A Disquieting Suggestion

we have a continuing responsibility to try to articulate these values in a way that is comprehensible in a secular debate — to correct our own inarticulacy. We have a responsibility to articulate our values, whatever their religious grounding may be, in a way that makes sense to people who do not necessarily share that grounding.

So Rawlsian! Who knew?

Perhaps instead of thinking about each element of modernity as being loosely connected into a large package called, “modernity,” the removal of any of which element’s direct causal relationship to the removal of the whole package is tenuous and undertheorized, the SCs adopt a more retributive theory of social justice, rather than a deterrent one.

JH, your argument works against those who see their political opposition to SSM as comprising one step on the long road to that awesomeness-that-we-used-to-be-way-back-when, because all you need to do is point out that their efforts are too unfocused to actually accomplish their yoooooge project. But if SCs see their opposition to SSM as a punishment for (or an attempt to punish) those who too gleefully partake of modernity, then there’s nothing arbitrary about making SSM or cotton candy jelly bellies or the X games the target of your political mobilization. I suspect that most SCs fall into the retributive, rather than deterrent, theory of social justice. Therefore, they probably think there should be any SSM because the people who would benefit from it don’t deserve to enjoy those benefits on account of their excessive self-reliance, hedonism, and individualism.

The great bikini off-road adventure, which isn’t really porn, but in their benighted state they don’t realize it.

Religious social conservatives should seek to be more like their Christ, rather than take issue with the motes in the eyes of their brothers and sisters.

That is just what their own teachings say. That they make such issue is a sign of, and indeed likely motivated by, an awareness of what are, in their own terms, their own failures.

I do not think their Christ would be amused by those who, calling out His name the loudest, are the least forgiving, imprisoning the largest number of their brothers; who take from widows and orphans; who in His name and on faint pretext, kill many thousands of strangers in distant lands, and who bend knee to (in their terms,) the worshipers of Mammon and their servants.

A problem with the quote from Dreher’s reader is that it leads to a false dialogue between modernists and the Christian Values crew. Following that advice, the anti-sexual-revolutionistas have to try and create a secular argument which supports their position.

But when they do, it’s a fake. Even the people putting it forward do not believe because of the argument, they make the argument because they believe. It’s like a school debate argument – constructed to support a given conclusion, and not actually the reason anyone in history ever came to that conclusion.

Unsurprisingly, such arguments are generally bad. But refuting them changes nothing, since nobody believed anything because of them anyhow.

“The Benedict Option” doesn’t amount to anything more than a speaking tour and a book deal. Beyond that, it’s just the same old no-TV-and-homeschool formula that is already accepted practice in the social conservative subculture Dreher earns his bread from.

I used to be a Dreher fan, but I’ve got tired in the past year because it’s just not fun anymore. The pseudo-intellectual mask doesn’t have much glue holding it in place and it blows off awfully quickly to reveal the banal little bigot underneath. And, as he admitted, what really “keeps me awake at night” is just the thought that his viewpoint isn’t the dominant one in conservatism anymore. It’s the loss of relevance, not correctness that is scary. He is becoming the most pathetic figure of multiculturalism: the “community leader” who is unknown and unregarded by their “community”.

He’d be interesting again if he could think beyond his cliches, and realise that he is not a victim of a “tyranny of relativism” but its opposite: a tyranny of a particular official morality, just not the one he accepts.

In Australia we had a good mini series about modernisation and religion when I was growing up, it was called Brides of Christ and was about Nuns during the Vatican II period, with some religious in favour of modernising and others very upset by all the changes.

http://youtu.be/4FEBAZC30G0

There was a Jesuit, Pedro Arrupe, who spoke about the need for them to modernise

“Jesuits must be brought abreast of the world in which they breathe and are able to face with intelligence and love the world of tomorrow.

Many Catholics are afraid of this new world when all that they were, took for granted, that made human living so serene, have been questioned, turned inside out, subjected to radical revision. At the risk of startling you, let me tell you quite honestly: it is not this new world that I fear. After all, God is there – however difficult it may be at times to discover Him.

I am rather afraid that we Jesuits may have little or nothing to offer this world, little or nothing to say or do in this world to justify our existence as Jesuits.

I am afraid we will repeat yesterday’s answers to tomorrow’s problems, take a way men no longer understand, speak a language that does not speak to the heart of living man.

If we do this, we shall more and more be talking to ourselves; no one would listen, because no one will understand what we are trying to say.” 1970

I think Dreher is not so sound on this really. For instance in the article he goes on about Turkish slums being better since people are religious, but African slums are worse not being as religious, and American slums too.

I feel like saying same sex marriage is wrong due to the effects on religiousness which has trickle down effects on whether slums are better to live in or not, is sort of very unsound theology.

The term “modernity”, and the abstract big-think it facilitates, has poisoned many a mind.

But does MacIntyre himself have the resources to oppose SSM?

In “Three Rival Versions Of Moral Enquiry” the chapter “Too Many Thomisms?” acknowledges that the tradition has many various branches and interpretations. It’s not any better than modern liberal theory if we are concerned to establish “firm foundations” in place of “shifting sands”.

A few months ago RD was getting very agitated about a young theologian who had written a paper suggesting Aquinas was more in line with Judith Butler than any modern “social conservative”. That’s not prima facie ridiculous, unless your sole interest in the Great Men is to provide a few classy namedrops amongst Readers Digest opinions.

