There are (at least) three foundational myths of contemporary liberalism. One is that John Kennedy’s assassination was instigated by the rank intolerance and hatred of the American people. A second is that of “upsouth”: the assertion that Northern racism was and is every bit as pervasive, if more subtle, than that of the Old South. The third is that the American popular culture of the 1950s was stifling not only in its “Donald Duck” banality but also in a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. In this view, the excesses of the 1960s were a struggle to free America’s brain-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the lords of mass culture.

At this AEI event, Fred Siegel will address this third myth. For all the bile directed at the 1950s, it was the high point of American popular culture, a period when many in the vast middle class hoped to elevate their tastes. The attack on mass culture, a mix of Marxant theorizing and aristocratic instincts, paved the way for a new form of status competition based on supposedly elevated consumer and cultural preferences.

Part of me likes best the faux-scrupulosity of the parenthetical “at least”, utterly undone by the second paragraph revelation that the first paragraph was two-thirds grumping around and he’s not even going to talk about the Kennedy assassination. (I have written abstracts in my time, but it has never occurred to me to start one, in effect: ‘Damn kids, get off my lawn!’ But, now that I think about it, there’s really no reason why an abstract should not be angrily digressive. Why not?) Part of me loves the idea that somewhere, someone is writing a book about how the inner life of American liberalism is, I guess, Theodor Adorno. That’s thinking outside the box, innerly-speaking. Part of me loves the image of all these liberals whispering ‘upsouth’ to each other constantly, in that knowing way.

OK, I guess he could be winding up to take a swing at Dwight Macdonald. But does Dwight Macdonald talk about Donald Duck, in particular?

The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. We’ve had some debates on Crooked Timber of late about what ‘neoliberalism’ means. I’ve not participated because, honestly, term’s more trouble than it’s worth, worrying what it means. (I have other terms that are more trouble than they’re worth to worry about that I worry about. As a philosopher, I need to limit the number of such that infest my mental life.) The thing is: in the current situation, there is not – and should not be – anything analogous to the neoliberal side of the trade debate. No one sane thinks that this whole 99/1 business might be like NAFTA, i.e. something we have to go for, in an end-justifies-the-means spirit.

This is Matt’s point. He considers himself a neoliberal and sees, correctly, I think, that anyone committed to that market-oriented outlook is more or less committed to sympathy for the core grievances expressed by the OWS protesters. Neoliberalism was always in favor of markets as means, not ends. Neoliberalism was never – or was never supposed to be – the view that being in favor of trade liberalizaton means market fundamentalism in everything. Neoliberalism says market liberalization should go hand in hand with progressive taxation and appropriate regulation so the pains that buy the gains are mitigated and borne equitably. Spread the gain, to spread the pain. If liberalization means making the 1% richer and everyone else poorer, you shouldn’t take the deal. Only (some) conservatives and (some) libertarians should be willing to take that deal.

We can now, if we like, refight old battles. Were neoliberals wrong all along, or is it the case that, like ‘pure’ communism, neoliberalism has never really been tried? (We never tried to conjoin market liberalization with appropriately fair and equitable taxation and regulation schemes, so we don’t know that it wouldn’t work.) Were progressives right to try to draw lines in the sand against liberalization, or was that picking the wrong fight, strategically or philosophically or for whatever reason? And that’s why they lost? Whatever the answers to these and other questions, here and now it’s obviously the case that everyone from a compulsively Clintonian neoliberal triangulator to an unreconstructed communist ought to agree, at least, that ‘we are the 99%’ has both its heart and its head in approximately the right place. The protesters say there is unjust inequality, and they are right. Only (some) conservatives and (some) libertarians could deny it.

But seriously. I guess I can see arguing that tax credits aren’t, per se, social programs – but aren’t they social engineering, hmmm yes? (Wouldn’t it follow that they couldn’t be faulted for being the latter, if they can’t be credited with being the former?) But I find it hard to see how 529 plans could, strictly speaking, fail of bare existence. (If you think otherwise, I’ve got a Pentagon you might like to levitate.) Arguing that if something didn’t exist, the private sector could take up the slack is one thing. But arguing that because you could – oh, say, hire a private protection outfit – that therefore the police actually don’t exist … ?

