process of how we codify and sanctify like the actions of those who can go off to do killing for us. We can see, perhaps, why such nonsensical behaviors as the rituals we put ourselves through also have a form that is intended to transform our thoughts about what we can and can't do. Thus the act of killing is "sanctified" by rituals that also use form "transform" the actors in the rituals of passage that usually begins a training, like a "boot camp," so that they can be "sanctioned" to keep the order we "value" in our socially constructed world, by doing acts none of us are normally legally sanctioned to do. It's part and parcel of any "suggestion" to "look and see what thought is doing" that spiritual thinkers like Jiddu Krishnamurti as anyone interested to do.

Moving Between Binary Oppositions

2007-10-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

Can you hear that whirring, rattling sound?

That's the gerbils running frantically in their wheels.

We are the giants who've entered the room, they both fear us and want our attention, since we feed them. So they run, as fast as they can, desperate to get our attention, and to get away at the same time. The infernal binary opposition.

Strange animals.

Maybe all they really want is to get out of their cages.

The wheel turns and turns and they run and run, staying in one place -- a dead heat in a ferris wheel.

We don't need them, they need us. We can go our way, pay no heed. The rattling is not so loud as to disrupt.

All they leave us are their droppings in the tray under the cage. That's the genius of the wire boxes, the droppings fall through.

Still, I never liked cleaning up after them. That's why I never wanted one for a pet.

The problem for the spinning gerbil gets to be something like this:

Inside his little six sided binary opposition cage he's spinning that wheel with the circumference of the irrational number pi, and he's running and spinning so much he gets to thinking he's running things.

And then what do you get?

You get an a narcissistic, self absorbed authoritarian gerbil.

And the more you ignore him, the more he runs, thinking all the while he's running things.

Nature is gray scaled, Life can’t be reduced to deterministic numerical pattern and true knowledge is available only at death. Max's search can be seen as the saga of the 20^th century that is doomed to fail since it uses the wrong tools. Other tools are available, they mustn’t necessarily be non-scientific, other logic systems, set of axioms and interpretive methods are possible. The story of movie Pi unfolds when we reveal the underlying binary oppositions that are woven through it...

But, aren't binary oppositions just the same as a dialectic?

A dialectic, when I think of it, is more of a spiral, a process. A binary opposition is essentially the two parts that may begin the dialectical process. So a dialectic would be a series of binary oppositions. A series of "thats" and a "not thats" beginning with a single "that." Computers use that simple binary component to compute with as well. It's really the fundamental basis for Western rational thinking. And it goes back at least as far as the Greeks. Understanding it can open many doors, or perhaps open the tops of boxes, the kinds of boxes dogma can create.

In observing how thought occurs in the mind, recognizing a binary opposition may merely be seen as an identification of the first steps in a rational thought process where one can identify, with concepts, a particular rational set: "that, not that."

Mathematically speaking, binary opposition is itself a concept that attempts to describe a raw, cognitive process that precedes culturally loaded values. "Views" are only one of the many possible concepts that can be included in a set of two -- that is, the conceptually recognized "that, not that" separated from a whole field of perceptions and distinguished. Noticing this is noticing our cognitive rational process at work in us.

Another set of concepts that can be used as cognitive tools for observing our inner process has been offered as "subliminal," "liminal," and "supraliminal." These are offered as an attempt to identify levels and types of consciousness. Supraliminal would be associated with processes that have more of an emphasis on abstract, rational thinking. This can be very complicated to describe, and a whole set of rational concepts have been developed to describe it.

What is meant by "liminal" consciousness, and then, "supraliminal" consciousness?

What makes them different? How does that difference effect a consciousness of environment, the moment, and an interactivity amongst humans in their cultural enclaves.

"Liminal state" is a rational effort to describe an awareness that is not "distorted" by the duality that rationality itself presents. With that as an understanding, then, liminality cannot be accessed directly through rational descriptions, only pointed to with it; the rational then is the supraliminal. A split that creates a seperation, a duality. Those who quest a vision are said to be questing to re-enter the liminal state, to be in a sense, non-dual. What that means conceptually is difficult to describe with words, but in essence, one lets go the rational supraliminal translation of perception and "enters" a state of consciousness where perception is "allowed" without judgement of what is, the mind will take care of that, consciousness does not have to be active to allow perceptions to occur. In that sense the assumptions that often precede behavior are not enacted. Let the people who do vision quests try to explain it:

Vision Statement
(from the School of Natural Wonder)

The Western psyche has been split asunder by the dualistic assumptions inherent in our way of seeing the world. Foremost among these assumptions is that humans are separate from and superior to Nature. Many of us suffer from this fundamental distortion of reality. We have been uprooted from our original spiritual 'home' in Mother Earth. As a consequence, our hearts long for something but we're not quite sure what it is.

The School of Natural Wonder (SNW) seeks to mend this wound to our psyches by offering experiential, nature-based programs designed to help people connect deeply with the natural world, themselves, each other, and Spirit, however that may be experienced. It is believed that Nature, as the dwelling place of Spirit, is our first and foremost teacher. Because we are not separate from Nature, the rhythms, inhabitants, and relationships of the natural world mirror back to us aspects of our own souls.

Dwelling upon the Earth in a sacred way returns us to our true nature. Buried beneath the masks of civilization lies an indigenous soul within us longing to emerge into the light of the sun, to sing and dance with joy, to reclaim that which is wild, holy, and free within us.

Towards this end, SNW offers a sacred, supportive container in which participants can experience contemplative, participatory, and ceremonial ways of being in Nature. The basic model for all our programs is the Vision Quest, an ancient rite of passage, which we have adapted for modern use drawing on many wisdom traditions. The Vision Quest places participants alone and fasting within the womb of Mother Earth where they can give birth to the truth and beauty of their own souls.

The Vision Quest can serve different intentions. It is a powerful, ceremonial way to mark, honor and celebrate any life change, to discover one's own meanings and purpose, to seek renewal, to heal old wounds, to connect with Spirit. In addition, it is a particularly powerful vehicle for helping young people negotiate the momentous passage from childhood to adulthood.

Ultimately, for us, 'vision' comes in the moment that we are fully present to our inner life and the presence of the 'Other,' whether human, animal, tree, rock, river, wind…. With that vision we are transformed and the world as well.

We invite you to join us on one of our transformational programs, so that you may discover your true nature in the heart of Nature.

"Furthermore, we have not only to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination; we shall find a god; …where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

-Joseph Campbell

Anthropologist E. Richard Sorenson has made a study of liminal consciousness integral to his life's work. Liminal consciousness may not be easy for us to imagine, since we are enculturated from birth in a supraliminal cognitive environment. Nevertheless, here's one of Sorenson's efforts to describe it:

Liminal Awareness

Most of us know about subliminal awareness—the type of awareness lurking below actual consciousness that powerfully influences behavior. Freud brought it into the mainstream of Western thought through exhaustively detailed revelations of its effects on behavior. But few, including Freud, have spoken of liminal consciousness, which is therefore rarely recognized in modern scholarship as a separate type of awareness. Nonetheless, liminal awareness was the principal focus of mentality in the preconquest cultures contacted, whereas a supraliminal type that focuses logic on symbolic entities is the dominant form in postconquest societies.5

Liminally focused consciousness is very different from the supraliminal type that has almost entirely replaced it. Within the preconquest cultures observed basic sensibilities (such as of identity, number, space, and truth) shape up in unexpected ways. So does human integration. Preconquest groups are simultaneously individualistic and collective—traits immiscible and incompatible in modern thought and languages. This fusion of individuality and solidarity is another of the profound cognitive disparities that separate the preconquest and postconquest eras. It in part explains why even fundamental preconquest cultural traits are sometimes difficult to perceive, much less to appreciate, by postconquest peoples.

From the Latin language underlying our Western heritage we can understand that liminal awareness, by definition, occurs on the threshold of consciousness. This concept, though abstract, provides a useful term. In the real life of these preconquest people, feeling and awareness are focused on at-the-moment, point-blank sensory experience—as if the nub of life lay within that complex flux of collective sentient immediacy. Into that flux individuals thrust their inner thoughts and aspirations for all to see, appreciate, and relate to. This unabashed open honesty is the foundation on
which their highly honed integrative empathy and rapport become possible. When that openness gives way, empathy and rapport shrivel. Where deceit becomes a common practice, they disintegrate.

Where consciousness is focused within a flux of ongoing sentient awareness, experience cannot be clearly subdivided into separable components. With no clear elements to which logic can be applied, experience remains immune to syntax and formal logic within a kaleidoscopic sanctuary of non-discreteness. Nonetheless, preconquest life was reckoned sensibly—though seemingly intuitively.

With preconquest consciousness largely unencumbered by abstract concepts, it remained unconstrained by formal categories of value and cognition (i.e., rules and stable cognitive entities). Only when awareness shifted from liminal to supraliminal did the notion of 'correctness' become a matter of concern—e.g., behaving `properly,' having `right' answers, wearing `appropriate' clothes, etc. `Improper' aspirations, inclinations, and desires were then masked as people tried to measure up to the `proper' rule and standard. They used rhetoric and logic argumentatively with reference to norms, precedents, and agreements to gain and maintain dignity, status, and position. It was an altogether different world from that of the preconquest era where people freely spread their interests, feelings, and delights out for all to see and grasp as they lurched toward whatever delightful patterns of response they found attractive.

Sorenson also attempts to give a contrasting view of how a Westernized supraliminal consiousness transforms from a liminal consciousness, which is one way of saying what it is to be supraliminal:

The outstanding economic condition is absence of private property, which allows constant cooperative usage of the implements and materials of life for collective benefit. The human ecology engendered by the interaction of these outstanding conditions makes the forcing of others (including children) to one's will a disruptive and unwholesome practice. It was not seen.

Any form of subjugation, even those barriers to freedom imposed by private property, are the kiss of death to this type of life. Though durable and self-repairing in isolation, the unconditional open trust this way of life requires shrivels with alarming speed when faced with harsh emotions or coercion. Deceit, hostility, and selfishness when only episodic temporarily benumb intuitive rapport. When such conditions come to stay and no escape is possible, intuitive rapport disintegrates within a brutally disorienting period of existential trauma and anomie. With no other models about except those of conquerors, a `savage-savage' emerges from the wreckage of a once 'noble-savage'. These more brutal beings adjust to the postconquest milieu by adopting formal group identities. First they internalize various abstract ideas of space, boundary and kinship introduced by their conquerors. They then use them to anchor claims of their own to turf. They devise rules and customs that clearly identify them as a distinct people with formal rights. From this process different kinds of cultural elaboration emerge in separated regions—until a harsher level of conquest presses their uniqueness to extinction. Sorenson - Preconquest Consciousness

Imagine you have been walking and you come to an ocean for the first time. You are standing at the edge of the water, watching the waves roll in. You see and feel the water, it looks like a blue plain stretching off forever to the horizon, but you cannot walk on it. You have the beginnings of a perceptual "that, not that" right there.

That process can happen with no necessary hierarchical value, that is, no "one is better than the other" value; that value would come with another operation of thought in the cognitive phase once the "that, not that" has been conceptualized and separated out (or perhaps better put, as focused upon) from the whole of perceptual awareness.

Try another angle on this: Imagine that you live next to the ocean in a village and you have canoes and you fish, your village has names for all these things you live with every day, then one day you see something far out to sea, gradually, as it comes closer, it becomes clearer, but it resembles nothing familiar to you. You have no "idea" what it is, you just see a new form (some folks have even asked if the first natives to see a ship even "saw" anything at all), but you have no actual correlative words for the forms you see, because nothing in your environment has those characteristics.

After awhile this curious object that has your attention is near enough that you can see humans moving around, and something drops from the bow with a big splash with something attached that you recognize, a line (because you do make rope-like things to do all sorts of things to make your life possible, so you understand that concept), and then the as yet unidentified, unnamed thing stops moving. Perhaps it is changing shape and poles and sticks are being revealed as the large, whitish floppy things are shrunk up to the cross poles at the tops of the vertical poles. How would you make sense of that with your language and experience? Rationally, the process is identified, at least in Western Cultures, as a process of "that, not thats" working together.

Humans are born into a world with a language that already has much historical residue of meanings in place, where conceptual identifications of "that, not thats" are are shared in the organic process of environmental perceptual recognition and language development from birth, and I would correlate that with your notion of "ethnic programming."

Binary Oppositions and Pi.

2007-10-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

Gerbil Pi

Inside, those little wire boxes

with little wire wheels,

circumferences, the irrational number pi,

befuddling in never-creations,

go purveyors of binary opposition.

Round and around they go!

A world of circles,

and they never, ever "know"!

rén 10/09/07

Occasionally I'll introduce the term "binary opposition" into my discussions, and I thought it might be worth some effort to explain what the term signifies to me, and why understanding it might be worth anyone's while. So, for anyone curious about what can be a fascinating topic -- at least for epistemologists -- this is an effort to put together a more concise explanation of the place of this concept in our globalized Euro-American world.

I feel it's worth the effort, because binary opposites have so much to do with the way we organize our categorized internal worlds, and the results of that internal form in both the form of our very way of life, and the way political discussions get folded into repetitive opposing sided boxes, like copied suburban houses in those ticky tacky housing developments surrounding our cities these days.

Think of it... binary opposites are easy to find, we all use them in our conceptual thought process, and sometimes the very way we value our thoughts is based on preformed hierarchical patterns that set the stage and create a momentum that almost pre programs where a discussion will go, and at another level, where societal behavior may go. Some of the first to do this in any codified "scientific" way were a group of philosophers and social scientists known as "Structuralists." In recognizing this pattern and it's more or less ontological force, some explorative folks have begun to try to figure out whether it's necessary that the structure of language and thought be so rigidly predictable, or if there might be some strategies for breaking out of what might well be called "the box."

So, then, "binary opposition" is really a simple and elegant abstract concept. I first encountered the term somewhere in my studies of philosophy, logic, and anthropology -- it's been so long I can't remember precisely where. Following you will find a couple of very brief descriptions from Internet sites, there are many sites that discuss it, if one simply does a search, so for that one poor misbegotten soul who follows me around, there's really no need to do that, pointing to my own binary oppositions, one can simply learn to observe one's own:

A binary opposition is a pair of opposites, thought by the Structuralists to powerfully form and organize human thought and culture. Some are commonsense, such as raw vs cooked; however, many such oppositions imply or are used in such a way that privileges one of the terms of the opposition, creating a hierarchy. This can be seen in English with white and black, where black is used as a sign of darkness, danger, evil, etc., and white as purity, goodness, and so on. Another example of a contested binary opposition is rational vs emotional, in which the rational term is usually privileged and associated with men, while emotional is inferior and associated with women. The list goes on. Deconstruction sometimes involves identifying the oppositions working in a text and then demonstrating how the text itself undermines the hierarchy implied or asserted by the opposition.

And:

KEY TERM!

BINARY OPPOSITION

This is a sophisticated but important idea that will help you understand how ideas and meanings are being shaped, created or reinforced in a text. It is 'a theory of meaning' and an idea that can be applied to all texts; it is especially useful when analysing poetry where meaning has been 'compressed' into a very few words.

In the mid-20th century, two major European academic thinkers, Claude Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes, had the important insight that the way we understand certain words depends not so much on any meaning they themselves directly contain, but much more by our understanding of the difference between the word and its 'opposite' or, as they called it 'binary opposite'. They realised that words merely act as symbols for society's ideas and that the meaning of words, therefore, was a relationship rather than a fixed thing: a relationship between opposing ideas.

For example, our understanding of the word 'coward' surely depends on the difference between that word and its opposing idea, that of a 'hero' (and to complicate matters further, a moment's thought should alert you to the fact that interpreting words such as 'hero' and 'coward' is itself much more to do with what our society or culture attributes to such words than any meaning the words themselves might actually contain).