The bigger mystery is how anyone can be a “christian conservative” and give their lives to the idolatry of worldly traditions and old things, when all that is just dust that will pass away, the only permanence is life with Christ outside of time.

MilitantlyAardvark,

I suspect that Dreher, in his confused and wambling way, doesn’t really want to undo modernity, so much as he wants people to tell him that his beliefs are best and they wish they could be like him. What really gets to Dreher is that the beliefs in which he has invested so much should be not merely a subject of disagreement or indifference but even ridicule and contempt by the largely imaginary community of liberals and SJWs living inside his head.

I think this is unfair to Rod (who, for the record, I’ve known for years, consider a friend, and have met multiple times), but it’s not inaccurate. On Dreher’s better days, he’ll acknowledge that he really doesn’t have in his collection of preferences a desire to undo modernity (go back and read his paeans to David Bowie when he died, for example); instead, his basic desire is simply to not have what he imagines to be the mob, the majority, going after his religious preferences…and since his religious preferences are tied up with various real-world phenomena (marriage mostly obviously, but many others as well), that means when he sees what used to be majority assumptions about public behavior and traditional Christian sexual morality being challenged, he figures it’s circle-the-wagons time. And lately, admittedly, it’s been circle-the-wagons time pretty much all the time. Again, when the question is framed the right way, he’ll acknowledge that his BenOp solution can have too much of the atavistic and reactionary bundled along with it (I’m thinking of a long, aching e-mail from a gay reader which he posted not long ago, and his very thoughtful and humble response to it), and he’ll emphasize that he doesn’t want to recreate the past. But then some other reader will send him some other example of supposed SJW/transgendered offensiveness, and off he’ll go again.

John,

Well, if the problem really is “Marbury v. Madison”, or something like that, Dreher could say so. Or if the problem is “Griswold v. Connecticutt”, Dreher could say so. Or if it isn’t really legal at all but moral, he could say so.

I’ve been on Rod’s case about this general point for years. Whether he likes it or wants to acknowledge it or not, he’s making use of actual theoretical, historical arguments in making his BenOp case–mostly agrarian and classically republican ones–and he needs to own up to them and think through the differences between the paths which those different arguments imply. (Saying everything started to go bad with Marbury can make sense, but it wouldn’t be the same sense necessarily as saying that everything started to go had with Griswold.) Of course, in saying he “needs” to do that simply betrays my (and your) preference for arguments that the broader public–including those of us who may be sympathetic to his points for our own theoretical reasons, but don’t follow his conclusions–can engage with. But if the BenOp project really is ultimately just being written for those which a traditionalist understanding of Christian sexual morality, then perhaps he’s right to kind of dismiss my whining to him about how his whole project is undertheorized.

Which one of you is “panda”?

@Russell Arben Fox

It seems more than a little strange for you to suggest that I am unfair to Dreher and then proceed to say essentially what I have just said about him in your own words. You apparently agree with me that he doesn’t actual want to dismantle modernity, and that he (over)reacts to what you call an “imaginary mob” going after his own preferences. Which is just what I said in the citation from my comment that you post as the introduction to your complaint that I am being unfair!

Perhaps I am missing some brilliant logical subtlety on your part?

No, Aardvark, you’re right; I’m probably just responding as a friend.

@John Holbo

“People who wave copies of “After Virtue” at other people …”

Surely that depends on whether they are first editions on the original, authentic vellum or not?

I must confess that I am curious to know what people define as “western civilization” for the purposes of this debate. I suspect that part of the *ahem* failure to communicate is caused by the different meanings that people attach to the term. Personally I blame the barbarians and Christianity (hendiadys! hendiadys!) for our modern falling away from the echt mos maiorum.

JH: “Let me try a fresh approach.”

Since this post isn’t engaging fruitlessly with some sort of argumentative detail, I’ll try again too: Dreher’s basic problem is that he sees his own imagined community but can’t imagine the other side as having its own community. The culture that he doesn’t like he imagines as atomized individuals, victims of modernity and what people on the left would call capitalism.

Where I live there was a utopian community called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. It was dedicated to an intensely moral modernism in which “the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color or condition, sect or religion.” It was formed in 1842.

And the concerns of that community are historically continuous with the concerns of the left now — something like Black Lives Matter has many of the same concerns. When I bring this up on this blog, posters here notably don’t get it, but this history is important, and the basic conflict is not really between individualist modernism and small-c conservative community. It’s between two different long-standing communities.

Rich,

Where I live there was a utopian community called the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. It was dedicated to an intensely moral modernism in which “the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color or condition, sect or religion.” It was formed in 1842. And the concerns of that community are historically continuous with the concerns of the left now –something like Black Lives Matter has many of the same concerns. When I bring this up on this blog, posters here notably don’t get it, but this history is important, and the basic conflict is not really between individualist modernism and small-c conservative community. It’s between two different long-standing communities.

In a way, this is a nice expression of one of the reasons why I find Rod’s writings valuable and his arguments important–because he’s addressing himself, whether he realizes it or not, to a conflict between moral and community visions. The fact he dresses his community up with a bunch of mostly unjustifiable civilizational jargon isn’t a condemnation of him, I think; after all, pretty much every intentional community or visionary of community ever has done the same (certainly Steve Jobs wasn’t slack in presenting his vision of individual technological empowerment in world-historical and universalist terms).

“I had the arguments down pat in my head, but my heart refused to accept the consequences, until I had driven my life into a ditch.”