Finally, I have a feeling that Tabarrok would not, if caught in another mood, express a preference for a tax code pockmarked with various and sundry breaks, giveaways and loopholes over one lacking these features, commonly regarded as unlovely by economists. But since Tabarrok’s stated position is now that such things are rightly regarded as precious islands of civil freedom, in a socialist sea of serfdom … oh I give up.

Thing is: it’s not just Magneto, it’s the government, going back to the first film. Everyone is right except Professor X.

The Mutant Registration Act is regrettable but clearly necessary, for public safety, and the loathsome Senator Kelly makes much more cogent arguments than earnest Jean Grey, in that scene from the first film. After all, if you have a critical mass of people shooting lasers out of their eyes – to say nothing of exhibitions of powerful mind-control, shape-shifting, teleporting – most of what we think we think we know about the optimality, even viability, of liberal/republican forms of government falls by the wayside, or needs to be re-thought from the ground up in pretty fundamental ways. Go back to Leviathan (not exactly liberal or republican, but you know what I mean). As the SEP puts it, Hobbes “assumes that people are sufficiently similar in their mental and physical attributes that no one is invulnerable nor can expect to be able to dominate the others.” If you assume the contrary, you might need to adjust a few other pieces as well. Stands to reason.

A related point. Everyone is saying, and I agree, X-Men – the film franchise – has been ‘about difference’. (The third film and Wolverine were a bit weak, but let it pass.) It’s flexible enough, as allegory, that you can plug in your favored value of X, Born This Way-wise. Race, sexual orientation. But there’s something screwy about this. Because the main moral lesson we – as good liberals – always want people to learn about race and sexual orientation is that folks are folks. People are pretty much the same, and the differences people are fixating on (skin color, who people want to sleep with) shouldn’t make a difference. If gayness were, literally, a red laser that shot out of gay people’s eyes, it would make sense to be homophobic. Homophobia and racism drape themselves, publicly, in prudential, civic-minded concern. X-Men-style mutation ought to be equal-opportunity allegory for homophobia and racism, as well as for liberal values of tolerance. They aren’t called the Virtually Normal Men, after all.

Maybe the conclusion should be that Charles Burns’ Black Hole did the whole thing better. But no one would film that as a summer blockbuster, so – hey – take what we can get and it’s all in good clean fun.

But there is something more philosophically authentic about the ethical contradiction at the heart of the X-Men franchise. A similar contradiction is found in Mill’s On Liberty. Everyone gets a private sphere of negative liberty because, within that sphere, we are properly concerned with ‘our own stuff’, and aren’t harming anyone else. The no-harm principle. But you could also call it the ‘no big effect’ or ‘no big deal’ principle. What I do, privately, really oughtn’t to be a big deal, in other people’s eyes. It isn’t their business. But, ultimately, the argument for this no-harm principle assumes the opposite. It’s a consequentialist calculation “grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” – homo superior, anyone? Major positive changes are to be expected from letting people be Born This Way, however that may fall out, evolutionarily. No sense pretending this isn’t a big deal, even if Mill didn’t have adamantium claws in mind. He did have something a bit like Professor X in mind. Philosophy as psychic power. “Speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey.”

Mill argues that difference should be tolerated because it’s not likely to make a big difference. (Since I can’t control anyone’s mind, just by thinking, I can think what I like.) And that difference should be tolerated because it is likely to make a big difference. (A few people can powerfully influence everyone else’s minds, just by thinking, if we let them.) So X-Men is maybe not such bad allegory after all.

There was a stage set for Remnick and Gladwell. … When they came out, Remnick immediately brought up the Gladwell’s social media article from a few weeks ago, where Gladwell wrote that social media only created weak ties and wasn’t sufficient to push a people to form a social movement. He took a lot of heat in the past few weeks, since social media may have played some role in the uprisings in Egypt. Gladwell was pretty hostile to his critics. He scoffed that his critic was some blogger from Huffington Post. Why should we listen to some pajama-wearing blogger, he asked? Some pajama-wearing blogger who lives in Brooklyn, he added for extra laughs.