Other oppositions that should help you understand the idea are the youth/age binary, the masculinity/femininity, the good/evil binary, and so on. Barthes and Levi-Strauss noticed another important feature of these 'binary opposites': that one side of the binary pair is always seen by a particular society or culture as more valued over the other.

When studying any kind of literature, it is worth looking for the ways in which layers of meaning are being created, shaped or reinforced by this sense of 'binary opposition'. In Simon Armitage's poetry, for instance, you might notice the binary opposition he creates between the ideas we associate or attach to 'sincerity', 'genuineness' and 'truth' because of our culture's utter dislike of their binary opposites, 'insincerity' and 'lies'.

Recognising such binaries can open up the ideas the writer is trying to express. Look out for these oppositions as they can allow a deep understanding of what is happening in the text as well as alerting you to the "BIG PICTURE" (see below) - what it is all about.

(here's the:)

BIG PICTURE

Whenever you need to discuss aspects of a text, remember never to skim read it. Before you can write in any meaningful way about it you will need to have grasped its big picture. This means gaining an understanding of exactly what it is about, who it was written for and why it was written.

You will also need to consider what might have motivated the writer to write the text and the circumstances under which it was created, that is aspects of its writer's context. It can also be important to take account of genre conventions and expectations as well as aspects of the reader's context as interest and interpretation can sometimes vary according to the reader's own situation.

With these details you can then open your answer by creating an effective overview of the text - of its content, genre, audience and purpose. Details of its style are left for the remainder of your answer.

It is an unfortunate fact that each year many students give shallow answers in exams that show they have skim read their texts. The moral of this tale: don't be a skim reader!

So the question really is, why take notice of binary oppositions? One can find many reasons to take notice, once onto them. Think of our fearless leaders taking us to war against those evil doers. Yes, good and evil. It can drive even the most secure nations with the biggest military forces into a frenzy of strange behaviors.

Those of us who are intrigued by the intellectual efforts of trying to get out of the box of our conceptual thinking, are often drawn to it because of the very social paradigms of hierarchy we find ourselves in, ultimately derived from valuing one element in a starting binary over another, valued elements which themselves accumulate to set up conditions of authority, all based on on a progression beginning with that first step of judging a better and a not better, a that and a not that. Even our computers work in that simple way to create their complexity of computation.

Sort of reminds me of Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. Societies can over burden their energy resources because they become excessively complex, that complexity results in social hierarchies, and the very structure of hierarchies require extra energy to maintain. Think of the cost of the middle management in a corporation where the management is not directly involved in its production capacities. In order to pay for its own maintenance, the middle management must use its intelligence to manage production in order to achieve an excess margin of production. It's because of those sorts of margin production stresses that societies such as the Roman Empire collapsed.

Some are comfortable with authoritarian structures that go with complexity, comfortable with their promises of daddy state security, or whatever... and some of us aren't, that's about all I will offer on that at the moment. Just wanted to mention it, because authoritarianism is a subject that runs through my ideas as an ongoing subtext, and I will be bringing it up from time to time. Authoritarianism has a number of features that I consider problematic, not the least of which is my personal sense of abhorrence of authorities.

To be interested in this, it's important to recognize the tendency of that interest to be based on cognitive acts of judgment. I put it that way because I want to call attention to the simple feature that making a judgments is an action, a cognitive, abstract action. One does not have to make a judgment, judgment can be suspended and one can be in an open state of observation and wondering, even more actively, questioning. Just call attention to that little innocuous action of thought, a judgment, harmless seeming, for the most part, even sometimes necessary when observing that a rhinoceros is charging at you on the open plain. So simply be aware that it's a part of our basic biological make up even. That's important to be aware of because distinguishing and judging is at the very beginning of the binary process itself! And if we are trying to understand how we trap ourselves in boxes made up of the binary process, then it's important to be aware of how it works, and where it begins.

Do that without forming a judgment, if possible -- and that will involve doing it without attaching a value to it -- and then just observe where it goes; that's the best I can offer.

When I call attention to a binary opposition, that's essentially what I'm doing, just noticing the tendency, and noticing that a valuing may be taking place, and that from there, a process unfolds based on that primary paradigm one sets up in one's own thought process. Notice, too, that this is a phenomenological experience. No one can know if you are aware of the process going on or not. That's why it's worth calling attention to it. It can be like a shared signal that people can recognize. Or like turning on a flashlight in the dark.

Now, why would that be helpful?

How about we introduce an Irrational Concept for starters?

Since this basic structural duality can be so helpful in understanding our very universal human interest in mythology, literature, and metaphor, I'd like to start with something both literary and metaphorical. The movie Pi, not the least because I enjoyed the movie immensely, but also because I found a nifty site that actually deals with the issue using the movie as it's paradigmatic focus to discuss the deeper implications of binary oppositions.

(Click on the picture of Max below, it's a link to the site).

Pi (see Pi the movie) is not, as most critics claim, a schizophrenic science-fiction thriller.

We refuse to fall into the naive pseudo-psychological interoperation but it’s is a very important movie to be with us, while we rush to the next millenium.

We also attempt to say meaningful things about the movie without categorizing it as others do, in the science-fiction genre, to be more precise, we actually categorize it for the sake of decategorization.

As Sol tells us in the movie itself, we filter everything through our obsessions and concepts. In this text, we filter Pi with some of the concepts found in postmodern and fuzzy logic theories, and then we attempt to go further…

The story of Pi can be told through deconstruction of its content into binary oppositions, and by defusing these oppositions using a critical tool we suggest in the text - fuzzy deconstruction.

We claim that it is possible to continue where deconstruction stops in silence. We use 'Pi' to demonstrate this. This will hopefully allow you to watch (or re-watch) it from a slightly different perspective…

End of part I.

Ecology and the Need for a Therapeutic Grounding in Nature

2007-06-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

The collapse of a global economic model is what most collapse scenarios address today, not nodes, whether democracies or not, they might fall back into. I think it can be assumed that humans surviving the collapse of a global economic system will certainly find some sort of way to survive if there is enough biosphere and ability to develop survival strategies left. It doesn't take any complex economic theory to anticipate that. What I'd like to raise attention about is the selectivity features of a society, and I'm interested in looking at institutions, since it's institutions that are the medium of adaptation, whether corporate or governmental. Whether the nature of the government is democratic is not likely to have much effect if the institutions continue unabated with a certain type of adaptation strategy. I am, however, interested in looking at the institutions involved in the adaptation strategy.

My interest is in looking at individual awareness of our natural environment, the relationship between that awareness and the theories about individual psychological perspective of the world, which inevitably goes into theories of phenomenological and existential psychology. These theories deal with how we encounter the world and how we make up that world in our own minds. And, from each of our minds come the forms that make up the choices we all make in living in our various societal systems. I want to question just how adaptable those systems are that we create, what is the nature of that adaptability, and I want to use some of the same eco system forms that ecologists have created to understand our biosphere as the most reasonable model we have to resort to for an understanding of ecological systems. Just keeping the discussion within that range is going to be difficult enough, without going off into debates about what democracy is or whether it is the ultimate tool to achieve eco diversity and ecological peace.

I'm going to go back to making the correlation between r-selected species and forms of cultural adaptations that may be correlated with those. As I indicated, the r-selected species are adapted to low succession environments. Humans have shown a unique capability for using their tool making genius to create cultural strategies to shape and form the natural environment for their purposes. Their ability with these interfaces has proven to be competitive in almost any ecological setting, and for the most part there are few species, including viruses, capable of doing more than offering momentary setbacks as humans have slowly, over eons, populated the globe, and rapidly, in the past 200 years, begun to wipe out major segments of eco niches and reduced the globe to low succession, high production of key, human related species for individual energy consumption, and all of this is proving to be a very energy intensive project, because keeping a low succession environment from creating tremendous instability in its population requires a high degree of energy input. That's essentially the nature of how that eco dynamic works and it would take pages of documentation from the ecological sciences to demonstrate that, so if there's any doubts, go exploring. I learned it nearly thirty five years ago.

The reason that's an important set of principles to understand, is that the correlation between unstable r-selected species populations, which show that dramatic rise in population numbers in the above graph, and human being populations is that it's important to recognize that the correlation is not to be limited to numbers of people. It must also be based on ecological foot print concepts, and niche occupation processes which are also a result of the technology and energy expenditures of thea given societal strategy. It's the ecological footprint that the biosphere and its eco systems are necessarily concerned with. If the ecological foot print of the average North American is 12 times that of another person somewhere else, than you don't just count the bodies taking up space, you compare the ecological foot print. If you show the footprint, the population may not be leveling at all, but may continue to increase just as rapidly as societies such as China, change to high intensity forms of economic adaption. So to show that the number of bodies is falling off in industrialized societies overlooks the real facts of how much it takes to support those bodies through a system that may, in fact, be extremely wasteful of the resourse -- an inherent characteristic of r-selected species -- and and may, in fact, require increasing amounts of energy to maintain the very biosphere itself, which is being reordered into an increasingly high energy required, low succession eco system.

For example:

If without firing a shot, human cultures wipe out one fifth of the species as projected in the next thirty years, that can not be considered in ecology the attribute of a K-selected species adaption strategy.

If 12 acres of the complex ecosystems that make up the belt of tain forests continue to disappear every eight seconds or so, nearly all the species involved losing their food and homes, to be replaced by the rapidly depleting soil activities of monocultural industrial farming to support both the large and small footprints of what continues to be an increasing curve of energy needs of the global population, that cannot be considered the attribute of a K-selected species adaptation strategy.

Rainforest Facts

We are losing Earth's greatest biological treasures just as we are beginning to appreciate their true value. Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth's land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.

One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries.

Rainforests are being destroyed because the value of rainforest land is perceived as only the value of its timber by short-sighted governments, multi-national logging companies, and land owners.

Nearly half of the world's species of plants, animals and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation.

Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases. Currently, 121 prescription drugs sold worldwide come from plant-derived sources. While 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less that 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists.

Most rainforests are cleared by chainsaws, bulldozers and fires for its timber value and then are followed by farming and ranching operations, even by world giants like Mitsubishi Corporation, Georgia Pacific, Texaco and Unocal.

There were an estimated ten million Indians living in the Amazonian Rainforest five centuries ago. Today there are less than 200,000.

And that is certainly not the whole of the range of environmental degradation going on. The ocean fisheries are a whole nother chapter.

It's the premise of the ecopsychology introduced here that by becoming more sensitive to these features of our environment, some sense of this will become a part of our total psychological awareness, and in that sense may become an important part of how each individual approaches a variety of choices that feed back through the global economic system itself. Whether or how this exploration and the individual awareness involved may effect the powerful institutions that are a part of that system is only to be guessed at, from my perspective.

Resurrection

2007-06-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

Since my last blog entry, I've lost the entire contents of my laptop's hard drive and I have been very busy rebuilding my system from the scattered bits and pieces of writings I've produced on several message boards, plus from the good fortune of having saved some of my writings up to a point in February of this year, when I'd last backed up my work on an external hard drive. So I think I'll devote this entry to my thoughts I've had over time about message board writing, sind, in a tangential way, they do relate to issues of globalization, modern technology, democracy, and other themes I've been writing about, because it's been a window into the way others think around the world, through direct writing contact, that I'd otherwise have never experienced. And the experience itself has been part of this creative assembly process I'm doing here.

Thoughts to a friend:

I don't know if what I say illuminates anything. You and I have been communicating on this board for a long time and have developed an understanding, a rapport, so maybe when I come up with something it makes sense to you from that background of familiarity. When you have the time I have found you quite adept at creating your own complex thoughts, usually more efficiently than I do, so we share an interest in language and thought building, not thought destruction. The sense of building an idea and playing with it is quite dissimilar to making preclusionary assumptions about a few words, which is pretty much all most people seem to have the time to do, or interest to do, and setting up an antithesis to the assumptions without bothering to find out if they've grasped the full extent of the thought being developed, and this goes on over obvious preconceptions in some strange pattern that just recurs over and over from what I can see. Like watching a ping pong match. Perhaps it's not the same for others but watching ping pong bores me so quickly I can't get my mind away from it quickly enough. I think more than anything I don't make sense to most people. What I have in mind to say doesn't exactly fit into a sound byte, I've discovered, when I try to find words for what I see. It's a real challenge. And this is a unique environment.

I've tried different tactics. The long essays is one. Obviously that cuts down on readership in a hurry. When I try to develop a thought a little at a time, the ability to distract and disarray comes into play. Non sequiturs abound. For example, there's absolutely no reason to assume that someone can't enjoy beautiful architecture made with the unique creative abilities humans have, and also learn to enjoy intricacies and complexities of the biosphere that we now have come to understand from the unique set of cognitive tools the sciences have developed, not impossible tools to grasp, yet that is the implication of putting a picture of some archictecture piece and asking some question that presumes that whoever is talking about this ecopsychology subject is incapable of having that appreciation as well, thereby setting up all sorts of preclusionary arguments that are completely unneccessary and, yes, for anyone struggling to grasp what might be an elusive and new way of thinking about what our planet is about, and how they relate to it through the given prisms of institutions, it certainly can derail their thought, creating some confusion and difficulty in paying attention, and the result of that I've found is I end up going back to the same starting point, trying to find the threads that were lost, and looking for ways to reweave them.

Again, it's a real challenge. I guess that's why I keep at it. I get a lot out of that effort. One thing I've learned in three years is the worthlessness of making any effort to stop the distractors. I can stay with what I want to develop better now than I could three years ago. Obviously this is very different than teaching in a classroom. When one teaches a subject one has a lesson plan and an already developed notion of what one wants to say, and an allotted time span to say it in. I don't start with that here, I am eclectically exploring a topic and, when it works out, others explore it too, as we did on that thread about hierarchy a couple of years ago, that started with Jeff Vail's (see link to Jeff Vail on side bar) discussions about the tragedy in Bhopal. I can see the nonsense in the distractions, the way baiting one's character is a distraction that wastes time and effort. That there are very real and deep differences in the way people "see" the world through values and fundamental forms developed through experience, perhaps from birth, and little is done to illuminate anything by defending those differences.

So what makes a discussion flow amongst participants, and what sorts of things disrupt it? In the flow of a discussion with a dynamic interchange of ideas, I've experienced a personal sense of community, sitting here in my room, physically isolated, yet somehow electronically connected. This is not the same thing as a connection to nature I've been exploring in this field of eco-psychology, which emphasizes experience of nature as primary, and out of the forms of that experience will hopefully come a restored sense of psychological wholeness. No, this is exclusively an abstract exercise out of with imaginary connections can occur, but to make them grounded at all, one must turn to one's own experiences in order to enrichen and inform them with sensory content.

Disruption is probably the easiest of the engagement possibilities. It often occurs by bringing in of the most obvious elements already imbedded in a discussion, and then treating them as if they are somehow important, unattended to, and therefore being excluded. So by becoming focussed on what may seem already obvious, the flow is disrupted as attention is turned to bringing clarity to what is in a sense already obvious. Psychologically this is disrupting, because the whole sense of trust that everyone is connected becomes distorted and at least momentarily a sense of distrust is created. And that makes for the unnecessary distractions in the development of a cooperative dialog, or any other type of exploration of ideas, that can sidetrack or derail the investigative efforts. With those who have a tendency to set up a dialectic format in their mind it also leads to the false creation of an antithesis (perhaps another term might be "non sequitur) that does not require more than a glance to recognize it for what it is, and that is problematic. Especially in an environment where all the physical keys to understanding by observing the subtleties of body language are missing. The challenge is then to act with proper discipline to ignore the possibility of going off on an endless and meaningless discussion, exhausting everyone and losing any sense of integrity in the discussion. Sometimes it's simply enough to ignore these distractions, sometimes it can be instructive to examine their nature.