After some amount of time trying to read this kind of thing charitably, I’ve come to the conclusion it means something like this: “I could talk the talk about treating people kindly, but all the time I was treating them like sh*t; but now I realize what I was doing; and therefore I’m now going to talk the talk about my certainty that YOU are doing what I used to do. I slept with a a different person every night and never called the next day; you had a three-year live-in relationship; don’t you see you’re no better than never?” Up to them to persuade me, the reader, that’s not what they mean.

As an amateur in this discussion, I’d always taken McIntyre’s central insight to be that, progressively from the later middle ages, moral debates which were once “at home in and intelligible in terms of a context of practical beliefs and supporting habits ….. have now lost that context” and so people are talking past each other. (From the Prologue to the Third Edition). This context (which was not only religious but also based on the classics) has lost favour almost totally today, except on the fringes of politics, but the lack of agreement about what should replace it has produced debates, or arguments, that as McIntyre says are “shrill and assertive”, reflecting different and incommensurable points of departure.
Of these the most successful, by far, has been personal social liberalism, which promotes a doctrine of radical **** you individualism which is easy to understand, and is very attractive, at least in the short term, because everybody wants to do exactly what they like, don’t they?
As it happens, I’m no fan of the “conservative” (in the US sense) values expressed in the article, but I think it has to be recognised that the success of this kind of radical individualism also represents a problem for all of us on the Left who don’t subscribe to its tenets, and who worry about society as a whole. Today, unlike fifty years ago, the question “is X or Y acceptable in terms of its overall effect on society?” is not regarded as valid if it conflicts with some adult person’s right to do what they want. This is why its much harder to make arguments for economic justice than it used to be, because the counter-narrative, of people doing exactly what they want to do in the name of economic “freedom” has become so deeply entrenched. It’s a shame that today issues of community and the wider implications of individual actions are identified with bible-bashing zealots, when they used to be central concern of the Left.

exaggerate = exaggeration.

FWIW, after reading that passage from AV many times, I’ve concluded that the problem I have with it is that AM (like the Marxists he was then repudiating, and like C.S. thing RD quotes) interprets “can talk the talk but not walk the walk” as a historical condition and not an ever-present possibility. He might be right (whatever the analogy is meant to prove), but he proves too much. Of course, that’s not a conclusion that’s going to satisfy people who blog about big-ticket politics. But it’s mostly what allows them to do the kind of thing Rich talks about.

“Just look for the category “family” on any porn site.”

Oh, hell no.

Dreher’s comments about Syrian refugees removed any doubt about what his “Christianity” really is. Small minded bigotry that he wants to impose on the rest of us.

You want SSM? Sure, have it, why not. But leave another M for the conservatives, the one they like.

My own Opposite Sex Marriage seems to have been completely unaffected by the legalization of SSM. What happened to the conservatives’ M?

Of course, the real problem is basing any public policy on religion — as in, bat-shit crazy superstitious nonsense, used for thousands of years to control people and drive them to do really terrible things to one another.

Steven Weinberg is, of course, correct:

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Am currently reading Stacy Schiff’s very interesting The Witches: Salem, 1692. It’s stunning to learn how truly fascistic those old Puritans were, and how they drove their own communities half insane with endless talk of the devil, endless talk of hell and damnation, which led half a dozen very young girls to begin wave after wave of accusations of witchcraft . . . and this spread to dozens more accusers and accused, with mothers turning in their daughters, daughters turning in their brothers, brothers and daughters and mothers and fathers and grandmothers turning each other and their neighbors in to the Salem Inquisition. I’m about 285 pages into it, so do not know the full story, but they’ve hung several men and women already, have dozens and dozens of the accused locked up in deadly jails, including little girls they’ve chained up and barely freeze, as they suffer through deep freezes and high heat. Confess! Confess!! or you will be hanged!! And when they do confess, they are.

Organized religion throughout history has created mass hysteria which runs the gamut from mass murder to RFRA. No sane society would allow one single law or public policy to come from it, and especially not from individual interpretations of this or that faction.

That said, I likes MacIntyre’s book when I read it in the 80s.

” Such are the trials and tribulations of those who confuse narcissistic self-pity with the quest for the divine.”

I just have to express my thorough enjoyment of that sentence! Thanks.

I can’t even begin to entertain the basic ideas here — that there might be such a thing as modernity that might be categorically different from the rest of human experience, and that the definitive difference might be individualism — if only as fun counterfactuals to play with. Some ideas are too incoherent to even play with.

“That said, I likes MacIntyre’s book when I read it in the 80s.”

Dreher’s use and misuse of AV, and how he smooths down the difficulties and cuts out the hesitations, is a fine example of a serious book being simplified for polemical purposes. Does anyone know if AM himself is aware of what is being done in his name?

Casmilis @60,

As mentioned, I read and really liked AV back in the 1980s, but can’t remember really what it was about. Need to reread it. It’s been roughly 30 years. But I’m guessing you’re right about Dreher’s misuse.

The individualist defense of SSM misses the point about opposing communities just as much as Rod Dreher does. Clearly it doesn’t hurt any existing individual traditional marriage if SSM exists. But most supporters of SSM didn’t actually want to be in a same sex marriage. They wanted to live in a society in which same sex marriage was available to people, because they wanted to live in a society that held to certain ideas of fairness.