Well, I’m not sure why we should listen to a journalist who doesn’t like to travel north of 14h Street. Look, it was a very entertaining evening. Those guys were funny and witty and shared lots of amusing stories. But they didn’t know anything about revolutions or social media or Egypt. That’s okay. Journalists don’t have know be experts in their field. But they have to acknowledge that they aren’t experts and they really have an obligation to talk to people who spend their lives studying those subjects. … Why should anyone care what Malcolm Gladwell thinks about Egypt and Facebook, when there are people who have travelled to the Mid East, are fluent in Arabic, and spend most of their waking hours learning about this subject.

Arthur Goldhammer

It must have been more than 30 years ago now that Michel Foucault wrote an article entitled “La mort de l’intellectuel.” Apparently Le Monde didn’t get the message, because it invited four “intellectuals” to comment on the “Arab revolts.” The choice of participants in this forum tells you something about what the word “intellectuel” means today. We hear from Alain Touraine, Alain Badiou, Elisabeth Roudinesco, and André Glucksmann. None is a specialist on the region in turmoil, on the history of revolutions, on Islam, on Arab culture, on the political economy of the rebellious states, on social movements in the Arab world, on previous rebellions against military dictatorships, on relations between the military and civil society, or any of a hundred other topics that might confer authority to speak about one or another aspect of the unfolding wave of rebellion.

in France, to be a specialist is almost a disqualification to speak as an “intellectual.” An intellectual is one who has risen above his or her specialty, if any, to acquire a quasi-priestly authority to pronounce on n’importe quoi—and as often as not, to say n’importe quoi about it. But I wonder if this sort of rootless speculation has any purchase on the French audience today. Perhaps a piece like this in Le Monde is simply a throwback to the day when large numbers of people hungered to know what Sartre or Camus thought about the events of the day.

When I read these posts (nearly back to back – I’ve been away from the internets for a few days), the similarities were striking. The current crop of French intellectuals is rather like Malcolm Gladwell. And (such comparisons being commutative) Malcolm Gladwell is rather like the current crop of French intellectuals. I wonder which would take greater umbrage at the comparison.

Two responses: Robert Farley reads a WSJ piece on Egypt and suggests, in effect, that the effect of internet social networking might not be to allow for more connections between protesters – ‘just connect’, as the slogan might be – but to enable aggregate overwhelming of the security response; which, in the end, couldn’t be quite ‘dexterous’ to be in enough places, with enough force, at once. I have no idea whether this is right or not but, as a thesis, it deserves a name, which will obviously be ‘Denial of Service Attack’, DoS for short. Denial of Security Service, that is.

Then they are on to zombies, and Drezner’s book. Farrell and Farley consider whether there is a history of supernatural approaches to political theory – Marx and vampires and a certain amount of para-zombie theory of the market, so forth. Any good Soviet-era socialist zombie political theory? They miss an important data point which, in fact, all historians of the zombie film, and zombie literature have also missed. The ‘modern’ zombie genre does not start with Romero, in 1968. It starts with one of my pet favorite sf films: the 1936 Menzies/Wells film, Things To Come. And it starts as emblematic political theory allegory. You read that right, kids: the modern zombie film genre was born as an explicit exercise in pedagogically illustrating the strengths and weakness of IR realism.

The internet archive has a copy, so I can conveniently link to the short segment in which we get the bare-bones zombie story. (It’s only about 2:45 minutes long.) After a catastrophic war, the ‘wandering sickness’ breaks out as an epidemic. Technically, these people aren’t dead, so they aren’t zombies. But if you watch the clip you see that they are being played as zombies. Arms out, unseeing stare, staggering slowly around. They are the ‘walking dead’ in that the film takes pains to explain that no one who gets to this stage recovers. They don’t actually eat anyone, but they are vectors of spreading the infection, so everyone flees from them. We see the earnest ‘liberal’ pleading that they not be shot (also, it’s his sister). And the hard-nosed realist – the character who will become known as The Boss – saying ‘Shoot, I tell you! Shoot! That’s the way to do it!’ The Boss (the Chief) then rises to power as the warlord of his tiny little Everytown statelet because he and his ruthless methods provide security. Here the Boss’s girlfriend discusses, frankly, the Boss’s attractions and limits. “Every woman finds him strong and attractive.” But he’ll never open up the wide world to you. He’s a tinpot Mussolini. Later his temporarily ascendant ‘realist’ approach to politics is superceded by the superior efficacy and attractiveness of the socialist, internationalist ‘Brotherhood of Efficiency’: Wings Over The World! That is, you may need a realist if you have an immediate zombie problem. And often you will. But eventually socialism and science will relegate him to the dust heap, providing a more optimal solution. While The Brotherhood of Efficiency is building new airplanes and expanding, the Boss is forever waging stupid war with ‘the people of the hills’, i.e. his former neighbors, in a collapsed former British Empire. (And then the Air Dictatorship of the Brotherhood of Efficiency, which is necessary for dealing with the likes of the Boss, is replaced by a still better, still more humane successor regime. But that takes us beyond the zombie issue.)