For some in these discussions, the question of freedom in these instances come up. If "my" freedom to express "myself" is inhibited, then my thoughts are being controlled by others in some way. So whether their thoughts are distracting the conversation or not, they assert their "rights" to express them, rather than taking the effort to sense the flow of the conversation and attempt to understand what others are trying to articulate.

From my own phenomenological perceptions, I see that freedom of the individual is inevitable until one is rendered incapacitated in some way or dead. The real question I am interested in, is about the form that freedom takes. I personally recognize that I have the innate, volitional freedom to agree to do what is being required even under the most extreme forms of coercion where I am being given choice, because I am the one that chooses to do it, even if I would prefer to do something else. The choice may also include the choice to go on living, or keep a finger, or one can imagine many other scenarios of of coercive pressure, but the choice is made until it's completely taken away. If that were not true the body hangs like a puppet waiting for strings to move it in some external way. It requires self initiation, self volition, hence "freedom," to act in any way, even to act in concert with others, or follow orders in a hierarchy. It requires personal freedom to agree not to bother someone if requested, and personal freedom to ignore that request. It requires freedom to drive down the highway on the established "correct" side of the road to minimize danger to self and others.

This sort of freedom hardly needs to be made into an issue. If we didn't understand it we wouldn't even bother with rules. At least one effort of any intellectual exploration is to seek to discover the abstract structural elements of mind from which actions freely emerge. Freedom of action is assumed as long as action is possible, as long as the brain is functional. So it's an entirely trivial point to say that the destruction of an ecosystem seems inevitable without freedoms. With freedom the destruction of the ecosystem may also be inevitable if people don't excersize it to question the very form and structure of their complex society. What you end up with by introducing such a concept is a non sequitur into the exploration of the meaning of freedom, in the context it is brought up, and the recognition that the meaning "imagined" in this vague way involves a whole series of beliefs and values, very often directly related to the very institutions themselves that are taking everyone "freely" in the direction of their own demise -- if indeed that's where things are headed.

We have seen that what is identified as "binary opposition," as the structuralists like Claude Levi Strauss have pointed out, can possibly be the very basis of human consciousness. We have also seen how it has inherent attributes that lead to hierarchical thinking, where one of two concepts in an opposition are favored over the other. It's, of course, an act of freedom to favor one over the other, which is essentially how values and institutions of all sorts are created. A transnational corporation is essentially an institution created out of a complex matrix of binary oppositions, one favored over another, creating the hierarchical structures of the institution and the form in which decisionmaking is made and the purpose of the collective efforts achieved, efforts from the providers of capital to the "work" -- whatever that might be.

But as the post structuralists and the post modernist era philosophers have also shown, those binary oppositions may not be as set as the earlier structuralists proposed them to be in societies, and thus may not offer such a good explanation for why a given society seems formed the way it is, in fact may not even explain that a society is formed the way it is; and then, it's recognized that the cognitive structures of binary opposition are constantly degrading, so a constant reiffication effort is required if a social form is to be maintained or allowed to change.

This in fact may be a more accurate description of the many "other" societies that anthropologists rushed to study as the institutions of globalization over the past five hundred years or so wiped them out through colonialization, and later something called "modernization" and "development." Many of those societies may have been much more flexible and interactive with their environments than the structuralists, who were operating themselves out of a paradigm of societietal mode bent on maintaining its own complex institutional forms intact, imagined them to be with their projecting of an analytical stasis by coding and analysizing through their entirely rational screen of the binary opposition tool, an analytical device they'd discovered through the very nature of their own philosophical traditions. Post structualist anthropologist have gone back and reexamined the precepts of Anthropology itself, and from that have emerged different efforts at understanding the nature of society, efforts that attempt to see how abstact forces are moving dynamically and in a flux relationship, both within the institutions and between the interface of cultural devices that are the very adaptation to the environment. Ecopsychology is something that has emerged out of the awareness that some sort of complex adaptational process is taking place, and that the consciousness of the whole of a society is involved. The hypothesis is that an increased awareness of the forces of nature can be a positive element in that process.

The binary oppositions then can be recognized to be in constant degradation against the forces of the whole of society which are made up of institutions, and what minimizes degradation is often the adherence to form itself that people participate in, almost like a daily ritual, and those forms reiffy the validity of the the institutions and the need for them, which can give a sense of stability and thus with stability "safety." This safety and stability of institutions may be a good and a valid strategy for all to take part in, as society is a group effort no matter how many notions of disintegration are introduced -- notions like favoring the concept that individual "freedom" is favored over the values of a whole of a group, a particularly familiar binary opposition one often hears as a rational explanation to promote certain societal institutions as necessarily performing for the good of all in a somewhat vague, and usually poorly defined atmosphere that holds together yet another concept called "free enterprise" and Reagan's famous "magic market," and so forth. This is how at least some of us go about looking at the rational forms that make up the glue of society, that hold together the institutional forms that we all, with some degree of conscious intent, freely agree to maintain.

If, perhaps, the social forms do not comply with the natural ontology of the inherent elements of a planetary biosphere seeking balance and sustainability of energy flows and species interactions that are the very nature of that energy interaction in a complexity we think of as life. In fact, past efforts to create complex societies based on an adherence to the institutions that are that that very hierarchical complexity has nearly always led to the collapse of complexity, from our understanding of history. That history is itself worth paying attention to, and holding in mind as we question the nature of our own complex institutions and where they may implicitly lead the human participants. So that itself, once understood, should bring a note of caution to those who follow the forms of their society, and one might then want to understand those forms and their ontological implications.

Thus to make an effort to stand aside from the forms which are the "conformity" the forces of society seek to maintain in order that the forms continue, to look at them and attempt to see them and their very nature, is an act of freedom; in fact an act of radical freedom because of the very inherent nature of institutions, and one which is generally frowned upon, and one for which those who dare do it are often eliminated from the public discourse in one way or another. There are many ways the status quo of cultural forms can be used to "eliminate" seekers and questioners.

ECOPSYCHOLOGY: Unity and spirit

2007-05-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

What unity ultimately requires is closure. The circle of theory must come round like the alchemical snake to bite its tail. What is must at last be known. Perhaps that is what underlies the eager unfolding of the natural hierarchy from the Big Bang to the human frontier: substance reaching out hungrily toward sentience. That is the simple but mighty insight that the physicist John Wheeler sought to capture in this schematic image of a universe that makes a u-turn in time to study itself through the human eye.

Oddly, this unity of the knower and the known seems to have been better appreciated by pre-scientific humans who worked from myth, image, ritual. If ecopsychology has anything to add to the Socratic-Freudian project of self-knowledge, it is to remind us of what our ancestors took to be common knowledge: there is more to know about the self, or rather more self to know, than our personal history reveals. Making a personality, the task that Jung called "individuation," may be the adventure of a lifetime. But every person's lifetime is anchored within a greater, universal lifetime. Each of us shares the whole of life's time on Earth. Salt remnants of ancient oceans flow through our veins, ashes of expired stars rekindle in our genetic chemistry. The oldest of the atoms, hydrogen whose primacy among the elements should have gained it a more poetically resonant name is a cosmic theme; mysteriously elaborated billions-fold, it has created from Nothing the Everything that includes us. -Theodore Roszak

About Reproducing Cultural Hubris

Out of what is this homo-centric hubris, this schizophrenic disconnect and self absorption of modern techno-industrial production/consumption emerging, each and every day, on the surface of the planet, intermixing with a delicate and thin shell of life we now call our biosphere? What institutes and perpetuates a bio destructive cancer on the planet like neoliberal polyarchic pseudo democratic globalism that itself relentlessly destroys and displaces the indigenous cultural forms that once did, in fact, interact directly with the forces and forms of nature?

I'm suggesting we might benefit from looking at the forms our very lives take and how we work our minds in relation to those, thereby creating our daily process of life, which imbeds the memories and the very sense of who and what we are as a daily, ongoing reality.

Ecopsychologists are suggesting that to understand that process, and ourselves, we need to do something to actually change our daily forms of life. That connecting with the natural world in a different way can begin to imbed different forms within us that become not just conscious, intellectual rationalizations, but that will go deep into our minds to be experienced throughout our bodies, and become subconscious as well, with a deeper sense of ourselves and who we are in relationship with the forms of our environment. They are suggesting that as a "therapy," it can't be done intellectually, rationally, any more than truly understanding what the "extent of anthropocentrism" actually is can be done through a rational, intellectual process. Intellectualism is easily recognized as a backward-looking, analytical process that actually occurs after direct experience and direct mind/body response in a situation. With that awareness of what we do with that process, we can see that we are fragmenting our awareness of now with our memories, with the beliefs those memories intertwine through accumulated processes of memory and thought, and we create illusions of reality that we than place, like a template over the immediate experience, thus potentially distorting what we can see, and in that distorting our response to what is.

If you've ever been in one of those life threatening emergency moments where everything goes into slow motion, perhaps you've directly been able to see your body seeming to do everything while the rational mind calmly observes it doing it, actions the body seems to know to do with with a direct intelligence you are somewhat mildly amused to discover, and without any guidance from this anthropocentric awareness one assumes is in charge until this moment of emergency. If you've grown up around animals and dealt with some energetic creatures of 1000 lbs or more, you recognize how your body is tuned to this, especially in close quarters, or that herding is something you do recognizing the charateristics in the animals and influencing them with your own form, as a dog learns to do when it learns to herd. Those are just some suggestions from my own experience.

This Jungian Analyst, Dennis L. Merritt, talks about his experiences growing up and how they have influenced him throughout his life. His experience on the dairy farm in Wisconsin mirrors my own in nearby Michigan:

Spirit in the Land, Spirit in Animals, Spirit in People

I grew up on a small dairy farm in Wisconsin where I spent many hours of my free time wandering the hills and marshes with my dog. A deep connection was forged between the land and my psyche, much deeper than I realized. After spending many years away from the Midwest, working on a doctorate at Berkeley in the late 60’s in Insect Pathology (microbial control of insects), then a Masters Degree in Humanistic Psychology from Sonoma State College, California, and finally training to become a Jungian Analyst in Zurich, Switzerland, I was led by a series of powerful dreams to return to the land I have felt so connected to. I also became involved in sweat-lodge, vision quest and Sundance ceremonies of the Lakota Sioux of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota that added a depth of relationship to the environment I could not have imagined otherwise.

-------

Near the end of my training at the Jung Institute in Zurich, I had one of the most powerful and simple dreams I have ever had. It was a single-image dream of a typical upper Midwestern landscape. There was a meadow with very green grass, flowers and possibly alfalfa. The topography was gently rolling with trees on the horizon. Insects flew above the meadow. It was a beautiful sunny day with puffy white clouds in a blue sky. What was most remarkable about this simple scene was that it shown with an inner light. Every atom in the dream was alive. Despite having seen some of the most beautiful scenery in the world—California, the Grand Canyon, the Canadian Rockies, Switzerland, etc., I have never seen anything as beautiful as this simple meadow scene.

This is an example of what the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called a numinous dream—a dream with an inner light and a sacred sense. I contend that no indigenous person has had a more sacred dream of the land. Every human is capable of experiencing this sense of the sacredness about the land. Long ago Jung recognized this archetypal need of a connection to, and love of, the land. E. O. Wilson calls this “biophilia”.

When one has such a dream, the challenge is to let it lead one’s life and direct one’s conscious orientation. To follow such a dream’s inspiration is to walk a path with heart. Having grown up in Wisconsin, I knew the state affected me deeply, but I had no sense of just how deeply until this dream. I began to look at all elements of the Upper Midwest more closely—its soils, topography, flora and fauna, seasons, etc. To deepen this process and help convey this sense of the land to others, my wife and I set up a week long summer institute in 1991 called Spirit in the Land, Spirit in Animals, Spirit in People. The Institute was so well received we ran a second one in 1992, followed by a reduced version for the University of Wisconsin Extension in 1994. The talks I gave at the Institutes became the genesis of the book I’m finishing, The Dairy Farmer’s Guide to the Universe--Jung, Hermes and Ecopsychology. To convey my sense of an interdisciplinary environmental education program, I am reproducing the contents of three brochures announcing the Institutes.

Seeing a Spiritual Connection Through Form

The possibility that we can be directed in this way by dreams and their metaphorical implications for our entire being is something that hardly makes it, it would seem, to the mainstream levels of popular culture. In a very basic way, it may be antithetical to the fundamental paradigm of a rationally derived, techno-industrial based society -- with a rational view that the world is its resource and not a living whole in its own right, of which humans are only a systemic part, not the top predator in a food chain meant to feed their, and only their self derived hubris -- that itself may have gone off track from the organic roots of being with its very liberal foundations of a rational, philosophic approach to its undestanding of a tautological determination of its social guiding principles of life. That is, unless the notion that violence and the many damaging implications that are considered "inappropriate" for young children to be exposed to are also taken seriously enough to be considered a questionable exposure to our adult population's psyche as well -- not that I am suggesting control measures, but just a recognition of what it implies. Is it true that a constant exposure to images of violence only effect young children?

Just to be clear, I'm not asking about social control issues, I'm asking about awakening a sensitivity to a seeing of how we are immersed in forms and how those forms are part of our consciousness, and in the process, invoke a wondering about just how separate we really are as assumed independent individuals from all this. What are the sources of our consciousness? Can we really be conscious and separate from our environment, like the mind is contained in some sort of bottle?

But myth and mythical thought was an important connecting force to the subconscious and our immersion in forms that our ancestors employed, by all accounts. For me, I've always had a strong response to literature and poetry, and the inspiring sense of imaginary power it can infuse. So in talking about this topic, I'd like to point to this dimension as a source of imaginative context and a way of seeing how the dynamics of ecopsychology can work for us, reconnect us to elements of our world, whether we want to save the planet or just want to have rich imagination related to it.

Also, in terms of language, this might in some ways relate to Edward De Bono's Water Logic and "ideas to flow" which speaks to the "voice" of the mind speaking out of these forms in a relational process rather than the static logic that retains a fundamentalist, or positivist nature. Lakoff, of course, as a neuro scientist, talks about cognitive categories and framing. Those are metaphors of form as well. Pointing to dreams and the subconscious metaphors of the mind may offer a view of language as a connection to the inspirational within us to that which connects our minds and our psychic health to the earth and its living forms as they are embedded in the subconscious to then become those connective metaphors. I suggest this to give a sense different where language is used to abstract and analyze, creating in that process a fragmentation and alienation from the actual ongoing process of life. This of course is done through a different process, perhaps, so that's worth keeping in mind. In other words, there is no need to binarily oppose them, for they may both be present at once as a conscious process.

These embedded forms may be the sources for those moments of epiphany, and the quality and form of those epiphanies may depend on the stimulation, whether a natural environment or human built one. Not judging one or the other, just noting how our mind is complex and may respond depending on the stimulus, can perhaps open our mental doors to see how the forms we live with daily confine our spiritual connection with our natural life forces and the planet.

ECOPSYCHOLOGY

2007-05-03T16:09:00.000-07:00

ECOPSYCHOLOGY

The basic idea of ecopsychology is that while the human mind is shaped by the modern social world, it can be readily inspired and comforted by the wider natural world, because that is the arena in which it originally evolved. Mental health or unhealth cannot be understood simply in the narrow context of only intrapsychic phenomena or social relations. One also has to include the relationship of humans to other species and ecosystems. These relations have a deep evolutionary history; reach a natural affinity within the structure of their brains and they have deep psychic significance in the present time, in spite of urbanization. Humans are dependent on healthy nature not only for their physical sustenance, but for mental health, too. The destruction of ecosystems means that something in humans also dies.

ECOPSYCHOLOGY: EIGHT PRINCIPLES - Theodore Roszak

The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious. For ecopsychology, repression of the ecological unconscious is the deepest root of collusive madness in industrial society.

The contents of the ecological unconscious represent, in some degree, at some level of mentality, the living record of cosmic evolution, tracing back to distant initial conditions in the history of time.

