No And I Don't Give A Good Goddamn

Alasdair Gray has famously kept using "work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" as a kind of motto, a spur to trying for more than seems sensible or perhaps even possible. Perhaps though, it would be better to work as if we are in the final days of a worse nation; vindictive, unafraid of casting our enemies down, contemptuous of power in our confidence that it will fall and that it deserves to. Were we to work as if we were in the early days of a better nation, we could be guilty of gilding our chains with flowers, of shying away from describing the squalor and constraint we live under. Perhaps artists should gild our chains with flowers; maybe the aesthetics of its inspirational power means that lie, that great lie, it involves is one they should tell. For someone trying to understand politics rather than gesture at the ideals  we should hope for it to realise though, it would be naive to ignore the difficulty of amassing a coalition capable of taking anything but the most incremental steps towards a more just world, of overcoming the significant forces ranged against achieving justice. Political theorists then might have reasons to be more intransigent, more insistent on the basic truth that our world is unjust and less hopeful, complacent even, about the changes needed to bring that to an end. Gray adapted the phrase from a Canadian poet, who only claimed that "best of all is finding a place to be/ in the early days of a better civilization". The best is not what we have here and now though, and pretending may not be the best way of ensuring we do.

Help For Heroes

From an LRB piece on the killing of Baha Mousa and the botched British Army investigations into it, a statement by a former detainee about his treatment after being arrested by British forces in November 2006.

[The soldiers who arrested him] beat him severely, slammed him against a wall and forced him into a stress position in which they stood on his knees and back. His 11-month-old son’s arm was stamped on and broken, and his father had to urinate on himself. The soldiers removed business documents, computers, mobile telephones, licensed guns and 40 million Iraqi dinars … At the [Brigade Processing Facility] the Claimant was initially hooded and earmuffed, then goggled. He was interrogated aggressively, struck with a stick and threatened with Guantánamo. In between sessions he was forced into a stress position in the cold for 30 hours and stoned and beaten. He was twice taken to medics, but not to the toilet, so he urinated on himself … [On arrival at a second detention facility] he was goggled and earmuffed, forced to undress in public and examined by a medic while naked. A female saw him nude. He spent 36 days in solitary confinement in a tiny freezing cell with restricted bedding, food and water. Soldiers beat him, prevented him sleeping by banging his door and shouting insults, restricted his privacy in toileting and showering and twice had sexual intercourse in front of him. Pornographic movies were played loudly and pornographic magazines left in sight. Soldiers exposed themselves, groped each other and masturbated in front of him … Humiliations continued at Camp B with poor conditions, beatings, food deprivation, threats, intimate searches and intimidation with dogs … He was released in November 2007 having had no explanation for his detention. His property was never returned.

Remember that next time someone assumes that British soldiers have some special entitlement to praise and support.

On Not Handling The Truth

The Danish detective series The Killing is misnamed. In the first season, the death it opens with, of a young woman chased through a forest, is far from the last. By the end of the run of 20 hour-long episodes, two removal men, a policeman, a civil servant, and a politician have all been killed. All of these deaths occur as a result of the investigation into the first, led by the stubbornly maverick Sarah Lund. Lund is the programme's draw, its beating heart. She struggles against the politicking and dull managerialism of her colleagues and superiors, and sacrifices her personal as well as professional life to find the man who murdered that young woman. It's her who we follow through the twists and double twists of the plot as it throws down false lead after false lead, incriminating one character after another, shifting its feet and slipping the weight of incriminating evidence to those it appeared to have exonerated. Yet this, over 20 episodes, creates a difficulty. In order to draw us in, Lund has to be drawn in each time another new suspicion is raised. This means that by the end of the season, she has been convinced that two schoolboys, a teacher, two different politicians, one more than once, and a removal man all committed the initial crime, none of whom did. Although initially the circumstancial evidence that she finds so damning seems compelling, it begins to wear thin as the realisation that the story will continue to be spun out dawns and the speed at which she reaches judgments, her indignation at and determination to sidestep the obstructions of proper procedure, seem increasingly misplaced. By the time the culprit is found, she has told the victim's family the case has been solved several times, been kidnapped and, separately, caused a colleague's death by rushing off to follow leads without support, allowed an innocent suspect to be beaten half to death by a vengeful father, and had her badge taken before hijacking a colleague's car at gunpoint, quite apart from the five other violent deaths her investigation has led to. This is not the behaviour of a police officer vindicating her instinctive and superior judgment over that of  pettifogging and self-interested bureaucrats; it's an abuse of public authority. Yet she is supposed to be the character we sympathise with, a woman devoted to her job, prepared to sacrifice everything for it, and who merely needs to be set free to do it properly. It's to the show's credit that it manages to sustain the impression that she alone knows what she is doing for so long, despite the fact that she manifestly doesn't. Nonetheless, by the end, you do wonder whether the series wouldn't have been better, shorter.