Before Things to Come [amazon], zombie films – like White Zombie [amazon] – were about zombies as slaves. It was an anxiety of control, not an anxiety of anarchy. (Of course there needs to be a breakdown of control, so you have a story. But zombies are by nature slaves, that’s the trope.) Wells gave us exactly what Romero did, set-up-wise. Only in Romero there isn’t any Boss figure. No realist hero who gets it together and just shoots all the zombies until there aren’t any more and thereby solves that problem. That’s because the film would be boring. But if your goal is, instead, to illustrate the advantages of disadvantages of different theories of politics and international relations – Wells’ purpose, as it is Drezner’s – then zombies can work great. They truly do have a natural affinity for brains, insofar as they get our intuitions and hearts pumping.

An interesting sidenote: as I’ve noted before, the film is quite relevant to political theory as it was intended to illustrate, as well, Wells’ pet notion of ‘liberal fascism’. The Air Dictator is supposed to represent an intermediate phase between the zombie-fighting, IR realist likes of The Boss, and genuine ‘liberty’ – internationalist socialism, really. Of course, since liberalism did not exactly go down the Air Dictator road – liberals hated the notion of ‘liberal fascism’, then as now – the films is only an example of what Goldberg is talking about in an ‘if it weren’t for counter-examples, some people wouldn’t have any examples at all’ sense.

Haeckel Haeckel everywhere and such a lot of ink.

If you don’t know Woodring’s work, the new Weathercraft [amazon] book is pretty good, and cheap. But what you really want is the The Frank Book. Which, it turns out, is crazy expensive. Gads. When did that happen?

But you can watch this animated version for free, anyway:

Oh, and here’s an animated version of the bit that really bothers Belle, really gives her the cold robbies. Whim (he’s the half-moon-headed guy) and his head-altering egg-beater device. Apparently it is called a ‘whim-grinder’.

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Recall the demonstrations which, through the first decade of the new millennium, regularly accompanied meetings of the IMF and the World Bank: the protester’s complaints tool in not only the usual anti-globalizing motifs (the growing exploitation of Third World countries, and so forth), but also how the banks were creating the illusion of growth by playing with fictional money, and how this would all have to end in a crash. It was not only economists such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz who warned of the dangers ahead and made it clear that those who promised continuous growth did not really understand what was going on under their noses. In Washington in 2004, so many people demonstrated about the danger of a financial collapse that the police had to mobilize 8,000 additional local policemen and bring in a further 6,000 from Maryland and Virginia. What ensued was tear-gassing, clubbing and mass arrests – so many that police had to use buses for transport. The message was loud and clear, and the police were used literally to stifle the truth.

The first examples are tendentious, as allegedly successful predictions of market movements tend to be. (Many predicted a crash. They always do. How many predicted the one that actually arrived, and when it would?) But I’m more curious what the last bit is about. What protest was this? The Million Worker March is all I can come up with. But that didn’t involve any far-sighted demands that financial collapse be forestalled. “Organizers have issued 22 demands, a broad array of grievances that go far beyond workers’ rights. Organizers call for universal health care, a national living wage, guaranteed pensions for all working people and an end to the outsourcing of jobs overseas. They also are demanding a repeal of the Patriot Act, increased funding for public education, free mass transit in every city, a reduction of the military budget and cancellation of what they consider pro-corporation pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.” Nothing about the dangers of mortgage-backed securities. Also, so far as I can recall – and Google seems to back me – the Million Worker March was relatively small and peaceful. So is that even what Zizek is talking about?