Just as it has been the goal of previous therapies to recover the repressed contents of the unconscious, so the goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious.

For ecopsychology as for other therapies, the crucial stage of development is the life of the child. The ecological unconscious is regenerated, as if it were a gift, in the newborn's enchanted sense of the world.

The ecological ego matures toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions.

Among the therapeutic projects most important to ecopsychology is the re-evaluation of certain compulsively "masculine" character traits that permeate our structures of political power and which drive us to dominate nature as if it were an alien and rightless realm. In this regard, ecopsychology draws significantly on the insights of ecofeminism with a view to demystifying the sexual stereotypes.

Whatever contributes to small scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego. Whatever strives for large-scale domination and the suppression of personhood undermines the ecological ego.

Ecopsychology holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being. The term "synergy" is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for salvation. The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be: the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet.

This proposition was posed to me by a person who does not see any need to be concerned about environmental degradation caused by human activity so long as humans are free do make individual choices, because it's his belief, like Adam Smith's, that as long as the rights of the sovereignty of the individual are maintained, the individual choices will guide the whole towards an equitible and sane relationship with the environment:

Without freedoms destruction of the ecosystem seems inevitable.

The following was my response:

From my own phenomenological perceptions, I see that freedom of the individual is inevitable until one is rendered incapacitated in some way or dies. The real question I am interested in, is about the form that freedom takes. I personally recognize that I have the innate, volitional freedom to agree to do what is being required even under the most extreme forms of coercion where I am being given choice, because I am the one that chooses to do it, even if I would prefer to do something else. The choice may also include the choice to go on living, or keep a finger, or one can imagine many other scenarios of of coercive pressure, but the choice is made until it's completely taken away. If that were not true the body hangs like a puppet waiting for strings to move it in some external way. It requires self initiation, self volition, hence "freedom," to act in any way, even to act in concert with others, or follow orders in a hierarchy. It requires personal freedom to agree not to bother someone if requested, and personal freedom to ignore that request. It requires freedom to drive down the highway on the established "correct" side of the road to minimize danger to self and others.

This sort of freedom hardly needs to be made into an issue. If we didn't understand it we wouldn't even bother with rules. At least one effort of any intellectual exploration is to seek to discover the abstract structural elements of mind from which actions freely emerge. Freedom of action is assumed as long as action is possible, as long as the brain is functional. So it's an entirely trivial point to say that the destruction of an ecosystem seems inevitable without freedoms. With freedom the destruction of the ecosystem may also be inevitable if people don't excersize it to question the very form and structure of their complex society. What you end up with by introducing such a concept is a non sequitur into the exploration of the meaning of freedom, in the context it is brought up, and the recognition that the meaning "imagined" in this vague way involves a whole series of beliefs and values, very often directly related to the very institutions themselves that are taking everyone "freely" in the direction of their own demise -- if indeed that's where things are headed.

We have seen that what is identified as "binary opposition," as the structuralists like Claude Levi Strauss have pointed out, can possibly be the very basis of human consciousness. We have also seen how it has inherent attributes that lead to hierarchical thinking, where one of two concepts in an opposition are favored over the other. It's, of course, an act of freedom to favor one over the other, which is essentially how values and institutions of all sorts are created. A transnational corporation is essentially an institution created out of a complex matrix of binary oppositions, one favored over another, creating the hierarchical structures of the institution and the form in which decisionmaking is made and the purpose of the collective efforts achieved, efforts from the providers of capital to the "work" -- whatever that might be.

But as the post structuralists and the post modernist era philosophers have also shown, those binary oppositions may not be as set as the earlier structuralists proposed them to be in societies, and thus may not offer such a good explanation for why a given society seems formed the way it is, in fact may not even explain that a society is formed the way it is; and then, it's recognized that the cognitive structures of binary opposition are constantly degrading, so a constant reiffication effort is required if a social form is to be maintained or allowed to change.

This in fact may be a more accurate description of the many "other" societies that anthropologists rushed to study as the institutions of globalization over the past five hundred years or so wiped them out through colonialization, and later something called "modernization" and "development." Many of those societies may have been much more flexible and interactive with their environments than the structuralists, who were operating themselves out of a paradigm of societietal mode bent on maintaining its own complex institutional forms intact, imagined them to be with their projecting of an analytical stasis by coding and analysizing through their entirely rational screen of the binary opposition tool, an analytical device they'd discovered through the very nature of their own philosophical traditions. Post structualist anthropologist have gone back and reexamined the precepts of Anthropology itself, and from that have emerged different efforts at understanding the nature of society, efforts that attempt to see how abstact forces are moving dynamically and in a flux relationship, both within the institutions and between the interface of cultural devices that are the very adaptation to the environment. Ecopsychology is something that has emerged out of the awareness that some sort of complex adaptational process is taking place, and that the consciousness of the whole of a society is involved. The hypothesis is that an increased awareness of the forces of nature can be a positive element in that process.

The binary oppositions then can be recognized to be in constant degradation against the forces of the whole of society which are made up of institutions, and what minimizes degradation is often the adherence to form itself that people participate in, almost like a daily ritual, and those forms reiffy the validity of the the institutions and the need for them, which can give a sense of stability and thus with stability "safety." This safety and stability of institutions may be a good and a valid strategy for all to take part in, as society is a group effort no matter how many notions of disintegration are introduced -- notions like favoring the concept that individual "freedom" is favored over the values of a whole of a group, a particularly familiar binary opposition one often hears as a rational explanation to promote certain societal institutions as necessarily performing for the good of all in a somewhat vague, and usually poorly defined atmosphere that holds together yet another concept called "free enterprise" and Reagan's famous "magic market," and so forth. This is how at least some of us go about looking at the rational forms that make up the glue of society, that hold together the institutional forms that we all, with some degree of conscious intent, freely agree to maintain.

If, perhaps, the social forms do not comply with the natural ontology of the inherent elements of a planetary biosphere seeking balance and sustainability of energy flows and species interactions that are the very nature of that energy interaction in a complexity we think of as life. In fact, past efforts to create complex societies based on an adherence to the institutions that are that that very hierarchical complexity has nearly always led to the collapse of complexity, from our understanding of history. That history is itself worth paying attention to, and holding in mind as we question the nature of our own complex institutions and where they may implicitly lead the human participants. So that itself, once understood, should bring a note of caution to those who follow the forms of their society, and one might then want to understand those forms and their ontological implications.

Thus to make an effort to stand aside from the forms which are the "conformity" the forces of society seek to maintain in order that the forms continue, to look at them and attempt to see them and their very nature, is an act of freedom; in fact an act of radical freedom because of the very inherent nature of institutions, and one which is generally frowned upon, and one for which those who dare do it are often eliminated from the public discourse in one way or another. There are many ways the status quo of cultural forms can be used to "eliminate" seekers and questioners.

Polyarchic Elite and US Elections

2007-04-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

Safe Bet Winner of the 2008 Presidential Election...

Corporations and Wealthy donors.

The word of the day is "Polyarchy." Wiki

"Polyarchy is generally what British leaders mean when they speak of promoting 'democracy' abroad. This is a system in which a small group actually rules and mass participation is confined to choosing leaders in elections managed by competing elites."

Essentially it means, rule by the elite.

The facade that makes us believe we are still in a democracy is we get to vote for them. In other words, the rabble gets to vote once in awhile and pay taxes.

This particular elite happens to be an interconnected global clique of neoliberalists.

What is neoliberalism?

The main points of neo-liberalism include:

1. THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating "free" enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say "an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone." It's like Reagan's "supply-side" and "trickle-down" economics -- but somehow the wealth didn't trickle down very much.

2. CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply -- again in the name of reducing government's role. Of course, they don't oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business.

3. DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminsh profits, including protecting the environment and safety on the job.

4. PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water. Although usually done in the name of greater efficiency, which is often needed, privatization has mainly had the effect of concentrating wealth even more in a few hands and making the public pay even more for its needs.

5. ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF "THE PUBLIC GOOD" or "COMMUNITY" and replacing it with "individual responsibility." Pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education and social security all by themselves -- then blaming them, if they fail, as "lazy."

Sound familiar? Remember Reagan's smiling face, glowing eyes, and those inspiring words: "Magic Market" as he looks up at the wonders of the universe?

Yes, neoliberalism is what replaced the old liberalism when Reagan came into office. The old liberalism started out as classical liberalism, the economic version of which is like neoliberalism (that's why it's called neoliberalism now) but it had become "perverted" when it evolved into the New Deal liberalism after it was discovered that classical liberalismn left common people, who's only capital was their time they could sell, hanging out over a cliff after the stock market crashed in 1929, and suddenly there was not enough places left where people could go to sell their time. Another unfortunate thing had come to pass: few people knew how to hunt and gather anymore, being as how they'd had to become city folks and all in order to work in the factories and make all that capital for the rich folks.

By the 1980s enough voters became convinced, through mass propaganda, particularly in the South, where Democrats used to reign, that enough boats had been floated by redistributing the wealth through New Deal programs, and it was time to go back to "freedom." Those neoliberal "freedom" principles were promoted by that smiling actor with his stirring lines he was so good at delivering, about the "magic market" and all, and Nixon's silent majority came out to vote. And so it was decided: time to start over again -- before too many people got uppity and began demanding more freedom from slavery of the workplace.

Now our candidates are decided by a horse race for the money. And quite apparently the money is going to decide what they do, though it's supposed to not be legal, and even though they keep getting caught at it.

Until there is required publically financed elections, the money interests apparently don't have to be worried about getting caught at capital investment in that realm of the polyarchs:

2008 Election Guide: Finances

From the above link, we can see that the top three Democrats have raised a total of nearly $66 million while the top three Republicans have raised a total of nearly $51 million. And top fundraiser Hillary Clinton has collected $19 million of her $26 million from people giving the max of $2300 for the primary cycle.

That's a staggering amount of money. What it means is the viable candidates will opt out of the public financing program that has been in place for thirty years. In fact, since the 2000 election the formula for winning the nomination and then the presidency is to not stay a part of that system.

Given that staying in the public finance system means limitations on the money that one can raise and spend, there is no incentive to be a part of it. This should not be a choice if any sense of a popular based democracy is hoped for in a society. Candidates bypass public financing and the inequities between haves and have nots grow stark. Polyarchy is enhanced as the impact of wealthy contributors is accentuated.

To give some sense of how the power of wealth factor of neoliberalism has taken root since the Reagan "revolution," data from the Campaign Finance Institute shows that the political party conventions, where the last remaining vestiges of soft money comes in, increased their take from $1.1 million in 1980 to $103.5 million in 2004.

The British have promoted polyarchic democracies for some time as they pulled back from their colonies. The US switched from CIA initiated coups to promoting them beginning in the early eighties through a number of government funded NGOs, the first of which was:

Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy

There is a world class crony system involved in all of this. The US is in the Middle East for these cronies and their neoliberal empire. But most of us have little to say about it other than to go to the polls and pick which one of them is going to revolve through the doors of the White House, Congress, the Military Industrial Complex, corporate funded NGOs and Transnational Corporations. And the ones in the White House now are picking our Supreme Court and other Federal appointees from the ranks of the Federalist Society, a well funded clique of some 35,000 members who have all the intentions in the world of finding the legal basis in the Constitution to support their way of life.

How about we rock their boat? Kucinich looks like a good bet to me for the people about now.

Understanding the Federalist Society Nexus

2007-04-22T11:42:00.000-07:00

New Deal to Neoliberalism

In my own ever evolving historical narrative, the Reagan administration marks the end of the transformed classical liberalism that had evolved through the creation of the New Deal experiment as a way of devising some sort of humane median arbitration between the forces of market capitalism and the needs of human beings caught up in it.

The Great Depression was merely the bursting of a boil that had been growing and festering as industrialization and the economic forces of the idealized free market formed a social environment in which large numbers of human beings found their only capital was their time, and their bargaining power was related to their membership in a class of humans with similar capital, and with that capital they bargained independently and increasingly together for the pay the capitalists were willing to expend for the work that made them more capital. When the boil burst, it made clear to those who followed along in hope, as the "leaders" with the capital led, that the magic market was not making the world safe and prosperous for all as was claimed, and that question of whether it was ever going to, may not be quite as important as putting a few potatoes in the pot today. And so came Roosevelt with a New Deal. There was some tinkerings in the US with the ideas of fascism at the time, but that experiment was left to the Germans and Italians.

For whatever reasons, the New Deal seemed to come through the next forty five years or so, raising a lot of boats in the process, paying off the huge debts from WWII. The US became a leader in the world, both idealistically and economically. But all along forces were at work to return to the ideals of classical liberalism, and so with WWII well behind it, as well as the bumps in the road of Korea and Vietnam, the next phase of trying the old liberal experiment looked to a number of political thinkers like it might be worth a try again. And so with Reagan the US got a "neo"liberalism strategy, complete with a well funded marketing campaign. That campaign once again promoted the following:

Free markets without government "interference" would be the most efficient and socially optimal allocation of resources, thus a philosophy of maximum deregulation to promote business.
Privatization removes inefficiencies of the public sector.
Goverment should mainly function to provide infrastructure to advance the rule of law with respect to property rights and contracts.
Sustained economic growth is the way to human progress (with the obvious assumption that human progress is the goal).
Replace the New Deal concept of "the public good" or "Community" with "individual responsibility." The poor are poor because they are lazy. The opportunities are there.

In 1944, Karl Polanyi published his critique of free market capitalism: The Great Transformation representing some of the philosophical ideals the New Deal attempted to merge with tenets of classical liberalism which had predominated up to the crash, and those were concepts like reciprocity and redistribution for the welfare of the whole, and the new hope those had brought to a body politic that awakened to the stark realities of a world wide depression. In the same year, Friedrich Hayek produced what is now commonly known as the conservative vision of classical liberalism, raising the alternative specter of fears of socialisms of all stripes as The Road to Serfdom. So in 1944 we had two pieces of philosophical work that set the tone for what would be the two political ideals that would be at odds with each other, struggling for the minds and hearts of the masses over the rest of the century, and beyond to now. These ideas were romanticised and made understandable by such popular writers as Ayn Rand, who saw the Hayek model as the prototype of ultimate human freedom and dignity, but managed in her romanticization to portray the ideals in Polanyi's work as a form of oppression that was somehow being overcome by the forces of good, and all that was needed was for Atlas (to) Shrug. So with the election of Reagan, Atlas shrugged and we got neoliberalism, or the new, economic oriented version of classical liberalism.

I have always thought one of the oddest results of this refinement of differences from classical liberalism to neoliberalism was the confusing application of "liberal" to the emphasis on a politics oriented in the New Deal way Polanyi describes it, and "conservative" to Hayak's defense of "classical liberalism." I find it best not to try to categorize myself, or else my sense of history just gets scrambled.

So. This revitalized liberalism, which calls itself conservatism, but which follows the principles of neoliberalism, began to chart a new course in the world. By the way, if anyone is fuzzy about what the term "neoliberalism" means, I highly recommend the following article: Neoliberalism: origins, theory, definition:

Neoliberalism inadequately defined?
The definition of neoliberalism presented here is more abstract than usual - but it also suggests that neoliberalism has been underestimated. A widely quoted example of those 'usual definitions' is What is "Neo-Liberalism"? by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo García:

Neo-liberalism is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so. Although the word is rarely heard in the United States, you can clearly see the effects of neo-liberalism here as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer....Around the world, neo-liberalism has been imposed by powerful financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter- American Development Bank....the capitalist crisis over the last 25 years, with its shrinking profit rates, inspired the corporate elite to revive economic liberalism. That's what makes it 'neo' or new.

This sense of the word 'neoliberalism' is widely used in Latin America. However, neoliberalism is more a phenomenon of the rich western market democracies, than of poor regions. That is why I emphasise the historical development of liberalism, in those western market democracies. The IMF and the World Bank are not the right places to look, to see the essence of neoliberalism. And the WTO ideology - free trade and 'competitive advantage' - is 200 years old. There is nothing 'neo' in their liberalism.