In that sense, no, there can’t be “tolerance”, and no, conservatives can’t have their own kind of marriage. We all live in one society and it either holds more or less to our principles or theirs. People can choose whether they get married or not but society as a whole only gets to make one choice about the range of choices available to individuals.

Note that the talk of utopian communities upthread may make people think of isolationism and localism. This isn’t always true. The particular community that I used as an example wasn’t just trying out communal living, it was also a center of national political action and had every expectation of exporting its values (e.g. helping to end slavery).

Shorter me–ideology can make good people do evil things. It doesn’t have to be a belief in the supernatural.

Don @65,

It’s about as far from the true Scotsman analogy as you can get. It has nothing to do with any kind of purity test or the like. It’s saying what is self-evident and blatantly obvious about having “faith” in the unseen and worse. The obvious dangers involved in this, and the snake would have bit you history.

Having faith in the unseen as “told to.” Having faith in the existence of all of those “as told to” people we have never been able to prove existed at all. Having faith in the interpretations about the as told to people who we can’t prove existed, and the total lack of questioning any of this from the get go.

And to make it even worse . . . . the passionate belief in the faith of those interpretations of the as told to and on and on and on.

Nothing comes close to this. No ideology has this trail of centuries and centuries of the non-existent to follow, or this massive accumulation of myth and legend to deal with. No ideology comes remotely close to dynamics of religious belief, because they all at least start somewhere, with actual human beings we know existed, and we have their own words in front of us, and we can study these words, etc. etc. and their entire output is not myth and legend, allegory and poetry, but, instead, at least shoots for some semblance of non-fiction.

Dreher makes the argument that marriage is a wonderful thing and that there is no credible argument against same-sex marriage any longer, except in an alternate universe.

Trader Joe @71,

I did not group all religious people together, and made the important distinction between beliefs and actions. I made the further distinction between those who believe in myths and legends and those who don’t.

I was raised in a Christian household which did not accept the supernatural aspects of Christianity, but did do its best to follow the humanitarian teachings — which could be called a “secular philosophy” in a sense.

Also, I have practiced Zen Buddhism, from that same secular perspective, and found no need to believe in certain myths and legends in a literal sense, but chose to draw lessons from them when it comes to how to live in this world.

To me the key is the literal acceptance of these myths and legends, or understanding them in a poetic sense. In short, I see a major difference between fundamentalists, literalists and other ways of integrating religion in one’s life.

I don’t know you beyond reading a few of your posts here, but I’m guessing you do not fall into the literalists camp.

If so, I wasn’t talking about you at all.

David@73:

Where is this “society which consistently refuses even to pose the question of what is good for society as a whole”? I haven’t seen it. Maybe I’m not looking in the right places.

David: “Fairness originally meant making homosexual practice legal, and ensuring that its practitioners were not discriminated against. What the SSM lobby wanted was extra rights, that others did not have […]”

Well, there you have it. Not fairness at all: extra rights that others don’t have.

There’s no way to have a serious conversation or argument with someone who believes that the right to marry is an extra right that other people don’t have and that fairness has nothing to do with it. Since SSM is now accepted in the U.S, I don’t have to pretend to have that argument.

I would suggest the common thread uniting the worst sources of human impulses, whether explicitly religious or secular, is dogmatism and an (outwardly) unshakable conviction of one’s righteousness.

Once an unassailable truth has been revealed and the one and only path set forth, all is permitted in its name.

@Merkwurdigliebe

My name is Ted Cruz and I approve this message.

@80

Well… this is to a large degree a matter of semantics,* actually, and a trap into which the Western monotheisms unfortunately fall because they popularly perceive God as a personified wizard idol, despite their own core commandment not to do so.

If you rephrase it as the “ultimate authority/power of the universe” (which is what I’m convinced it’s really originally getting at), then you can’t really argue with that on any level. You can’t very well rebel against the universe; you simply have to accept what it throws your way.

* One rather convincing explanation of this phenomenon goes to the subject-verb relation of the Semitic languages – in which (just like in English) every verb must have an express subject. Which creates an unwarranted assumption that there is an actor behind every action. So things can’t just happen, God had to do them.

I side with Donald Johnson:

“ideology can make good people do evil things. It doesn’t have to be a belief in the supernatural”

as against Plume’s quote of Weinberg:
“for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

The salient examples in the 20th century make the point clearly enough, and the fact that they took on some *trappings* of religion is a red herring, or at best an argument for another day.

But what I’d like to know, and I ask from a position of genuine historical ignorance, is the following:
have their been evil, non-religious ideologies that lasted more than 50-100 years?

Hitlerism burned itself out in under 30 years. Leninism had a longer lease on life, but the ideology was deader than a doornail decades before the wall came down.

Have there been long-lasting, multi-generational, non-religious evil ideologies?

If not, then we might be able to say that religion, while not uniquely productive of evil, is uniquely productive of sustained, multi-generational, tradition-founding evil. And that would be kind of interesting around the margins.

Is Dreher still just an Orthodox convert or has he ascended his stone pillar yet?

Various local flavors of national chauvinism have had a fairly long and terrible life, especially in east Asia. We could argue whether to count those as proper ideologies though. But while they are usually quite shallow and rarely go beyond the formula of tribalism + tradition, they are still transmittable ideas affecting human behavior… Memetic prions as opposed to the viruses of ideology, perhaps.