On The Authority Of Science

Bernard Williams on a certain kind of postmodernist:

Now it is a real question whether the intellectual authority of science is not tied up with its hopes of offering an absolute conception of the world as it is independently of any local or peculiar perspective on it. Many scientists think so. Some people think that this is the only intellectual authority there is. They include, counterfactually speaking, those defenders of the humanities... who think that they have to show that nobody has any hope of offering such a conception, including scientists: that natural science constitutes just another part of the human conversation, so that, leaving aside the small difference that the sciences deliver refrigerators, weapons, medicines and so on, they are in the same boat as the humanities.

 

Is Your Hate Pure, Or, Out By The Gas Fires From The Refinery

Lincoln is a film about the dirty business of doing the right thing, about the costs, both human and moral, of fighting injustice. Lincoln himself of course ends by bearing some small portion of those costs, though nonetheless greater than any of the other characters the film spends any time with. His historical grandeur, his secular sanctity, is only increased by his nicely self-aware habit of breaking into homespun homilies whenever faced with and resolving political and so appropriately large scale difficulties: it's notable his confrontations with his wife involve no such storytelling; we see he knows it's an act, even if one right at the core of his power, one that he could not avoid, would have used whatever public role he found himself in. That habit of reducing political decisions to the level of folk wisdom seems to me to make it difficult for him to bring to light the tensions involved in the struggle to pass the thirteenth amendment or indeed any attempt to drag a people who cannot agree on what it is towards justice. Folk wisdom does not have room for tragedy, or only at a distance; it smooths and reconciles, does not linger on the path not taken, is not bitter or disenchanted.

For me then, the scenes which best capture the dilemmas the film tries to make real are those when Thaddeus Stevens lies before the House of Representatives about his commitment to equality. To retain the support of moderates, Stevens is forced to pretend that he and other supporters of the amendment do not intend to do more than free slaves, not to allow them to vote for example. Although he pleasingly illustrates the possibility of believing someone entitled to the equal protection of the laws while holding them in contempt by using the leader of his opponents, who has made him tell lies in public, as an example of someone in exactly that position as he ends his time on the floor, his insincerity is obviously difficult for him. None of his usual rhetoric is present: the sentences are short, declarative. Yet when a junior member of his coalition, a nobody he has already suffered criticism from for being willing to work with Lincoln, finds him sat outside the chamber later, and begins to question his performance, he is quick to make clear why it had to be made. The war and its dead, and the futility of accepting only perfection rather than what a coalition can be mobilised behind excuse his betrayal of his ideals. It is a betrayal though, and he knows it. His bitterness is in the speed, the contempt of his reply. That is the dirty business of politics. Lincoln himself is too unworldly to feel those costs, at least in public. Stevens hates, and it is Stevens we are most like. Hate though, like other symptoms of injustice, eats you up. He died not long after the failed impeachment of Lincoln's successor, Johnson, over the Reconstruction.