Seattle and Genoa?
The image of 'neoliberalism' has been heavily influenced by the protests against it: people think of the violent protests at Seattle and Genoa, and the associated social movements. If you only thought about that, then neoliberalism would be an ideology of the riot police, and that's not accurate.

It's true that the Genoa G8 summit was intended as a show of force. The organisers knew that violent demonstrations were probable in an Italian city, but chose to confront them. Democratically elected leaders "should not run from demonstrators", said Tony Blair. (However, when it was Britain's turn to organise the G8 summit, the hypocrite choose the isolated Gleneagles hotel in Scotland). 20 000 police and soldiers were deployed at the Genoa G8 summit - NATO used 42 500 troops to occupy Kosovo. This show of force was out of all proportion to the political strength of anti-market forces, but it emphasised the legitimacy of the market-democratic states.

It is possible for 'the state' to suppress 'the market', but also to promote it. In fact, the free market emerged in Europe under the protection of the state, and the market needs the state, more than the other way around. The market needs internal regulation, in order to function: the state, in the form of the legal system, ensures contracts are enforced. In the form of the police, it prevents theft and fraud. It establishes uniform systems of weights and measures, and a uniform currency. Without these things there would be no free market, no market forces, and no resulting market society. Bill Gates disputes the US Government's authority over his business - but if there was no government at all, the poor would soon steal his wealth. The attack on the World Trade Center provided some images of this dependency - the reopening of the New York Stock Exchange by police and firefighters, for instance. (In turn, at least in the United States, the market is integrated in the national identity: the NYSE reopening was seen as an act of national defiance).

The free market is itself a form of social organisation: it is neither spontaneous nor endemic to humans. If no-one ever promoted or enforced it, there would be no free market on this planet. For thousands of years, there was none. The modern free market came into existence primarily because liberalism demanded its existence. This demand was a a political demand, and it was enforced through the state.

The general functionalist starting premise is only modified to the extent that the "system" is comprehended as capitalist, in a specific way "form-determined". The state and the political system function as a form of an 'ideal all-around capitalist', who must uphold not just the society as such, but the 'capitalist element'. The different forms of state interventionism are explained both as an expression of functional needs of the accumulation and reproduction process of capital. The general requirements of capital accumulation such as basic infrastructure, functioning law systems and legitimization mechanisms are tasks that cannot be carried out by individual capitalists due to the competition relations, but instead systemically require a "fictive all-around-capitalist". This "capitalist referee" must guarantee the fulfilment of these tasks in the interest of maintaining the system of capitalist society..
Business and the State: Mapping the Theoretical Landscape
Volker Schneider and Marc Tenbuecken, 2002.

If everyone on this planet was a liberal, an enthusiastic supporter of the free market, then that would be the end of the matter. But of course some people oppose the market, and its effects - especially the resulting inequality. The market is a political and social regime, and like any other regime, it must be enforced against opposition. That is true even of democracies: democrats overthrow dictators, and dictators overthrow democracies. If either side wants to avoid their own overthrow, they must use force. Democrats do use democratic force, and do fight democratic wars, as they know in Iraq.

The relationship between supporters and opponents of the free market, is similar to that between democrats and anti-democrats. They are enemies, inherently. On the very existence of the market, no compromise is possible. The free market either exists, or it does not exist. It can disappear by consent - which is absurdly unlikely - or without consent. Any attempt to end the free market is, by definition, an attempt to overthrow a fundamental social structure. Certainly, in the long-established western market democracies, it would mean a collapse of the existing social structures. The effect would be dramatic - comparable to occupation by a foreign power.

So it is not surprising that force is used in the face of a threat, and it is not surprising that it is the force of the state. That is after all, a typical task of the state - the preservation of the regime itself, the preservation of the nature of the state. Anarchist propaganda speaks of "the State", as if all states were interchangeable, but they are not. A market democracy is not interchangeable with a Bolshevik regime, simply because they both have a government, an army, and a police force. A market democracy will use force, state force, against an attempt to overthrow either democracy or the market. That is what the riot police did: defend the state, and defend the market - without contradiction between them.

In historical perspective 'Genoa' was an absurd over-reaction. The western market democracies are the most stable and successful societies in history. The principle of the free market is accepted by well over 90% of their population, probably closer to 99% in western Europe. The tensions can be explained by the underlying sense of threat, but they are not specifically related to neoliberalism, and they certainly do not explain it. For that, a long-term and ideological perspective is necessary.

Liberalism
Liberalism as a coherent social philosophy dates from the late 18th century. At first there was no distinction between political and economic liberalism (economics was not considered a separate discipline until about 1850). Classic liberal political philosophy has continued to develop - after 1900 as a purely conservative philosophy. The basic principles of all liberal philosophy are:

* Liberals believe that the form of society should be the outcome of processes. These processes should be interactive and involve all members of society. The market is an example, probably the best example, of what liberals mean by process. Liberals are generally hostile to any 'interference with process'. Specifically, liberals claim that the distribution of wealth as a result of the market is, in itself, just. Liberals reject the idea of redistribution of wealth as a goal in itself.

* Liberals therefore reject any design or plan for society - religious, utopian, or ethical. Liberals feel that society and state should not have fixed goals, but that 'process should determine outcome'. This anti-utopianism became increasingly important in liberal philosophy, in reaction to the Communist centrally-planned economies: it anticipated the extreme deregulation-ism of later neoliberalism.

* Liberalism is therefore inherently hostile to competing non-liberal societies - which it sees not simply as different, but as wrong. In the last 10 years, Islamic society has replaced the Communist state, as the perceived 'opposite' to a liberal society.

* Nevertheless liberalism has compromised with one specific form of non-liberal ideology: nationalism, in the ethno-national form which underlies most present nation states. A political community based on common origin, history and language is not liberal, but liberals never tried to form the voluntarist, contractual, non-historical state - which liberalism would logically imply. The nation state was simply taken for granted, as the political and economic arena for liberal process.

* Liberals define liberalism itself as 'freedom', so they rarely think consent is required for the imposition of a liberal society. In fact, most would say it can not be imposed, inherently. After the Cold War this belief has acquired a geostrategic significance: many western liberal-democrats now believe, that a war to impose a liberal-democratic society is inherently just. This belief influences interventionist policy, but as yet no war for the sole purpose of liberalisation has been fought.

* Classic political liberals reject the idea that there are any external moral values: they say that there are only opinions. They feel that these opinions should be 'expressed' in public, and that in some way this 'market of opinions' will favour the truth. (The idea that truth can be revealed by discourse is much older than liberalism).

* The liberal rejection of external moral values is formally expressed in the liberal idea of human rights: both good and evil humans have equal rights, which apply equally when they facilitate good or evil actions. Classic liberal philosophy advocated 'liberty' as a value, even if they did not call it a value. In effect it places liberty as a value above good (and evil).

* Liberals believe in formal equality among participants in a liberal society, but almost all liberals also believe in inequality of talent. Many liberals were therefore sympathetic to biological theories of inequality. (Theories of hereditary racial differences in intelligence are now popular among US neoliberals).

Liberalism is a universal ideology, and in principle liberals seek to apply it to the entire planet, and the entire human population. Most liberals have supported the expansion of liberal society, although in the 19th century that meant among the 'civilised nations'. For a long time the free market was considered the only cross-cultural and 'exportable' element of liberalism. Only recently have liberals advocated, that African and Asian societies should become 100% liberal-democratic societies. 'Liberal missionaries', such as George Soros, were unknown or marginal in the 19th century.

Market liberalism
The free market is not simply 'exchange' or 'trade'. Two people who exchange products can not form a free market in the liberal sense, even if their transactions are monetarised. The element of competition is missing in this two-person society.

A minimal liberal free market needs at least three parties, with two of them in competition - for instance, two competing sellers and one buyer. The resultant pressure on the two sellers to lower prices, is the simplest type of 'market force'. Such a force comes into existence without any conscious action on the part of the three parties. In modern markets there are millions of parties, and complex market forces. Market-liberals value this characteristic of the market. Their belief in the moral necessity of market forces in the economy, is probably the first defining feature of market liberalism. The second is the belief in entrepreneurs themselves, as a good and necessary social group. To summarise:

* For all liberals, interactive process legitimises outcome: in market liberalism, the market is the primary process, and market transactions are the interaction.

* Market liberals believe that economic transactions should take place in a framework which maximises the effect of each transaction on every other transaction. (That is an abstract definition of the free market, but it makes the later transition from liberalism to neoliberalism easier to understand).

* Liberals see the market as good, and often as semi-sacred. They want the market to be as large as possible, involving all of society. In modern liberal-democratic states almost all adults participate in the market. A private club in a Communist state, where members can hold a closed free market, would satisfy no liberal.

* Liberals are hostile to economic self-sufficiency - so strongly, that they believed in war to 'open up markets'. The most famous example is the Opium War, when Britain forced the Chinese Empire to allow the import of opium. This liberal belief in market expansionism has revived after the end of the Cold War.

* Market liberals are hostile to trade barriers: "free trade" is a classic slogan of market liberalism. That meant traditionally, the free flow of goods and capital: neoliberalism later developed a more diffuse version, where 'flow' and 'interaction' are treated as quasi-ethical values.

* Market liberals believe that important aspects of society should be determined by the market, certainly the distribution of income and wealth. Neoliberalism later extended this belief, claiming that all social life should be determined by the market.

* All market liberals are hostile to interference in the market, by church, state or others - although since the 19th century only the state has sufficient power to interfere. Market liberals are clearly anti-utopian, in the sense of opposing economic planning, especially centralised state control of the entire economy. They believe that the market produces the best 'design for society', and that is is wrong to substitute any other design.

* However, market liberalism is itself a utopia, despite its anti-utopianism. In the 'ideal world' of market liberalism, no goods or services exist which are not the product of market forces, but all goods or services which are market-responsive do exist. This is in itself a utopian project, implying a total structuring of society. Neoliberalism goes even further - extending the market principle beyond the production of goods and services.

* The social institution of the entrepreneur is central to market liberalism. An entrepreneur is a person whose profession is, to respond to market forces. In the 19th century most entrepreneurs were still private individuals, later the business firm took over this function. The enterprise/firm is a permanent organisation, structured to respond to market forces. An entrepreneur is not a farmer, or a manufacturer, or a consultant: in theory an entrepreneur changes activities in accordance with the market. In reality most entrepreneurs retained a specialisation for some specific products or services: but neoliberalism now demands, that the theoretical flexibility should become standard practice.

* Without the entrepreneur there is no free market, therefore market liberals demand a privileged social status for the entrepreneur. The early liberal theorists were hostile to the urban guild economy of mediaeval Europe: they saw it, in effect, as a conspiracy not to compete. In their historical vision, the entrepreneur rescued Europe from the poverty of the Middle Ages. (This vision was shared by Karl Marx, who admired the cultural dynamism of the free market). Not just mediaeval Europe, but all societies without an entrepreneurial caste, were seen as failures.

A central but rarely explicit political demand of market liberals is therefore, that entrepreneurs should have control of the economy. This has not only been accepted, but has become so incorporated into the culture of western liberal-democratic societies, that few people ever think about it. But it would not be any less logical, to hand the economy to engineers, or priests - or not to privilege any one group. The choice depends on underlying values, and liberals value the entrepreneur. This value preference of liberals, and its widespread acceptance, has created what in the US is called 'the business community'. That is a real and identifiable social elite - with specific cultural preferences, specific clothing, and often a specific form of language (sociolect). It does in fact control the economy, in liberal-democratic states. Although this was probably not foreseen by early liberals, market liberalism has become an ideology in support of this elite. Their culture, attitudes, and ethics have greatly influenced neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism
If Adam Smith returned and saw the more extreme aspects of neoliberalism, he would probably find them bizarre. Nevertheless, they derive from the ideas of early liberalism. The belief in the market, in market forces, has separated from the factual production of goods and services. It has become an end in itself, and this is one reason to speak of neoliberalism and not of liberalism.

A general characteristic of neoliberalism is the desire to intensify and expand the market, by increasing the number, frequency, repeatability, and formalisation of transactions. The ultimate (unreachable) goal of neoliberalism is a universe where every action of every being is a market transaction, conducted in competition with every other being and influencing every other transaction, with transactions occurring in an infinitely short time, and repeated at an infinitely fast rate. It is no surprise that extreme forms of neoliberalism, and especially cyberliberalism, overlap with semi-religious beliefs in the interconnectedness of the cosmos.

Some specific aspects of neoliberalism are:

* A new expansion in time and space of the market: although there has been a global-scale market economy for centuries, neoliberals find new areas of marketisation. This illustrates how neoliberalism differs from classic market liberalism. Adam Smith would not have believed that a free market was less of a free market, because the shops are closed in the middle of the night: expansion of trading hours is a typically neoliberal policy. For neoliberals a 23-hours economy is already unjustifiable: nothing less than 24-hours economy will satisfy them. They constantly expand the market at its margins.

* The emphasis on property, in classic and market liberalism, has been replaced by an emphasis on contract. In the time of Adam Smith, property conferred status in itself: he would find it strange that entrepreneurs sometimes own no fixed assets, and lease the means of production.

* Contract maximalisation is typically neoliberal: the privatisation of the British railway network, formerly run by one state-owned company, led to 30 000 new contracts. Most of these were probably generated by splitting services, which could have been included in block contracts. (A fanatic neoliberal would prefer not to buy a cup of coffee, but negotiate separately for each microlitre).

* The contract period is reduced, especially on the labour market, and so the frequency of contract is increased. A service contract, for instance for office cleaning, might be reduced from a one-year to a three-month contract, then to a one-month contract. Contracts of employment are shorter and shorter, in effect forcing the employee to re-apply for the job. This flexibilisation means a qualitatively different working life: many more job applications, spread throughout the working life. This was historically the norm in agriculture - day labour - but long-term labour contracts became standard after industrialisation.

* Market forces are also intensified by intensifying assessment, a development especially visible on the labour market. Even within a contract period, an employee will be subject to continuous assessment. The use of specialised software in call centres has provided some extreme examples: the time employees spend at the toilet is measured in seconds: this information is used to pressure the employee to spend less time away from the terminal. Firms with contracts are also increasingly subject to continuous assessment procedures, made possible by information technology. For instance, courier services use tracking software and GPS technology, to allow customers to locate their packages in transit. This is a typical example of the new hyper-provision of business information, in neoliberal economies.

* New transaction-intensive markets are created on the model of the stock exchanges - electricity exchanges, telephone-minute exchanges. Typical for neoliberalism: there is no relationship between the growth in the number of transactions, and the underlying production.

* New forms of auction are another method of creating transaction-intensive markets. Radio frequency auctions, such as those for UMTS frequencies, are an example. They replaced previous methods of allocation, especially licensing - a traditional method of allocating access to scarce goods with no clear private owner. The complex forms of frequency spectrum auctions have only been developed in the last few years. Neoliberals now see them as the only valid method of making such allocations: they dismiss all other methods as 'beauty contests'.

* Artificial transactions are created, to increase the number and intensity of transactions. Large-scale derivative trading is a typically neoliberal phenomenon, although financial derivatives have existed for centuries. It is possible to trade options on shares: but it is also possible to create options on these options. This accumulation of transaction on transaction, is characteristic of neoliberalism. New derivatives are created, to be traded on the new exchanges - such as 'electricity futures'. There is no limit to this expansion, except computer power, which grows rapidly anyway.

* Automated trading, and the creation of virtual market-like structures, are neoliberal in the sense that they are an intensification of "transaction for transaction's sake". However, a world in which all entrepreneurial activity was automated would not be neoliberal, or liberal.