Also, Zizek has odd ideas about how the bank bailouts were supposed to work. He takes the argument for bailing out Wall Street to have been “standard trickle-down”: “although we want the poor to become richer, it is counter productive to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element in society. The only kind of intervention needed is that which helps the rich get richer; the profits will then automatically, by themselves, diffuse amongst the poor” (13-4). Did anyone actually make this argument for the bailouts? Odder, Zizek accepts the argument himself: “It is all too easy to dismiss this line of reasoning as a hypocritical defense of the rich. The problem is that, insofar as we remain in a capitalist order, there is a truth within it: namely that kicking at Wall Street really will hit ordinary workers” (15). One could defend this by pointing out that the latter point, on its own, is sadly correct. But Zizek takes the further step of taking this as evidence/illustration of how ‘standard trickle-down’ arguments are, in general, descriptively valid (however ethically deplorable) under capitalism: “If you want people to have money to build homes, don’t give it to them directly, but to those who will in turn lend them the cash. According to the logic, this is the only way to create genuine prosperity; otherwise it will just be a case of the state distributing funds to the needy at the expense of real wealth-creators” (14). Zizek seems unaware that liberal-left economists who conceded the need for bailouts – with gritted teeth – do not, in general, take themselves as committed to “standard trickle-down” arguments about how markets do, and must, function. I am sure our own John Quiggin, for example, will be happy to testify that his grudging support for the bailouts did not rest on trust in trickle-down.

You may think that I am nit-picking Zizek to no good purpose! And you may be right! (Yes, I’m looking at YOU.) But in the event that you are wrong, the reason will be something like this: I’m writing an article on (wait for it!) Zizek on liberalism, and one point I want to make is that when Zizek critiques liberalism, which he does a lot, he almost always uses ‘liberal’ to mean, narrowly, economic neoliberalism. Forces of economic globalization. The Washington Consensus. Liberalism is: Sarkozy trying to make France more Anglo-ish. It’s never: John Rawls. I think it’s fair to say that Zizek is hereby basically strawman-ing liberal democracy, and liberalism qua political philosophy, by identifying both with the Washington Consensus. This is not only philosophically unsatisfactory but rhetorically odd, because Zizek ends up sounding weirdly like a Fox News commentator, talking trickle-down as if it were an Iron Law of Prosperity, under any conceivable, market-based system.

There is one major exception to Zizek’s liberalism = neoliberalism tendency: namely, he not infrequently uses ‘liberalism’ to refer to academic-style, ironist-relativistic multi-culti, feel-good pc leftism. Then he sounds sort of like P.J. O’Rourke yelling in your ear at a Laibach concert. From Tarrying with the Negative [amazon].

Yet what is deeply suspicious about this attitude, about the attitude of an antinationalist, liberal Eastern European intellectual, is the already-mentioned obvious fascination exerted on him by nationalism: liberal intellectuals refuse it, mock it, laugh at it, yet at the same time stare at it with powerless fascination. The intellectual pleasure procured by denouncing nationalism is uncannily close to the satisfaction of successfully explaining one’s own impotence and failure (which always was a trademark of a certain kind of Marxism). On another level, Western liberal intellectuals are often caught in a similar trap: the affirmation of their own autochthonous tradition is for them a red-neck horror, a site of populist protofascism (for example, in the U.S.A., the ‘backwardness’ of the Polish, Italian, etc. communities, the alleged brood of “authoritarian personalities” and similar liberal scarecrows), whereas such intellectuals are at once ready to hail the autochthonous ethnical communities of the other (African Americans, Puerto Ricans …) Enjoyment is good, on the condition that it not be too close to us, on condition that it remain the other’s enjoyment. (212)

OK, P.J. O’Rourke wouldn’t use the phrase ‘autochthonous ethnical communities’. But he – and any number of shorter-in-the-tooth conservative snarkmongers – would play the tired trick of conflating ‘liberalism’ with a kind of half-intellectualized, pc, white self-loathing. Here again, I don’t see Zizek making himself of much intellectual use. (Also, a lot of it seems distinctly tin-eared, even by the tinny standards of right-wing snark: liberals hate the Polish for not being Puerto Rican enough? That’s the sort of thing that always opens up a fresh front in the War On Christmas. ‘You know you’re a liberal when you hyphenate ‘red-neck’’ sounds like a rejected Jeff Foxworthy joke.)