A Rage For Paper Money

Philip Pettit, the chief cheerleader for republicanism in contemporary political philosophy, is at best ambivalent about democracy, at least when it is understood in the usual sense of the picking and choosing of governments through elections in which the whole adult population has a vote. He prefers what he calls 'contestatory democracy', where everyone has the opportunity to contest, through various checks and balances, what legislative majorities decide on; that is, where governments and their policies are picked not by elections, but by elections constrained by institutions like Supreme Courts. I, as I have indicated before, am more than a little sceptical about this. Whatever Pettit may think about their tendencies to protect people from being dominated by legislative majorities, the US Supreme Court, say, is not after all an institution with such a great record on things like, oh, I don't know, preventing people being held in exactly the state republicans use as a paradigm of domination. What's interesting about this is that I think there may be an explanation for this, an explanation which, more, demonstrates that Pettit has not paid proper attention to the republican tradition.

Recall Rousseau, that terrible proto-totalitarian whom Pettit is at serious pains to distance himself from despite his centrality to the republican tradition. Rousseau is insistent that sovereignty cannot be divided, that the people must be sovereign and that that means that there must be no other powers entitled to limit its lawmaking power. This is because, as he puts it

“if individuals were left some rights… each, being judge in his own case on some issue, would soon claim to be so on all, the state of nature would subsist and the association necessarily become tyrannical or empty” (Social Contract, 1.6.7)

If the law doesn't govern everything, then it doesn't solve the coordination problem of getting out of the state of nature and its attendant violence and unpleasantness. More, the members of the sovereign wouldn't be free, since they wouldn't be obeyed laws they had made. Some of the rules they obeyed would be set by the rights retained from the state of nature, which they did not set. Of course, many of the rules they will set are exactly those rules that are supposed to govern our interactions in the state of nature; the reasons for thinking we ought not to be entitled to chop off each others limbs as we please are much the same whether or not we have a government, after all. Still, when they *set* them, they are theirs and so they are not bound by rules that are not theirs.

Pettit's contestatory democracy, of course, consists of putting limits on the people's legislative power. He explains this, in a 1999 piece entitled Republican Freedom and Contestatory Democratization, by arguing that the people as a collective are not the same as the people as a set of individuals. Fair enough; what we collectively will may not be what we all individually will, although one way of interpreting Rousseau is see him as saying that if we don't all individually will, at least in some sense, what we collectively will, then the possibility of decent, non-oppressive government is already gone, precisely because some of us are now living under laws we didn't will. What's interesting about Pettit's contestatory democracy is that he thinks giving everyone opportunities to try and exempt themselves from the general will solves this problem. 

All that does, though, is ensure that rather than the will of the democratic majority deciding the law, the will of some minority capable of mobilising the support of members of the political and social elite will decide the law. Pettit thinks this somehow involves the exercise of less arbitrary power than if majorities get what they want, as if giving one actor a power does not exclude another from having it. It's not an accident, it strikes me, that he has had to issue a culpa mea for failing to see how banks might be a bit of a problem for republicans when he takes his cues from people whose main concern, beyond the association between standing armies and despotism, seems to have been to prevent "improper and wicked projects" like the "an equal division of property" or the "abolition of debts". The question is, he has forgotten, if he ever knew, who coerces whom, and if it's not us, it'll certainly be them.

 

Rocking Chairs For Cretins

The idea of advertising food under the name 'organic energising detox salad' disgusts me. The idea that food, a thing of pleasure, should be a way of removing poisons from your body, of atoning for your excesses is vile. Not only does it corrupt what should be an act of bodily enjoyment into one of repentance, of life-denial, but it requires an attitude that treats the rest of one's life as toxic, the rest of what one ingests as poisons. The licence to condemn it freely grants itself encompasses a whole life: it demands an attitude of pious abnegation towards everything, as if anything else one might consume were an act of sacrilege, a destruction of the icons, a sapping of the spirit. And yet this is supposed to be a way of enticing people to eat, to perpetuate a life that cannot but be racked by guilt. How monstrously patronising, how infantilising.