* This expansion of interactivity means that neoliberal societies are network societies, rather than the 'open societies', of classic liberals. Formal equality and 'access' are not enough for neoliberals: they must be used to create links to other members of the society. This attitude has been accurately labelled 'connectionist'.

* Because of contract expansionism, transaction costs play an increasing role in the neoliberal economy. All those 30 000 contracts at British Rail had to be drafted by lawyers, all the assessments have to be done by assessors. There is always some cost of competition, which increases as the intensity of transactions increases. Neoliberalism has reached the point where these costs threaten to overwhelm the existing economy, destroying any economic gains from technological change.

* The growth of the financial services sector is related to these neoliberal characteristics, rather than to any inherent shift to service economies. The entire sector is itself a transaction cost: it was almost non-existent in the centrally planned economies. In turn, it has created a huge demand for office space in the world's financial centres. The expansion of the sector and its office employment are in direct contradiction of propaganda about 'more efficiency and less bureaucracy' in the free market.

* The speed of trading is increased. Online market data is expensive, yet it is now available free with a 15-minute delay. The markets move so fast, that the data is worthless after 15 minutes: the companies can then give it away, as a form of advertising. Day-traders buy and sell shares in minutes. Automated trading programmes, where the computer is linked direct to the stock exchange system, do it in seconds, or less. It is this increased speed which has led to the huge nominal trading volumes on the international currency markets, many times the Gross World Product on a yearly basis.

* Certain functions arise which only exist inside a neoliberal free market - 'derivative professions'. A good example is the profession of psychological-test coach. The intensity of assessment has increased, and firms now regularly use psychological tests to select candidates, even for intermediate level jobs. So ambitious candidates pay for training, in how to pass these psychological tests. Competition in the neoliberal labour market itself creates the market for this service.

* The creation of sub-markets, typically within an enterprise. Sub-contracting is itself an old market practice, but was usually outside the firm. It is now standard practice for large companies to create competition among their constituent units. This practice is also capable of quasi-infinite extension, and its promotion is characteristic of neoliberalism. A few companies even required each individual employee to register as a business, and to compete with each other at the place of work. A large company can form literally millions of holdings, alliances and joint ventures, using such one-person firms as building blocks.

* Supplier maximalisation: this extends the range of enterprises that compete for each contract. The ideal would be that every enterprise competes for every contract offered, maximising competition and market forces. In the case of the labour market, the neoliberal ideal is the absolutely flexible and employable employee, who can (and does apply) for every vacancy. In reality, an individual can not perform every kind of work - but there is a real development towards non-specialised enterprises, especially in the producer services sector. In neoliberalism, instead of the traditional 'steel tycoon' or 'newspaper baron' there are enterprises which "globally link people and knowledge, and cultures" or "advise and implement solutions to management issues". (In fact these are quotes from the accountants Price Waterhouse, but you can not guess this from the descriptions).

Neoliberalism is not simply an economic structure, it is a philosophy. This is most visible in attitudes to society, the individual and employment. Neo-liberals tend to see the world in term of market metaphors. Referring to nations as companies is typically neoliberal, rather than liberal. In such a view Deutschland GmbH competes with Great Britain Ltd, BV Nederland, and USA Inc. However, when this is a view of nation states, it is as much a form of neo-nationalism as neoliberalism. It also looks back to the pre-liberal economic theory - mercantilism - which saw the countries of Europe as competing units. The mercantilists treated those kingdoms as large-scale versions of a private household, rather than as firms. Nevertheless, their view of world trade as a competition between nation-sized units, would be acceptable to modern neoliberals.

Competition for inward investment, on the other hand, was generally unknown until the late 19th century. This competition is often seen by activists as the core doctrine of neoliberalism, especially since the neo-mercantilist policies are easy to understand and very unpopular: wage cuts, less money for public services, less tax on the rich. The neo-mercantilist nation, in other words, behaves like a caricaturally mean and nasty capitalist. It is not relevant either for these policies, or for opposition to them, whether they have any effect at all. Perhaps investment decisions are not made on this basis, perhaps there is no real mobility of capital, perhaps no investor is interested in Argentina, for instance. But so long as the Argentine government believes that it should pursue certain polices to attract investors, then it will do so. So long as it believes that the 'SA Argentina' is a business firm, then it will run Argentina accordingly.

The market metaphor is not only applied among nations, but among cities and regions as well. In neoliberal regional policy, cities are selling themselves in a national and global marketplace of cities. They are considered equivalent to an entrepreneur selling a product, but the product is the city (or region) as a location for entrepreneurs. The successful 'sale' of the product is the decision of an entrepreneur to locate there, not simply the sale of land or factories. This view of cities as sub-firms within the fictive 'national firm' parallels the creation of sub-markets within real firms. The difference is, that those sub-markets really exist - neoliberal city governments, on the other hand, act primarily on a belief in a metaphor. Again, there is no hard evidence that the global marketplace of cities exists: for most economic sectors complete mobility of plant and labour is an illusion. Most firms can not simply move from city to city, across continents and ignoring language and cultural barriers, in pursuit of locational advantage. Here too, the neoliberalism is a philosophy, an attitude - rather than an economic reality. It has influenced European politics - the fear of this neoliberalism dominated the French campaign against the European Constitution. There is certainly a neoliberal lobby within the EU, represented by the Lisbon Council, although it sees the world in terms of competing trade blocks rather than competing cities or regions. However, it is not clear how a continent could be run as a business firm - even its inhabitants wanted that. (More on neoliberal economic geography below).

A good example of the underlying attitudes is the basic policy document of the city of Düsseldorf - the Leitbild, equivalent to a 'mission statement' in English. It was adopted in 1997, and is no longer online at the city website, but parts are quoted at St@ttbuch Düsseldorf...

Düsseldorf bekennt sich zum Prinzip des Wettbewerbs. Der Erfolg von Städten entscheidet sich im Wettbewerb nach innen und aussen. Düsseldorf will besser sein.
Wettbewerb ist treibende Kraft unseres gesellschaftlichen Systems. Im zusammenwachsenden Europa gilt dies in hohem Masse auch für die Beziehungen zwischen den Regionen, die als Wirtschaftsstandort, als Lebensraum für die Bürgerinnen und Bürger und als Kulturstandort miteinander konkurrieren. Sich hierzu bekennen heisst, den Wettbewerb aufnehmen und aktiv gestalten zu wollen.
Im Wettbewerb besteht nur, wer gut ist. Düsseldorf will Wettbewerb. Im Interesse der vielen Millionen Menschen des Lebens- und Wirtschaftsraums: Düsseldorf will besser sein.
...
Düsseldorf is committed to the principle of competition. The success of cities is decided by competition, internal and external. Düsseldorf wants to be better. Competition is the driving force of our social system. In a Europe which is becoming more integrated, this applies increasingly to the relations between regions. They compete with each other as investment location, as residential choice for the citizens, and in cultural activity. Our commitment means that we will actively and structurally enter into this competition. In a competitive world, only the good can survive. Düsseldorf wants to compete! In the name of the millions of people in our economic and residential region: Düsseldorf wants to be the best!

The neoliberal urban vision was adopted, without debate, by many city governments in the 1990's. At some point, a belief in 'competition by population structure' was incorporated - the idea that a successful city is inhabited only by successful people. This belief, nonsensical or not, has had an effect in a negative sense: some cities now pursue active policies aimed at relocating low-income households outside the city. In the Netherlands, a new law allows large cities to legally ban poor people, from certain areas, or from the entire city..

As you would expect from a complete philosophy, neoliberalism has answers to stereotypical philosophical questions such as "Why are we here" and "What should I do?". We are here for the market, and you should compete. Neo-liberals tend to believe that humans exist for the market, and not the other way around: certainly in the sense that it is good to participate in the market, and that those who do not participate have failed in some way. In personal ethics, the general neoliberal vision is that every human being is an entrepreneur managing their own life, and should act as such. Moral philosophers call this is a virtue ethic, where human beings compare their actions to the way an ideal type would act - in this case the ideal entrepreneur. Individuals who choose their friends, hobbies, sports, and partners, to maximise their status with future employers, are ethically neoliberal. This attitude - not unusual among ambitious students - is unknown in any pre-existing moral philosophy, and is absent from early liberalism. Such social actions are not necessarily monetarised, but they represent an extension of the market principle into non-economic area of life - again typical for neoliberalism.

The idea of employability is characteristically neoliberal. It means that neoliberals see it as a moral duty of human beings, to arrange their lives to maximise their advantage on the labour market. Paying for plastic surgery to improve employability (almost entirely by women) is a typical neoliberal phenomenon - one of those which would surprise Adam Smith.

Eileen Bradbury, a psychologist who advises surgeons at the Alexandra Hospital in Cheadle, Cheshire, said she was particularly worried that Jenna wanted the operation so that she could be successful. "That is a very disturbing belief for a 15-year-old girl to have, and also a false one," she said. "I have seen women coming for surgery who work in television and they say they have to have it done or they won't get the work. I usually go along with that because it is probably true".
Guardian: Parents defend breast implants for girl, 15.

In practice many 'workfare neoliberals' also believe that there is a separate category of people, who can not participate fully in the market. Workfare ideologies condemn this underclass to a service function for those who are fully market-compatible. Note however, that by recognising a non-market underclass, neoliberals undermine their own claims about the universal applicability of market principles.

The general ethical precept of neoliberalism can be summarised approximately as:

* "act in conformity with market forces"
* "within this limit, act also to maximise the opportunity for others to conform to the market forces generated by your action"
* "hold no other goals"

If everyone lives by such entrepreneurial precepts, then a world will come into existence in which not just goods and services, but all human and social life, is the product of conformity to market forces. More than traditional market liberals, neoliberals therefore have a quasi-heroic attitude to the entrepreneur, and to engagement in the market. A 1998 speech by German entrepreneur Jost Stollmann is typical: his neoliberal ideas played a prominent role in the national elections in Germany in that year. Stollmann includes his personal moral philosophy, such as it is...

Ich möchte die Lust und Bewunderung unternehmerischen Erfolgs in den Augen der jungen Menschen sehen. Ich möchte den Stolz und den Zuspruch der Eltern spüren, wenn sich Sohn oder Tochter tatenvoll in das Abenteuer Selbständigkeit stürzen.
....so gut sein, wie wir nur können - getreu der bewährten Formel, die ich während meiner Zeit in Amerika verstehen gelernt habe: 'BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE'
Jost Stollmann

The idea that everyone should be an entrepreneur is distinctly neoliberal. Early liberals never expected the majority of the population to own property, let alone run a business. (The participation of the poor in the market was limited to accepting any work they were offered). The practices on the flexibilised labour market would seem strange to the early liberals. For instance, individuals set up a one-person employment agency with one person on the books, themselves - partly for tax reasons, but also to meet the ideal of the entrepreneur. Policy to increase the number of entrepreneurs is typically neoliberal, although ironically it must be implemented by the State. A classic market-liberal would not say that a free market is less of a free market, because only 10% of the population are entrepreneurs. For neoliberals it is not sufficient that there is a market: there must be nothing which is not market.

the neoliberalism joke
Marxist: "The workers have nothing to sell but their labour power"
Neoliberal: "I offer courses on How to Sell Your Labour Power Like A Shark"

There is therefore no distinction between a market economy and a market society in neoliberalism. With the attitudes and ethics set out above, there is only market: market society, market culture, market values, market persons marketing themselves to other market persons. In a sense neoliberalism has returned to the position of early liberalism - which also combined culture, values and ethics with economics. But neoliberalism brings a far more intensive 'market' - replacing not only traditional social forms, but also the concept of private life. At the same time this 'market' is increasingly remote from the necessity of production, which was so real for the early liberals - when there were still regular famines in Europe. In fact it is so remote from the existing cultural perception of a 'market', that it would perhaps be better to use some other word.

Finally, neoliberalism has become associated with specific cultures (especially US culture) and a specific language (English). This is not surprising: Anglo-American liberalism had the most influence on neoliberalism. Neoliberalism as ideology is not tied to any culture or language. It is true that a single global language would facilitate free trade - but that could be Esperanto, as well as English. In practice, the promotion of the English language, neoliberal policies, and pro-American foreign policy, usually go together: this was especially true in Central and Eastern Europe.

Globalisation and neoliberalism
Often the terms 'globalisation' and 'neoliberalism' are used as if they were interchangeable. That is only correct in a limited sense, for the neo-mercantilist aspects of the neoliberal ideology. I will try to clarify the perceived and actual relationship between the two - especially for the South American use of the term 'neoliberalism'.

The neoliberal ideology sees the nation primarily as a business firm, as explained above. The nation-firm is selling itself as an investment location, rather than simply selling export goods. If no-one in government believes in this ideology, it will have no consequences. If however, a neoliberal government is in power, it will pursue policies designed to make the nation more attractive as an investment location. These policies are generally pro-business, and are perceived as such by the opponents of the policies.

But remember that the ideology is neo-mercantilist: the policies are national policies, directed ultimately at the welfare of the nation and not of the market. Paradoxically, they are a form of protectionism: if there is a global market of investment locations, then it is 'unfair competition' for governments to artificially increase the attractiveness of their own country. Such governments are, strictly speaking, not good market liberals. Hard-line classic market liberals would shrug their shoulders at the election of an anti-business government. "Business will go elsewhere, the country will become poor, that's the way the global market works, leave the market alone", they would say. They would not waste their time trying to get a pro-business government elected there. In reality few liberals are so consistent, neoliberals certainly are not. But their rhetoric of 'national competitiveness' is a form of economic nationalism: it is a modern version of the old nationalist insistence, that the whole nation should work together. It revitalises jingoism, chauvinism, flag-waving and foreigner-bashing: Tony Blair is probably the best example.

Don't tell me that a country with our history and heritage, that today boasts six of the top ten businesses in the whole of Europe, with London the top business city in Europe, that is a world leader in technology and communication and the businesses of the future, that under us has overtaken France and Italy to become the fourth largest economy in the world, that has the language of the new economy, more brilliant artists, actors and directors than any comparable country in the world, some of the best scientists and inventors in the world, the best armed forces in the world, the best teachers and doctors and nurses, the best people any nation could wish for. Don't tell me with all that going for us that we do not have the spirit to meet all the challenges before us.
Blair conference speech, 26 September 2000

Now, a neoliberal government will almost certainly appeal to 'globalisation' as a justification and legitimisation of its policies - Tony Blair certainly does. By globalisation they mean, more or less, that the global market of investment locations now exists, and that it is an inevitable historical development. The opponents of the neoliberal government will, in turn, oppose this 'globalisation'. However, that does not mean that the global market of nations actually exists. The existence of neoliberal governments, pursuing neoliberal policies justified by an appeal to globalisation, does not mean that a new global order has superseded the order of nation states. The very fact, that it is still primarily the nation state which is being 'marketed' in this way, shows that the nation has not disappeared.

Before considering the reality of the global order, it is also necessary to consider the beliefs of the opponents of such a neoliberal government. Again paradoxically, many of them accept without question the neoliberal claim that there is a long-term historical process of 'globalisation', transforming the nation into a business firm on a global market of nation-firms. Worse, if the nation is a business then it is often clearly weak - everyone can see that Argentina is economically worse off than the United States. A neoliberal government will therefore try to convert a nation such as Argentina into a 'strong player', which means worsening the living conditions of much of the population. Now here is the next paradox: the response of the opponents is also an economic nationalism, this time with the emphasis on protectionism. The opposition perception of globalisation differs in one respect: for them it is a historical but not spontaneous development. For them it is a policy imposed by a non-national global elite, directed against the individual nations.