“Donald Johnson wants to say that it’s not religion it’s “ideology,” but how closely the truly pernicious secular ideologies (Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Ayn Randism etc) have resembled religions: they have their prophets (or demigods) their “Bibles,” their litanies, hymnals, costumes, rituals, and above all their demonology. Your extraterrestrial anthropologist would certainly classify all of them as religions — cults if you prefer — and laugh at any attempts to debunk this sensible taxonomy.

Exactly the move I predicted. How about liberal humanitarianism or Western colonialism and not just the religiously driven kind, but the economic ideology that led the British to starve millions of idiots (“Late Victorian Holocausts” is my source there).

But sure, if every ideology is going to be identified as “religious”, then religion is what is needed to make good people do evil things. So the next time an Obama fan defends drone strikes (I have a particular person at another blog in mind), I can say it is religious fanaticism at work. And in a way, yeah. But then everything is religious.

Merk upthread said it best–it’s dogmatism that causes mass slaughter. I like your posts, Plume, and you might think that your brand of Chomskyan anarchism could never be used to justify mass slaughter, but give it a chance–it probably could. I expect fanatical Esperantists could probably justify a linguistic-based genocide, given the opportunity. (Joking–I don’t know any Esperantists. Well, one, but he’s a Methodist, so if he kills someone it’s Wesley’s fault.)

Marriage is a millennial-old institution, that in the last 100 years or so has seen the following changes, some which Dreher approves of:

— the end of couverture laws,
— the end of formal bars against women working in various professions,
— the right of women to have a separate legal existence, even during marriage,
— the right of women to vote,
— the right of married couples to use contraception,
— the right of elderly, infertile and incarcerated to marry,
— no-fault divorce,
— the existence of the Pill,
— the rise of feminism,
— the end of marital rape exceptions,
— the widespread availability, even to single women, of various forms of IVF,
— adoption being allowed to single individuals.

So, no, marriage is no longer about raising kids. It can be about that, but it can be much more (or less, depending on the individuals involved).

Yet after all that, what really sticks in Dreher’s craw is SSM? I get it, at least a little. All the other changes could be ignored. You can simply choose not to see that the nice family in the next pew has only 2 kids, 1 kid, zero kids. But if it’s two guys holding hands, well you can’t not see that!

Donald Johnson,

Oh drat I fell into your wily semantic trap!

Maybe. Every system of belief requires a leap of faith somewhere (even empiricism) so perhaps it’s pretty tricky to parse out the religious from the ideological and the cultic. Still the trappings and behaviors of some nominally secular confederations are a lot more like those of “religions” than are some others — and I suspect that these tend to promote harm more than less leader-obsessed, ritualistic groups. That’s an empirical question that could be resolved.

Offhand I can’t think of many atrocities perpetrated in the name of “liberal humanitarianism” — perhaps you’ll enlighten. But I don’t think you can divorce Western colonialism from Christianity, not with a hose and crowbar. This includes perhaps the “economic ideology” that starved the Indians (?) Irish (?). Many of those God-fearing gentlemen responsible saw their victims as heathens and thus their empathy failed to engage.

Besides, I agree with Plume: many people do evil quite independent of religion. I just happen to think that religion (especially Western religion) is an especially efficient aggregator of the evil tendencies common to us all.

You don’t need to wholesale reverse modernism. You only need to revert back to traditional gender roles. We had those and we had modernism. For a long time, actually. Do you think it was inevitable modernism would change gender roles? That’s pretty idealist. Economics surely played a role. Once these started to erode, the norms upholding sexual choice also started to go. New norms exist, of course–but they are too voluntarist for this crowd.

What the fundamentalists truly want in their heart of hearts is a reversion to traditional gender roles and strict social enforcement thereof. A certain religious interpretation looks like a good vehicle for that. But there are non-religious methods to getting it. And you see a similar rejection of same sex sexual relationships among animists, Hindus and traditionalist Buddhists. And plenty of ardent Jews and Christians are cool with SSM. But if you are cool with it, you are cool with a lot of other things that for others are the erosion of the social fabric itself.

You might need modernism as fuel for the fire but the tinder involves many other social shifts.

That’s why everything goes to hell once SSM is normalized. Everything is hanging by the thread of traditional gender roles and SSM snips the thread.

@Job and others. Oh dear. My point was that the arguments for SSM, although formally couched in terms of fairness and equality, were in fact about something else. This is not actually that hard to understand, and goes back to ways in which we search for some coherent philosophy to guide our thinking in the absence of one which is supernaturally imposed on us. Macintyre’s point (and I don’t have the book in front of me now) was that we no longer have a common starting point or set of concepts in which to discuss. Thus, two Catholics (I suppose) could discuss the question of SSM and disagree strongly, but would be doing so within a commonly agreed ethical framework. That would not be possible between (say) a catholic traditionalist and some of the readers of this blog. For non religious-traditionalists, which I suspect is most of us, we need another set of guiding principles than those revealed by some divine figure. The dominant (though not the only) principles of the moment are those based around concepts of equality and rights, both modern ideas. It’s natural that defenders of SSM would express themselves in those terms, just as in earlier ages they would have used different frameworks.
I presume Job @93 is being deliberately obtuse, since I obviously said the opposite of what he implies. Old fashioned left-wing thinking (maybe its a generational thing) was concerned with universal rights, so of course you had the same rights irrespective of your color, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin etc. A lot of progressive social activity in the 60s and 70s was aimed precisely at establishing and defending those rights. But rights have now become a competitive, aggressive, market-based struggle between identity groups. You can argue for SSM as an equality issue if you like (personally it doesn’t bother me at all as an idea) but only by stretching the concept of equality to breaking point. The point however is not what you or I think, but that conversations on this kind of topic tend to become very rancorous very quickly (see the discussion about religion above for another example) because people simply don’t start from the same premises.