To review: Zizek does this liberal = neoliberal thing. Which is no good. And he doesn’t even have much to say about economics. And Zizek does this liberal = self-hating pc white intellectuals thing. Which is no good.

Does Zizek ever critique liberalism as political philosophy – that is, not as Washington Consensus economic policy or knee-jerk pc passive-aggressive white self-loathing? Does he have anything to say about any of the ideas and issues discussed in this article? I think the answer is: basically, no.

He critiques tolerance, as a positive political virtue. That seems like a promising angle for engaging liberalism. But he doesn’t go on to offer remotely plausible accounts of why liberals favor tolerance.

Contemporary liberalism forms a complex network of ideologies, institutional and non-institutional practices; however, underlying this multiplicity is a basic opposition on which the entire liberal vision relies, the opposition between those who are ruled by culture, totally determined by the life-world into which they were born, and those who merely “enjoy” their culture, who are elevated above it, free to choose their culture.

I don’t see that any liberals actually buy this dubious dichotomy, nor why they even might, let alone should. And Zizek doesn’t say. So that’s a non-starter.

The only place I’ve found where Zizek makes what seems to me a reasonably serious, reasonably sustained critique of liberalism – as political philosophy – and, simultaneously a critique of liberal democracy – as social-political form – is, again, in Tarrying With The Negative. Liberals abhor nationalism, but nationalism is born from liberalism. It is regarded as this awful recrudescence of pre-modern impulses, but really it is modernity incarnate. The idea is that ‘formal’ democracy makes an empty hole that is, as it were, filled by dangerous fundamentalism.

The structural homology between Kantian formalism and formal democracy is a classical topos: in both cases, the starting point, the founding gesture, consists of an act of radical emptying, evacuation. With Kant, what is evacuated and left empty is the locus of the Supreme Good: every positive object destined to occupy this place is by definition “pathological,” marked by empirical contingency, which is why the moral Law must be reduced to the pure Form bestowing on our acts the character of universality. Likewise, the elementary operation of democracy is the evacuation of the locus of Power: every pretender to this place is by definition a “pathological” usurper; “nobody can rule innocently,” to quote Saint-Just. And the crucial point is that “nationalism” as a specifically modern, post-Kantian phenomenon designates the moment when the Nation, the national Thing, usurps, fills out, the empty place of the Thing opened up by Kant’s “formalism,” by his reduction of every “pathological” content. The Kantian term for this filling-out of the void, of course, is the fanaticism of Schwärmerei: does not “nationalism” epitomize fanaticism in politics?

In this precise sense, it is the very “formalism” of Kant which, by way of its distinction between negative and indefinite judgment, opens up the space for the “undead” and similar incarnations of some monstrous radical Evil. It was already the “pre-critical” Kant who used the dreams of a ghost-seer to explain the metaphysical dream; today, one should refer to the dream of the “undead” monsters to explain nationalism. (221)

So therefore liberal democracy can never become suitably ‘universal’, because it always needs an Other, the ‘undeveloped, the Excluded. This argument is pretty important to Zizek, I think, and he is in effect developing it in his more recent books: not just First As Tragedy, but also In Defense of Lost Causes. Communism is supposed to be better than liberalism because it can be universalized, and liberal democracy can’t.

Now I think this Zombie Nationalism argument makes considerably more sense than Zizek’s bad attempts to write Zombie Economics. (He should leave that to the economists.) And he gets bonus style points for getting Swedenborg in the mix, even just a little. But as a silver bullet for killing the werewolf of liberalism, this just ain’t gonna do it, not all on its lonesome. Liberals don’t need to be as formal Kantian as all that (hell, I’m not sure even Kant is as Kantian as that. Not when he went to the bathroom, or even when he just went to dinner, I suspect.) And even if liberals were as Kantian as all that – which they aren’t – we are still skipping several steps to get all the way to a sufficient explanation of the social-psychology of modern nationalism from Kantian formalism. (And a few of those steps look impossible to me, but you’re mileage may vary.)