In their view, the international financial institutions are equivalent to an imperial power, which has de facto colonised countries such as Argentina. In caricatural form: they believe that a new and powerful empire has come into existence, the Empire of IMF-ia, at an indeterminate location. The neoliberal government, in this view, is a traitorous elite acting as a colonial Viceroy for the IMF-ian Empire. The opposition wants to replace it with a government which will 'liberate' the nation from the global market, from its colonial status. That 'liberation' is generally understood as: withdrawal of the nation-firm from the global market of nation-firms, protectionism, economic nationalism, and self-sufficiency instead of trade. Here too there is a paradox: the oppositional movements are not anti-business: they generally see national business as a victim of global business. (Local business in South America is in the comfortable position, that both neoliberals and anti-neoliberals want to help it, for different reasons).

The 'IMF-ia model' is partly correct: the global financial institutions are indeed a bastion of neoliberal ideology, and they can bully some poor countries into adopting neoliberal policies. But they can't do that to the rich western powers, in fact they would not exist without the support of these powers. They are not a force outside nations, they are not an imperial power. The global financial institutions are, in the simplest terms, an instrument of US policy - and if there is a quasi-imperial power, it is the United States.

The point is, once again, that the truth of beliefs about globalisation is itself irrelevant. If the government and people all believe that a country is being attacked by fire-breathing dragons, then the government might distribute asbestos suits to the population, and the opposition might complain that there were not enough of them. Ideologies and politics can operate on a completely fictive basis. Millions of Europeans died to 'resolve' theological issues such as the Virgin Birth of Mary, Mother of God.

So the perceptions have themselves generated a political reality: on the basis of a belief in 'globalisation' some governments pursue neoliberal policies, which are neo-mercantilist in their logic and aims. In such circumstances opposition to globalisation and neoliberalism coincides, rather than neoliberalism being identical or synonymous with globalisation. Both sides share a common fallacy: that trade and sovereignty are opposites, a zero-sum pair. The neoliberals believe that national success - "in today's global market" - requires the abandonment of national economic autonomy and sovereignty. Their opponents believe that national welfare requires minimisation of trade and external links: they believe that trade and invasion are equivalent, although no-one will say that outright. Once again, the equivalences and perceptions on both sides are false. Most of the Gross Global Product is tied to individual nation states for technical, climatic, logistical, and cultural reasons. For most investment decisions, there is no global market of locations. And sovereignty is not necessarily inverse to trade volume and trade regime. A powerful country such as the United States can have a high trade volume relative to GNP. Many colonies - by definition not sovereign - had a low trade volume relative to GNP, because the bulk of 'GNP' consisted of peasant agriculture. But even a fallacious belief can apparently support not just one, but two competing forms of economic nationalism.

So what is the reality behind the perceived globalisation? One reality is that nation states still dominate global social and economic structures. However these nation states themselves form a specific arrangement of a specific type of state. Globalisation claims appear logical if you see nation states as isolated islands, but that is not the historical reality. The very existence of a world of nation states, indicates some form of global order of nation states. What these nation states do - trade or no trade, capital flows or no capital flows - is irrelevant to that issue. What is already global can not logically be globalised: therefore there is no globalisation, in the widely used sense. There is no transition underway, or recently completed, to a fundamentally different global structure. Because the existing order of nation states is already global, intensification of global flows, or global trade, or global communication does not undermine it, or fundamentally alter it. If some part of the world were to break with this global order - for instance a future autarkic caliphate - that would be a radical change. When nations trade with each other, that simply indicates that the global order of nations is functioning as expected.

The false premise in the globalisation thesis is in fact the standard nationalist claim, that each nation is a separate and particular entity. In reality nations collectively are a global and universalist structure: the functional equivalent of a nationalist world state. The world functions as if a nationalist world government had seized power in the 19th century, led by Mazzini and Garibaldi and friends. Most existing states were indeed established by nationalist groups. Nationalists co-operate to maintain one (nationalist) world order and exclude others. The nation state is not a particularity, existing by itself in isolation, but part of a global design. Supporters of the globalisation thesis claim, that a world of isolated nation states existed in the recent past - before 1989, or more approximately before 1950. They claim that these isolated nation states are now being eroded in a global process: it includes the formation of the neoliberals claimed 'market of nations'.

Economic globalization represents a major transformation in the territorial organization of economic activity and politico-economic power....The sovereignty of the modern state was concentrated in mutually exclusive territories and the concentration of sovereignty in nations...economic globalization has contributed to a denationalizing of national territory...
Saskia Sassen. Losing Control: Sovereignty in an Age of globalization (1996).

But is the global order of nation states disappearing, anywhere? In reality, there is no collapse of the nation state to be seen. Nation states have not suffered anything comparable to the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman empires. All that remains of those empires are oversized palaces in Vienna and Istanbul. The rest of their institutions have completely disappeared: there is not a square metre of Habsburg or Ottoman territory left in Europe. There is no longer an Austro-Hungarian imperial army, or police, or courts, or parliament. The nation states succeeded the multi-ethnic empires, seized all their territory, and remodelled all society on that territory. The replacement was total. Where is the equivalent 'collapse' of the nation state? There are few places on earth without the institutions of a nation state - perhaps Somalia, but that is not the result of globalisation. If the world was truly 'globalised' then it would be full of disused national parliament buildings - and not a national army in sight. The world is not like that, and will not be like that in the immediate future.

In other words, 'globalisation' remains a belief rather than a reality. It is an instrumental belief with great political influence and effect. It is appealed to by both neo-mercantilist neoliberals and their economic-nationalist opponents. Nationalists have a tradition of appealing to external threats to enforce national unity. The nation must unite and work together, they said - to defeat the Hun, or the Bolshevik threat, or the Yellow Peril, or the enemy within the gates, or Osama bin Ladin. The instrumental use of 'globalisation' is in the same dishonourable category.

Summarising neoliberalism
To conclude, here are summaries of neoliberalism in two forms. First a list of key points in neoliberalism:

* transaction maximalisation
* maximalisation of volume of transactions ('global flows')
* contract maximalisation
* supplier/contractor maximalisation
* conversion of most social acts into market transactions
* artificial maximalisation of competition and stress
* creation of quasi-markets
* reduction of inter-transaction interval
* maximalisation of parties to each transaction
* maximalisation of reach and effect of each transaction
* maximalisation of hire/fire transactions in the labour market (nominal turnover)
* maximalisation of assessment factors, by which compliance with a contract is measured
* reduction of the inter-assessment interval
* creation of exaggerated or artificial assessment norms ('audit society')

A final summary definition of neoliberalism as a philosophy is this:

Neoliberalism is a philosophy in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves, separately from any previous relationship with the production of goods and services, and without any attempt to justify them in terms of their effect on the production of goods and services; and where the operation of a market or market-like structure is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action, and substituting for all previously existing ethical beliefs.

Enter the Federalist Society

In the first Reagan term a number of changes were enacted. I've already mentioned the pro democracy NGOs in an earlier Blog. At roughly the same time, a private law society was established by a clique of law students and lawyers at three Universities -- University of Chicago, Yale, and Harvard. Its founders named it the Federalist Society in honor of an important ideological founder of the US Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, who wrote the Federalist Papers, because it saw its own legal principles echoed in that founder and what he wrote. Especially in Federalist Paper Number 78 for its articulation of judicial restraint. It is unabashedly conservative in spirit and in it's aims to further a conservative legal interpretation of the Constitution. Integral to that interpretation is their own fundamentalism of originalism and textualism.

Since it began, the Federalist Society has grown into one of the nation's most powerful legal associations. Its membership has grown to some 35-40,000 (they don't offer a public record). Some 25,000 are practicing attorneys in at least sixty cities. Members include Supreme Court Justices Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Sam Alito, and possibly John Roberts, though he has disclaimed his membership, though he was listed in 1998. It has chapters in at least 180 US law schools, including all of those that rank in the top 20. And the Society is generously funded by a range of conservative foundations.

Key Sources of Funding

The Federalist Society's standard membership fees -- $25 for lawyers and "standard members," $5 for law students and $10 for faculty -- account for a relatively small share of the organization's annual income. [27] Major contributors, both individuals and foundations, are recognized through the James Madison Club, whose namesake appears as the silhouetted profile in the Society's logo. The growing clout of the Society has been aided by millions of dollars from the likes of the John M. Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Sarah Scaife, and Charles G. Koch foundations -- some of the largest funders of right-wing groups in the country. In 1998, all four of these foundations contributed at least $100,000 to the Federalist Society, gifts that placed them in an elite group of eight top Society contributors. [28]

The Olin Foundation grew out of a family chemical and munitions manufacturing business. It routinely has funded ultra-conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research. Other organizations on the far right that have received support from Olin are the Center for Individual Rights, Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family, the Free Congress Foundation, the Independent Women's Forum, and the Institute for Justice. [29] The Olin Foundation was once headed by Michael Joyce, who later departed to head the Bradley Foundation. (The Olin Foundation has recently decided to disband in keeping with the wishes of its namesake, who feared that the foundation might someday be "captured by someone who didn't agree with his philosophy." [30])

The Bradley Foundation, which uses much of its financial resources to promote school vouchers and attack affirmative action and welfare programs, has a history of funding right-wing causes. It provided a grant to support David Brock's 1992 book The Real Anita Hill. [31] The book was designed to "ruin" Hill's reputation and remove lingering doubts about Thomas' fitness for the Supreme Court, but Brock has recently recanted the book's claims, admitting that right-wing activists encouraged him to work "virtually every derogatory -- and often contradictory -- allegation I had collected on Hill into the vituperative mix." [32]

The Bradley Foundation's Joyce defended the foundation's $100,000 grant to Charles Murray, who co-wrote the highly controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. Murray's book was criticized widely by scholars as racist and statistically unsound. An earlier book that Murray wrote, Losing Ground, was also produced with financial backing from Joyce. In Losing Ground, Murray argued that poverty did not result from economic dislocation or discrimination, but from personal failings. In response to critics who assailed Murray's blame-the-victim view, Joyce praised Murray as "one of the foremost social thinkers in the country." [33] (This summer, Joyce left the Bradley Foundation and has formed a lobbying group to help push for congressional passage of President Bush's plan for government funding of religion, also known as faith-based initiatives. [34])

The Scaife Foundation has also funded the Federalist Society, along with a long list of other right-wing efforts. These include the American Spectator and its "Arkansas Project" -- a $2.4 million campaign to gather information for the expressed purpose of discrediting former President Bill Clinton and potentially forcing him out of office.

The Koch Foundation is one of three family foundations established by Charles G. Koch, the heir to Koch Industries, an oil refining and petrochemical company based in Wichita, Kansas. Koch Industries began as Rock Island Oil and Refining, built a generation ago by Fred Koch, who was also one of the founders of the John Birch Society. [35] In addition to serving as chief executive officer of the company, Charles Koch is a co-founder of the Cato Institute, [36] a libertarian Washington, D.C.-based think-tank whose publications have downplayed the dangers of lead-based paint and asbestos, and proposed allowing states to choose "whether to accept any increase" in the minimum wage. [37]

The Koch Foundation supports right-wing causes at every level -- from academic research and the recruitment of young scholars to think tanks and "implementation" groups that attempt to turn these ideas into political realities. Among the other right-wing groups supported by the Koch Foundation are Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Institute for Justice, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Landmark Legal Foundation and the Young America's Foundation. [38]

Since 1985, the Olin, Bradley and Scaife Foundations have provided over $5 million in grants to the Federalist Society. [39] Since 1993, the Federalist Society's funding has soared 182 percent. [40]

A large number of its members were tapped to serve in the first George W. Bush adminstration, which included Spencer Abraham as energy secretary,Gale Norton as interior secretary, John Ashcroft as attorney general, and Theodore Olson as solicitor general. Other Federalist Society members tapped by Bush (many of whom have now moved out of government or on to different posts) and the positions they held include: Alex Acosta (deputy assistant attorney general), Bradford Berenson (associate counsel to the president), Ralph Boyd (assistant attorney general), Michael Chertoff (assistant attorney general and secretary of homeland security), Paul Clement (principal deputy solicitor general), Daniel Collins (associate deputy attorney general), R. Ted Cruz (associate deputy attorney general), Viet Dinh (assistant attorney general), Noel Francisco (associate counsel to the president), Sarah Hart (director, National Institute of Justice), Brian Jones (general counsel, Education Department), Brett Kavanaugh (associate counsel to the president), Thomas Sansonetti (assistant attorney general), Eugene Scalia (Department of Labor solicitor; son of Antonin Scalia), Larry Thompson (deputy attorney general), and Edward Whelan (principal deputy assistant attorney general). There are more: The Conservative Movement Moves In.

The Federalist Society is a nexus for a philosophical makeover of the US Constitution, and it seeks nothing less than to reshape the entire landscape of the US judiciary by promoting right-wing activists into key power positions who will be positioned to pressure judicial decisionmaking in line with the explicit conservative philosophy of the Federalist Society.

All of this is background so I can begin to discuss the Unitary Executive Theory, which is the brainchild of one of its founding members, Steven Calabresi, who is now a legal Scholar teaching at Northwestern University.

Economic life zones

2007-04-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

Are we headed for a world of corporate feudalism?

World Systems Analysis

In terms of world systems, I've been analyzing the whole of it now from an ecological model, rather than through economic theory, because it appears to me that a wide range of environmental problems are approaching an ecological crisis point.

A couple of blogs back, I brought up the notion of levels of succession with what ecologists identify as r-selected species for low succession eco-systems and k-selected species for high succession eco-systems. I correlated the concept "species" with the different types of cultural adaptations that can be characterized as human societies. In that sense we can see, from studying ranges of societies through social sciences like anthropology, that human culture itself is an adaptive mechanism in the same way that genetic endowments of species are. Once we've analyzed the features, we find that the variation among societies can be categorized in terms of their eco niche features, much as we do species.

In that blog I correlated the r-selected species with features of neoliberal capitalism-based societies. I'll offer one of the better write-ups on neoliberalism I've found on the web below to clarify what I mean by neoliberal capitalism.

Wallerstein, along with Gunder Frank, provided what I consider an attractively sophisticated analysis of the evolution and spread of world capitalism with the intertwining of differentiated global societal relationships. That debate has evolved, now, in the Twenty First Century, to one that addresses limits to growth issues in very starkly real terms.

That issue might be phrased this way: The question for today is, given that one hundred years ago most nation state policy makers would probably have concluded the world could sustain several economic life spaces based on the capitalistic economies that were considered predominant, what can the globe sustain of the system we see evolving now? And the answer, now as then, depends on the issue of technology... but technology writ large, not as mere technique, but as the broad system of organizing the processes of providing material support for society."

I approach that question more consciously now, given my own study of environmental issues, in terms of recognizing that energy as the primary ingredient to the technology issue, as the transformation of energy in an eco-system is the primary ingredient to life. Most of the technology in the world has evolved in relation to fossil fuels. When the energy sources in a given eco-system are few, that is one way of identifying a low succession eco-system, and one that is unlikely to be balanced and stable.

I would say the global economic system right now is aimed at maximizing the technology involved with that low succession form of energy consumption. I think whatever we want to consider about the notion of "economic life zones" is predicated on recognizing that. But it would seem to me that the globalizing neoliberal principles involved in the policymaking of the major developed nations are geared to allowing that recognition.

I would hazard a further suggestion and say that whether peak oil has already occurred, or whether it won't occur for a hundred years, the current neoliberal strategy of attempting to maximize a kind of democracy based on neoliberal principles is headed for the same kinds of unstable adaptational constraints characteristic with all r-selected species eco-systems.

Neoliberalism

If Adam Smith returned and saw the more extreme aspects of neoliberalism, he would probably find them bizarre. Nevertheless, they derive from the ideas of early liberalism. The belief in the market, in market forces, has separated from the factual production of goods and services. It has become an end in itself, and this is one reason to speak of neoliberalism and not of liberalism.