@72 Plume
I’m not sure I took from the comment @67 quite the qualifications (i.e. literalists only) that you assert in 72, but thats fine. In religion there is never a clear line that says “mythology starts here” and two pilgrims in perfectly good faith can draw the line at different points. Your point seems aimed most exclusively at those who choose to be intollerant regardless of their line drawing and on that I’d concur.

Where I think I differ, and in-line with the some of the subsequent commentors, is whether religion is a sufficiently unique impetus for intollerance. It most definitely is and has been, but there are are plenitude of other motivations available in different countries and in different eras.

Apropos of Dreher, he seems to be looking at the end of a parade and being disappointed that its different from the beginning of the parade without being able to appreciate that a parade wouldn’t be a parade if it was the same thing over and over.

Certainly one big problem for religions in general is the distinction between certitude and certainty. Faith is a super(natural)glue that bonds them far too often, impregnable to rational distinction.

I find it vaguely obnoxious that “social justice” is being treated as equivalent to “radical personal autonomy.” It is no way. It is the wing of liberalism that rejects radical personal autonomy. This is rather explicit. On virtually every major issue on which social justice draws criticism from anyone other than actual conservatives, it does so because its norms and arguments are critical or and incompatible with radical personal autonomy.

I’d expect (it’s not an area where I’m an expert) that any strong social ideology, in a society with a religious ideology, will become entangled with religious views.

I do not think that strong-form racism required a religious ideology; you see it in societies with widely differing religious forms. It’s widespread in the US, in Great Britain, in Spain, in China, in India…

I guess I should also add- I find it more than vaguely annoying that people in comments (and even the OP!) keep acting like Dreher just suddenly started having a problem with modernity when it involved SSM. No, he didn’t. Even the linked article is really explicit about that. His objections to SSM are, explicitly, built on more foundational moral intuitions he holds about the proper way society should treat sexuality, and the importance of strong moral norms as a guiding force for human behavior.

I don’t agree with him on… uh, any of that. But I can at least read the words on my screen and remember them long enough to comment. Come on.

Donald,

Merk upthread said it best–it’s dogmatism that causes mass slaughter. I like your posts, Plume, and you might think that your brand of Chomskyan anarchism could never be used to justify mass slaughter, but give it a chance–it probably could. I expect fanatical Esperantists could probably justify a linguistic-based genocide, given the opportunity. (Joking–I don’t know any Esperantists. Well, one, but he’s a Methodist, so if he kills someone it’s Wesley’s fault.)

Thanks for that. In general, with exceptions, I try not to say never, though I fail more than I want to. So, no, it’s actually not my belief that libertarian socialism could never, ever be used to justify mass slaughter . . . . but I think it would take an enormous pretzelization/distortion/perversion of things to do so, whereas other isms have texts which just flat out revel in slaughter. The three monotheisms of the Levant, for example, have sacred texts which feature genocide, ordered by their god, repeatedly. And the Christian End Goal — if one takes it literally — is the mother of all genocides. Everyone on earth dies if they don’t accept the Christian god. And it doesn’t even stop there. These poor souls are condemned to eternal torment in the Christian hell, which is itself a sign of sociopathic imagination.

As far as I know, Chomsky and the leftist intellectual history he draws from and agrees with . . . just doesn’t have this ingredient.

So, yes, any vision of “how things should be” can be bastardized, perverted, hijacked, made grotesque. Any vision can be abused and misused. But some visions present us with all the key ingredients up front, explicitly, and we don’t have to dig deep for the underlying id or subtext or read between the lines. It’s just there. In plain sight. Throw in that ultimate, never-to-be questioned cosmic authority and it’s a very dangerous mix . . . . which takes us back to Chomsky and left-anarchism in general, by way of great contrast. One of its main pillars is:

Always question authority. Always question assumptions. Make them justify their authority, non-violently, democratically. Treat it as a temporary loan from us, from we the people, not a permanent sinecure, etc.

No gods, no masters.

Anderson @111,

The things is, the bible does have injunctions against same sex relations. But it also, as mentioned upthread (76), depicts a god who tells his chosen people to kill in his name for truly insane reasons. Which should call into question all of his injunctions. All of them. If some authority figure is crazed enough to demand the death penalty for unruly children, divorcees, people who get tattoos, women who are raped but fail to scream out loudly enough, and brides who aren’t virgins on their wedding night . . . . among dozens of other truly despicable and insane “thou shalt nots” . . . . this is clearly not someone we should ever follow. And that’s not even counting his multiple genocides and his ultimate End of Days finale.

The beauty of Christianity, Judaism and Islam — when it appears — stems primarily from human beings struggling to find truth, justice and beauty in the face of extreme sadism, injustice and ugliness . . . . all too often created by their god himself. I find it, in many ways, a (a very hopeful) testament to the potential greatness of the human spirit that we work so hard to find those roses in deep dark swamps . . . . and that we keep doing this, decade after decade, century after century.

Anderson, that’s a very good way to put it:

“Those religions, in their brighter moments, are triumphs of interpretation over texts.”