Am I missing anything? Is there anywhere else in Zizek’s prodigous corpus where he attempts a sustained critique of liberalism as a political philosophy? Some point at which he actually addresses, say, Rawls, as opposed to just kicking Fukayama in the shins for thinking history had ended, or complaining about Rortyan ironism? There probably is. Probably in the middle of some discussion of Wagner and Hitchcock movies.

Tis the season for posting more original Dickens Christmas story illustrations to Flickr. I just put up a set for “The Haunted Man”, which is, in addition to being a nicely gothic sort of affair – such as suits the season – another nice illustration of Henry’s point that sf has its roots in the ‘condition of England’ novel. “The Haunted Man” is about a mad scientist who finds a way to erase from his own memory all the sorrows and wrongs he has suffered. And: the effect is contagious. Those he touches have their memories erased as well. Of course it turns out to be a terrible idea. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and all. (But a lot more sentimental.) The only one who is immune to the effect is a boy – a feral child. Furthermore, this feral child is, as it were, a morlock rising. A harbinger of a feral race to follow. But there’s a happy ending!

Tell it that way and it sounds like some sort of sf scenario. The mad science-y atmosphere is indeed well conjured:

Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part laboratory, – for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of aspiring ears and eyes hung daily, – who that had seen him there, upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power to uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and vapour; – who that had seen him then, his work done, and he pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame, moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead, would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber too?

But, in fact, the memory effect is not due to some Jekyll-and-Hyde drink he concocts but the work of a spirit of sorts – the chemist’s own spirit. He is haunted only by … himself. I’ll just quote the Morlock bit as well:

“You know what I would ask. Why has this child alone been proof against my influence, and why, why, have I detected in its thoughts a terrible companionship with mine?”

“This,” said the Phantom, pointing to the boy, “is the last, completest illustration of a human creature, utterly bereft of such remembrances as you have yielded up. No softening memory of sorrow, wrong, or trouble enters here, because this wretched mortal from his birth has been abandoned to a worse condition than the beasts, and has, within his knowledge, no one contrast, no humanising touch, to make a grain of such a memory spring up in his hardened breast. All within this desolate creature is barren wilderness. All within the man bereft of what you have resigned, is the same barren wilderness. Woe to such a man! Woe, tenfold, to the nation that shall count its monsters such as this, lying here, by hundreds and by thousands!”

Redlaw shrank, appalled, from what he heard.

“There is not,” said the Phantom, “one of these – not one – but sows a harvest that mankind MUST reap. From every seed of evil in this boy, a field of ruin is grown that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again in many places in the world, until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another Deluge. Open and unpunished murder in a city’s streets would be less guilty in its daily toleration, than one such spectacle as this.”

It seemed to look down upon the boy in his sleep. Redlaw, too, looked down upon him with a new emotion.

“There is not a father,” said the Phantom, “by whose side in his daily or his nightly walk, these creatures pass; there is not a mother among all the ranks of loving mothers in this land; there is no one risen from the state of childhood, but shall be responsible in his or her degree for this enormity. There is not a country throughout the earth on which it would not bring a curse. There is no religion upon earth that it would not deny; there is no people upon earth it would not put to shame.”

The Chemist clasped his hands, and looked, with trembling fear and pity, from the sleeping boy to the Phantom, standing above him with his finger pointing down.

I can’t say that it’s an unjustly neglected classic. It’s spotty and downright tiresome in places, even if you love Dickens. (Obviously if you can’t take dollops and gobs of sentiment you should stay well away.) But it’s got great bits as well. The descriptions of the chemist, Redlaw, feeling his memory go – the world around him being disenchanted by the ghost’s enchantment – are good. Overall, it’s a good example of a great writer feeling the urge to explore what have become standard sf themes, but not having the stock tools to do it, and trying to make do with a Christmas story instead.