A general characteristic of neoliberalism is the desire to intensify and expand the market, by increasing the number, frequency, repeatability, and formalisation of transactions. The ultimate (unreachable) goal of neoliberalism is a universe where every action of every being is a market transaction, conducted in competition with every other being and influencing every other transaction, with transactions occurring in an infinitely short time, and repeated at an infinitely fast rate. It is no surprise that extreme forms of neoliberalism, and especially cyberliberalism, overlap with semi-religious beliefs in the interconnectedness of the cosmos.
Some specific aspects of neoliberalism are:

• A new expansion in time and space of the market: although there has been a global-scale market economy for centuries, neoliberals find new areas of marketisation. This illustrates how neoliberalism differs from classic market liberalism. Adam Smith would not have believed that a free market was less of a free market, because the shops are closed in the middle of the night: expansion of trading hours is a typically neoliberal policy. For neoliberals a 23-hours economy is already unjustifiable: nothing less than 24-hours economy will satisfy them. They constantly expand the market at its margins.

• The emphasis on property, in classic and market liberalism, has been replaced by an emphasis on contract. In the time of Adam Smith, property conferred status in itself: he would find it strange that entrepreneurs sometimes own no fixed assets, and lease the means of production.

• Contract maximalisation is typically neoliberal: the privatisation of the British railway network, formerly run by one state-owned company, led to 30 000 new contracts. Most of these were probably generated by splitting services, which could have been included in block contracts. (A fanatic neoliberal would prefer not to buy a cup of coffee, but negotiate separately for each microlitre).

• The contract period is reduced, especially on the labour market, and so the frequency of contract is increased. A service contract, for instance for office cleaning, might be reduced from a one-year to a three-month contract, then to a one-month contract. Contracts of employment are shorter and shorter, in effect forcing the employee to re-apply for the job. This flexibilisation means a qualitatively different working life: many more job applications, spread throughout the working life. This was historically the norm in agriculture - day labour - but long-term labour contracts became standard after industrialisation.

• Market forces are also intensified by intensifying assessment, a development especially visible on the labour market. Even within a contract period, an employee will be subject to continuous assessment. The use of specialised software in call centres has provided some extreme examples: the time employees spend at the toilet is measured in seconds: this information is used to pressure the employee to spend less time away from the terminal. Firms with contracts are also increasingly subject to continuous assessment procedures, made possible by information technology. For instance, courier services use tracking software and GPS technology, to allow customers to locate their packages in transit. This is a typical example of the new hyper-provision of business information, in neoliberal economies.

• New transaction-intensive markets are created on the model of the stock exchanges - electricity exchanges, telephone-minute exchanges. Typical for neoliberalism: there is no relationship between the growth in the number of transactions, and the underlying production.

• New forms of auction are another method of creating transaction-intensive markets. Radio frequency auctions, such as those for UMTS frequencies, are an example. They replaced previous methods of allocation, especially licensing - a traditional method of allocating access to scarce goods with no clear private owner. The complex forms of frequency spectrum auctions have only been developed in the last few years. Neoliberals now see them as the only valid method of making such allocations: they dismiss all other methods as 'beauty contests'.

• Artificial transactions are created, to increase the number and intensity of transactions. Large-scale derivative trading is a typically neoliberal phenomenon, although financial derivatives have existed for centuries. It is possible to trade options on shares: but it is also possible to create options on these options. This accumulation of transaction on transaction, is characteristic of neoliberalism. New derivatives are created, to be traded on the new exchanges - such as 'electricity futures'. There is no limit to this expansion, except computer power, which grows rapidly anyway.

• Automated trading, and the creation of virtual market-like structures, are neoliberal in the sense that they are an intensification of "transaction for transaction's sake". However, a world in which all entrepreneurial activity was automated would not be neoliberal, or liberal.

• This expansion of interactivity means that neoliberal societies are network societies, rather than the 'open societies', of classic liberals. Formal equality and 'access' are not enough for neoliberals: they must be used to create links to other members of the society. This attitude has been accurately labelled 'connectionist'.

• Because of contract expansionism, transaction costs play an increasing role in the neoliberal economy. All those 30 000 contracts at British Rail had to be drafted by lawyers, all the assessments have to be done by assessors. There is always some cost of competition, which increases as the intensity of transactions increases. Neoliberalism has reached the point where these costs threaten to overwhelm the existing economy, destroying any economic gains from technological change.

• The growth of the financial services sector is related to these neoliberal characteristics, rather than to any inherent shift to service economies. The entire sector is itself a transaction cost: it was almost non-existent in the centrally planned economies. In turn, it has created a huge demand for office space in the world's financial centres. The expansion of the sector and its office employment are in direct contradiction of propaganda about 'more efficiency and less bureaucracy' in the free market.

• The speed of trading is increased. Online market data is expensive, yet it is now available free with a 15-minute delay. The markets move so fast, that the data is worthless after 15 minutes: the companies can then give it away, as a form of advertising. Day-traders buy and sell shares in minutes. Automated trading programmes, where the computer is linked direct to the stock exchange system, do it in seconds, or less. It is this increased speed which has led to the huge nominal trading volumes on the international currency markets, many times the Gross World Product on a yearly basis.

• Certain functions arise which only exist inside a neoliberal free market - 'derivative professions'. A good example is the profession of psychological-test coach. The intensity of assessment has increased, and firms now regularly use psychological tests to select candidates, even for intermediate level jobs. So ambitious candidates pay for training, in how to pass these psychological tests. Competition in the neoliberal labour market itself creates the market for this service.

• The creation of sub-markets, typically within an enterprise. Sub-contracting is itself an old market practice, but was usually outside the firm. It is now standard practice for large companies to create competition among their constituent units. This practice is also capable of quasi-infinite extension, and its promotion is characteristic of neoliberalism. A few companies even required each individual employee to register as a business, and to compete with each other at the place of work. A large company can form literally millions of holdings, alliances and joint ventures, using such one-person firms as building blocks.

• Supplier maximalisation: this extends the range of enterprises that compete for each contract. The ideal would be that every enterprise competes for every contract offered, maximising competition and market forces. In the case of the labour market, the neoliberal ideal is the absolutely flexible and employable employee, who can (and does apply) for every vacancy. In reality, an individual can not perform every kind of work - but there is a real development towards non-specialised enterprises, especially in the producer services sector. In neoliberalism, instead of the traditional 'steel tycoon' or 'newspaper baron' there are enterprises which "globally link people and knowledge, and cultures" or "advise and implement solutions to management issues". (In fact these are quotes from the accountants Price Waterhouse, but you can not guess this from the descriptions).

Neoliberalism is not simply an economic structure, it is a philosophy. This is most visible in attitudes to society, the individual and employment. Neo-liberals tend to see the world in term of market metaphors. Referring to nations as companies is typically neoliberal, rather than liberal. In such a view Deutschland GmbH competes with Great Britain Ltd, BV Nederland, and USA Inc. However, when this is a view of nation states, it is as much a form of neo-nationalism as neoliberalism. It also looks back to the pre-liberal economic theory - mercantilism - which saw the countries of Europe as competing units. The mercantilists treated those kingdoms as large-scale versions of a private household, rather than as firms. Nevertheless, their view of world trade as a competition between nation-sized units, would be acceptable to modern neoliberals.

Competition for inward investment, on the other hand, was generally unknown until the late 19th century. This competition is often seen by activists as the core doctrine of neoliberalism, especially since the neo-mercantilist policies are easy to understand and very unpopular: wage cuts, less money for public services, less tax on the rich. The neo-mercantilist nation, in other words, behaves like a caricaturally mean and nasty capitalist. It is not relevant either for these policies, or for opposition to them, whether they have any effect at all. Perhaps investment decisions are not made on this basis, perhaps there is no real mobility of capital, perhaps no investor is interested in Argentina, for instance. But so long as the Argentine government believes that it should pursue certain polices to attract investors, then it will do so. So long as it believes that the 'SA Argentina' is a business firm, then it will run Argentina accordingly.

The market metaphor is not only applied among nations, but among cities and regions as well. In neoliberal regional policy, cities are selling themselves in a national and global marketplace of cities. They are considered equivalent to an entrepreneur selling a product, but the product is the city (or region) as a location for entrepreneurs. The successful 'sale' of the product is the decision of an entrepreneur to locate there, not simply the sale of land or factories. This view of cities as sub-firms within the fictive 'national firm' parallels the creation of sub-markets within real firms. The difference is, that those sub-markets really exist - neoliberal city governments, on the other hand, act primarily on a belief in a metaphor. Again, there is no hard evidence that the global marketplace of cities exists: for most economic sectors complete mobility of plant and labour is an illusion. Most firms can not simply move from city to city, across continents and ignoring language and cultural barriers, in pursuit of locational advantage. Here too, the neoliberalism is a philosophy, an attitude - rather than an economic reality. It has influenced European politics - the fear of this neoliberalism dominated the French campaign against the European Constitution. There is certainly a neoliberal lobby within the EU, represented by the Lisbon Council, although it sees the world in terms of competing trade blocks rather than competing cities or regions. However, it is not clear how a continent could be run as a business firm - even its inhabitants wanted that. (More on neoliberal economic geography below).

A good example of the underlying attitudes is the basic policy document of the city of Düsseldorf - the Leitbild, equivalent to a 'mission statement' in English. It was adopted in 1997, and is no longer online at the city website, but parts are quoted at St@ttbuch Düsseldorf...

Düsseldorf bekennt sich zum Prinzip des Wettbewerbs. Der Erfolg von Städten entscheidet sich im Wettbewerb nach innen und aussen. Düsseldorf will besser sein.
Wettbewerb ist treibende Kraft unseres gesellschaftlichen Systems. Im zusammenwachsenden Europa gilt dies in hohem Masse auch für die Beziehungen zwischen den Regionen, die als Wirtschaftsstandort, als Lebensraum für die Bürgerinnen und Bürger und als Kulturstandort miteinander konkurrieren. Sich hierzu bekennen heisst, den Wettbewerb aufnehmen und aktiv gestalten zu wollen.
Im Wettbewerb besteht nur, wer gut ist. Düsseldorf will Wettbewerb. Im Interesse der vielen Millionen Menschen des Lebens- und Wirtschaftsraums: Düsseldorf will besser sein.
...

Düsseldorf is committed to the principle of competition. The success of cities is decided by competition, internal and external. Düsseldorf wants to be better. Competition is the driving force of our social system. In a Europe which is becoming more integrated, this applies increasingly to the relations between regions. They compete with each other as investment location, as residential choice for the citizens, and in cultural activity. Our commitment means that we will actively and structurally enter into this competition. In a competitive world, only the good can survive. Düsseldorf wants to compete! In the name of the millions of people in our economic and residential region: Düsseldorf wants to be the best!

The neoliberal urban vision was adopted, without debate, by many city governments in the 1990's. At some point, a belief in 'competition by population structure' was incorporated - the idea that a successful city is inhabited only by successful people. This belief, nonsensical or not, has had an effect in a negative sense: some cities now pursue active policies aimed at relocating low-income households outside the city. In the Netherlands, a new law allows large cities to legally ban poor people, from certain areas, or from the entire city..

As you would expect from a complete philosophy, neoliberalism has answers to stereotypical philosophical questions such as "Why are we here" and "What should I do?". We are here for the market, and you should compete. Neo-liberals tend to believe that humans exist for the market, and not the other way around: certainly in the sense that it is good to participate in the market, and that those who do not participate have failed in some way. In personal ethics, the general neoliberal vision is that every human being is an entrepreneur managing their own life, and should act as such. Moral philosophers call this is a virtue ethic, where human beings compare their actions to the way an ideal type would act - in this case the ideal entrepreneur. Individuals who choose their friends, hobbies, sports, and partners, to maximise their status with future employers, are ethically neoliberal. This attitude - not unusual among ambitious students - is unknown in any pre-existing moral philosophy, and is absent from early liberalism. Such social actions are not necessarily monetarised, but they represent an extension of the market principle into non-economic area of life - again typical for neoliberalism.

The idea of employability is characteristically neoliberal. It means that neoliberals see it as a moral duty of human beings, to arrange their lives to maximise their advantage on the labour market. Paying for plastic surgery to improve employability (almost entirely by women) is a typical neoliberal phenomenon - one of those which would surprise Adam Smith.
Eileen Bradbury, a psychologist who advises surgeons at the Alexandra Hospital in Cheadle, Cheshire, said she was particularly worried that Jenna wanted the operation so that she could be successful. "That is a very disturbing belief for a 15-year-old girl to have, and also a false one," she said. "I have seen women coming for surgery who work in television and they say they have to have it done or they won't get the work. I usually go along with that because it is probably true".

Guardian: Parents defend breast implants for girl, 15.

In practice many 'workfare neoliberals' also believe that there is a separate category of people, who can not participate fully in the market. Workfare ideologies condemn this underclass to a service function for those who are fully market-compatible. Note however, that by recognising a non-market underclass, neoliberals undermine their own claims about the universal applicability of market principles.

The general ethical precept of neoliberalism can be summarised approximately as:

• "act in conformity with market forces"

• "within this limit, act also to maximise the opportunity for others to conform to the market forces generated by your action"

• "hold no other goals"

If everyone lives by such entrepreneurial precepts, then a world will come into existence in which not just goods and services, but all human and social life, is the product of conformity to market forces. More than traditional market liberals, neoliberals therefore have a quasi-heroic attitude to the entrepreneur, and to engagement in the market. A 1998 speech by German entrepreneur Jost Stollmann is typical: his neoliberal ideas played a prominent role in the national elections in Germany in that year. Stollmann includes his personal moral philosophy, such as it is...

Ich möchte die Lust und Bewunderung unternehmerischen Erfolgs in den Augen der jungen Menschen sehen. Ich möchte den Stolz und den Zuspruch der Eltern spüren, wenn sich Sohn oder Tochter tatenvoll in das Abenteuer Selbständigkeit stürzen.
....so gut sein, wie wir nur können - getreu der bewährten Formel, die ich während meiner Zeit in Amerika verstehen gelernt habe: 'BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE' Jost Stollmann

The idea that everyone should be an entrepreneur is distinctly neoliberal. Early liberals never expected the majority of the population to own property, let alone run a business. (The participation of the poor in the market was limited to accepting any work they were offered). The practices on the flexibilised labour market would seem strange to the early liberals. For instance, individuals set up a one-person employment agency with one person on the books, themselves - partly for tax reasons, but also to meet the ideal of the entrepreneur. Policy to increase the number of entrepreneurs is typically neoliberal, although ironically it must be implemented by the State. A classic market-liberal would not say that a free market is less of a free market, because only 10% of the population are entrepreneurs. For neoliberals it is not sufficient that there is a market: there must be nothing which is not market.

the neoliberalism joke
Marxist: "The workers have nothing to sell but their labour power"
Neoliberal: "I offer courses on How to Sell Your Labour Power Like A Shark"

There is therefore no distinction between a market economy and a market society in neoliberalism. With the attitudes and ethics set out above, there is only market: market society, market culture, market values, market persons marketing themselves to other market persons. In a sense neoliberalism has returned to the position of early liberalism - which also combined culture, values and ethics with economics. But neoliberalism brings a far more intensive 'market' - replacing not only traditional social forms, but also the concept of private life. At the same time this 'market' is increasingly remote from the necessity of production, which was so real for the early liberals - when there were still regular famines in Europe. In fact it is so remote from the existing cultural perception of a 'market', that it would perhaps be better to use some other word.

Finally, neoliberalism has become associated with specific cultures (especially US culture) and a specific language (English). This is not surprising: Anglo-American liberalism had the most influence on neoliberalism. Neoliberalism as ideology is not tied to any culture or language. It is true that a single global language would facilitate free trade - but that could be Esperanto, as well as English. In practice, the promotion of the English language, neoliberal policies, and pro-American foreign policy, usually go together: this was especially true in Central and Eastern Europe.

I would suggest that free market ideology may be more of a religion designed to overcome, in a fundamentalist way, questions raised to the eco-sanity of that economic philosophy, which in that sense "almost" puts it in the category of a religion.