@Merkwürdigliebe Maybe. I thought it could explain why they think everything will totally fall apart same sex couples can marry–and therefore have socially sanctioned relationships. The family in their minds is patriarchal in structure–and there needs some kind of rigid boundary over who does what and who is what–particularly for social authority to be apparent. I know of no modern authoritarian who did not persecute same sex relationships and valorize traditional gender roles in some way or other. It’s such a recurrent motif of social disorder for there to be any mixups. Think ‘Rebel Without A Cause’ where the dad wears an apron and brings James Dean’s mom dinner on a tray and therefore James Dean is ruined forever.

But if it is about sex itself and sex for pleasure I guess the undermining comes from the fact that everyone will be able to screw everyone and then no one will be afraid to leave their wife for the boy next door. The reason I didn’t think it was this is that why get all bent out of shape over marriage as a result? Marriage keeps the lid on sex.

Parse,

I couldn’t care less about the institution of marriage, and the talk about “traditional marriage” is nonsense. What was “traditional” in most of the world for thousands of years was men being able to marry several women and treat them as virtual slaves. Those women, who were often just girls, had little to no say in the matter up until the 20th century, and in some parts of the world, they still don’t. In America, we still had legal marital rape on the books in dozens of states until 1981. Not to mention the way children have been abused within the context of marriage and the nuclear family.

My thing is that it’s flat out wrong to treat gay people as second, third or fourth class citizens and to deny them equal protection under the law. And I detest the “faith-based” aspect of the argument, and am against it being allowed one iota of impact on civic law. I think it’s wrong that religion can be used in a secular society to privilege believers above non-believers, and to enable their imposition of their views on others. The easy answer for one’s religious beliefs being against it, don’t. Just don’t marry someone of the same sex, if your beliefs proscribe this. But you damn sure need to provide public accommodations and issue marriage certs regardless of your beliefs. We don’t live in a theocracy, thank goddess.

I see it as a stretch to say you don’t want to strengthen the institution, therefore you are against same sex marriage. If your aim is to weaken it, then you would have to apply the same opposition to hetero marriages as well. As in, y0u’d just be against anyone getting married, and you wouldn’t differentiate between same sex or hetero.

Is that your stance?

The talk of “erosion of society” is an example of the fake debate I spoke of earlier. Dreher and the conservatives claim that they don’t want SSM because erosion of society, but it’s a fake-out. You could spend a hundred years producing figures showing no erosion, and they wouldn’t care – they would still oppose SSM.

Their real reason is because literal Paul/Leviticus, but they can’t admit that, because that reason means nothing to anyone who does not accept Paul/Leviticus as authorities.

Though I’m banned over there, one of the reasons I still like to visit is things like this, where, after page on page of telling people they need to re-adopt the old disciplines and rituals of the Church (of whichever variety he’s currently following) and reject the spineless decadent indulgence of modern liberalism, he’ll come out with

Antwerp, Belgium. I’m in Flanders this weekend for a very long overdue visit to a good friend. For the occasion I’ve made a brief suspension of my no-meat Lenten discipline, in order to eat one of my favourite things: friet met stoofvlees, fries covered in Flemish beef stew (cooked in beer—of course!)

It’s like his fondness for the Stones- “Lord, give me the Ben-Op; but not just yet.

the truly pernicious secular ideologies (Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Ayn Randism etc)

Oh Lord, don’t ever stop.

Late to this thread, but there is another meta-elegaic aspect to both Dreher’s complain and his readers: they seem to know (or at least sort-of get) that they cannot win an argument with people who do not share their premises, and that the hell of vigorous defenses of tradition is that they are self-eroding after a short time.

All those conservatives demanding that everyone think about how unthinkable gay marriage was ended up eroding the very thing they relied on, which was a vaguely Haidtian sense that homosexuality is somehow impure.

(The canon died the same way. The argument about who goes on the canon was never settled, but the canon itself was over when people not represented on it became strong enough, within the academy, to start arguing about it’s construction and purpose.)

And the most famous backfire of a Dreher-like willingness to argue, out loud, for doubling down on conservative virtues, came from Scalia, who in U.S. v. Windsor ended up penning the most cogent argument in favor of gay marriage:

The real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by “‘bare … desire to harm’” couples in same-sex marriages. How easy it is, indeed how inevitable, to reach the same conclusion with regard to state laws denying same-sex couples marital status.

I see it as a stretch to say you don’t want to strengthen the institution, therefore you are against same sex marriage. If your aim is to weaken it, then you would have to apply the same opposition to hetero marriages as well. As in, y0u’d just be against anyone getting married, and you wouldn’t differentiate between same sex or hetero.

Is that your stance?

Yes, it is.

@123,

And no, not even “literal” Paul/Leviticus, whatever that means.

@123,

“Their real reason is because literal Paul/Leviticus, but they can’t admit that, because that reason means nothing to anyone who does not accept Paul/Leviticus as authorities.”

I agree. But, again, why the cherry picking? If they truly believe their god is infallible, omniscient, above all questioning and the ultimate Grand Poobah of cosmic authorities, then why not also push for the dozens upon dozens of other “abominations” he lists, with their attendant death penalties too?

I would still be radically opposed to everything they stood for, but could at least grant them consistency of principle — if they did that. They pretty much ignore 99.9% of what their god condemns and latch on to one or two pieces of the sociopathic puzzle to support.