… something similar should have happened to science fiction, shouldn’t it? After all, catastrophes and sudden shifts in perception are part of its stock in trade. But instead of confronting Reality A, the genre has, in the first decade of the 21st century, too often turned to its own comforting version of Reality B: retreating into pleasant little pulpish daydreams in which starships still effortlessly span a galaxy where a guy can turn a profit, or where technology is as controllable as clockwork and the actions of individuals can still make a mark on history. …

I prefer the point of view of William Gibson, who has pointed out that the only way to tackle the place we’re in now is to use the science-fiction toolkit – the tropes, images and metaphor developed from the crude flint hammers of pulp by decades of cooperative effort and argument. If other writers are using the science-fiction toolkit to evolve new kinds of stories in the present’s different air, that’s exactly what we should be doing, too. Forget the past. Especially the pasts of all those great glorious science-fiction futures, lost when it all changed. Look again at the future. Embrace change. Let go. If only. If only.

And Cosma Shalizi riffs on Ernest Gellner

It was pretty plain by, oh, 1848 at the latest that the kind of scientific knowledge we have now, and the technological power that goes with it, radically alters, and even more radically expands, the kind of societies are possible, lets us live our lives in ways profoundly different from our ancestors. (For instance, we can have affluence and liberty.) How then should we live? becomes a question of real concern, because we have, in fact, the power to change ourselves, and are steadily accruing more of it.

This, I think, is the question at the heart of science fiction at its best. (This meshes with Jo Walton’s apt observation that one of the key aesthetic experiences of reading SF is having a new world unfold in one’s mind.) Now it is clear that the vast majority of it is rehashing familiar themes and properties, and transparently projecting the social situation of its authors. I like reading that anyway, even when I can see how it would be generated algorithmically (or even by a finite-state machine). … But sometimes, SF can break beyond that, to approach the question What should we make of our ourselves? with the imagination, and vertigo, it deserves.

Discuss – but try not to get bogged down in the finer nuances of the etymology of ‘reticent’ please …

I’ve decided to make both available for free reading on Issuu – which is where I keep Reason and Persuasion. It’s a pretty good online reader, better than the Blurb preview feature. So: click here to read all of Squid and Owl online. Here for Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness.

A word of warning: I haven’t yet laid hands on a physical copy of Mama In Her Kerchief. I’ve made several books with Blurb now, so there shouldn’t be a problem. When I first made Squid and Owl there was a problem with covers curling. But Blurb was quick to send replacements.

Here is “The Spiritual Rail-Way”:

In the not-too-distant future, our relations to computers/the internet have grown more intimate. Our machines respond directly to our thoughts, courtesy of implants. Now: it’s very dangerous to be driving your computerized car and have it respond like lightning to every stray death wish that flits across your mental monitor. So our mind-machine links, in this future world, are insulated and buffered in prudent ways. But: Google (or whoever) has figured out that internet searching goes much better if the machine can read you raw at every level and log all that stuff. People go along with it. Of course, privacy is assured. But: Julian Assange (Assange’s envatted brain, or whoever) stages a massive, Wikileaks-style intelligence release: Psycheleaks. Everyone get up one morning and finds, to their horror, that in the night have sprung up public ‘Psykis’, consisting of everyone’s logged-and-now-leaked thoughts – down to every last little Underground Man-style private fantasy. And the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel got to read the dreams earlier than everyone else, etc. Everyone pretty much knew what this stuff would be like, in broad outline. But it’s still embarrassing. And now no one can live without their implants. But Assange has cult followers everywhere, fanatically devoted to transparency …

Also, Twitter has become a meditative religion; syncretic amalgam of Buddhistic and Tantric notions and practices. The goal is to achieve complete mental-spiritual self-discipline. Some practitioners strive to post only the 140 characters of God’s true name, repeatedly – a variant of Amitabha (‘The Buddha of Infinite Tweet’) Buddhism. One guy almost sets the world record but accidentally tweets ‘world record!’ instead, breaking his streak. Twitric Buddhism maintains that the universe itself is the godhead’s twitter feed. The sexual side of Twitric ritual practice requires a Microsoft Kinect. In the wake of the Psycheleaks scandal, Twitter acquires many new devotees.

I release my story idea under a CC license. Or, more accurately, a CD license – that is, Cory Doctorow can use my idea for any commercial or non-commercial purpose. If he wanted to, that is.