After decades of trying to discuss this with fundies, trying to understand why they do this cherry picking, I’ve given up. And I don’t see why we, as a secular society, should have to walk on eggshells for them. They haven’t earned this “sensitivity” toward their views, feelings, etc. etc. Their doctrines and dogmas and orthodoxies simply don’t warrant “respect.”

I just like to ask why they don’t seem to like this verse all that well:

“Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”

I suppose the answer is “I don’t want to be perfect.” (Bring on the Belgian poutine!)

Traditionalism is maybe a natural consequence of dying traditions, but it also actively corrodes them.

Salem @139 and 127,

Given that you said this (@127), and only this:

“Oh Lord, don’t ever stop.”

I’m guessing no one got your point, if your point was as stated @139.

But, going from 139, I can now respond by saying the history of capitalist destruction dwarfs that of Stalin and Mao, many times over, if we go by sickness, death, wars and environmental destruction. It’s not at all close.

Lovers of capitalism — especially right-libertarians — spend most of their time condemning the Soviet Union and Maoist China, while completely ignoring the far greater (and much longer term) horrors wrought by capitalism, which are ongoing. They ignore its history of mass slaughter, pillage and plunder, slavery, wage-slavery, Dickensian and Darwinian hells . . . its mass theft of land from “the peasants,” from indigenous peoples, Native Americans, the enslavement of those peoples and the mass theft of natural resources.

There never would have been a capitalist system if not for this death and destruction, rape, pillage and plunder. It never would have gotten off the ground, nor would it be sustainable. And it is the first economic system in history with an internal imperialist logic. No other economic system before it had imperialism baked in, as one of its laws of motion. All previous imperialism came about from political and aristocratic foundations and drives. Capitalism is the first economic system to be organically imperialistic, whether or not the politics match up.

See the seminal, classic, essential study by Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, for the best single description of what makes capitalism unique and unprecedented, and why.

See also Michael Perelman’s must-read study, The Invention of Capitalism. He is especially good on primitive accumulation and in his usage of political economists, like Smith and Ricardo, in their own words.

There is a bit of a straw-man going on with the arguments around the literal interpretation of the bible, in that throughout much, and I would even go so far as to say most, of the history of the three main Abrahamic monotheisms, interpretation of scripture and law has been the norm and literal interpretation has not.
Judaism has not taken a literal interpretation of the Talmudic law since sometime before Roman occupation – basically the last 2000 years – instead focusing on an ever-evolving series of commentary, in which multiple completely contradictory interpretations of the same scripture are completely normal (and all considered true). There are a few exceptions like the Karaites, but the bulk of Judaism follows the rabbinic tradition
Christianity dispensed with much of the old law with the notion that Christ was the new covenant, which in and of itself is an interpretation of some pretty ambiguous passages in John and the Pauline letters. The dietary laws are explicitly dispensed with in Matthew 15:11*. And for much of Christian history under the Catholic Church there were a whole batch of provisions that were designed to allow and accommodate local traditions and customs that had nothing to do with anything in the bible.
Up until the 19th century there was pretty universal understanding that Christian scripture was not to be read literally, but that much of it was allegorical and metaphoric, and needed to be interpreted. This did not mean that there was wide-open-interpret-as-you-will toleration – those disputes were often quite bloody – but they were disputes over interpretation. It was only in the mid-late 19th century that there developed a minority Christian movement to read the bible literally, and even that was largely an illusion. The Hebrew and Christian bibles are too scattered and contradictory to make any kind of coherent literal sense. The result was that you have people like Pat Robertson arguing that Adam and Eve’s children all married each other, and that sibling incest was OK back then, because they were closer to Eden, and therefore less stained by sin, so there were none of the harmful genetic mutations that are behind the incest taboo.

So really, Christians have not had an issue with shellfish, or tattoos, or wearing mixed fabrics for the last 2000 years, and punishment of adultery and other such things have been governed by local traditions rather than the Talmudic laws. For the most part, they have followed interpretations and theological arguments that give reasons for why certain portions of the old-testament should be followed, and others should not. But to somehow attach these as Christian beliefs, or claim that they should be Christian beliefs, is to argue for with something that even those who claim to read the bible literally don’t follow. So while bringing it up makes for some fun reducto ad absurdum, it doesn’t really address what motivates modern religious conservatives. It is like attacking evolution by pointing out flaws in The Origin of Species, when evolutionary scientists are like “there’s this thing called DNA we discovered a few decades back…”

(*it is also worth pointing out that if Matthew 15:11 frees Christians from following the dietary laws, it also clearly permits gay sex, so long as it is oral.)

Plume @129 – There is actually a lot of scholarship on the historic roots of Christian anti-Semitism, and it really does not support the ideas that it originated in some “Christ killer” justification (though that came later). Generally it is believed that Christianity adopted certain anti-Semitic frameworks when it spread into the Greek and Roman populations. Originally Christianity was a debate between Jews as to what the proper course of Judaism should be, and all of those “you generation of vipers” statements and attacks on Jews in places like Matthew and Mark were clearly meant to be one Jew talking to another. But once Christianity spread to Greek and Roman communities, then it was like “you aren’t those Troglodytes we heard about who don’t eat bacon are you?” and then Christians suddenly decided they were Not-Jews.

steven,

Lotsa good points.

And our involvement in Vietnam was primarily a matter of making sure our capitalists could make massive profits there, which might be shut off from them if “Communism” took hold. We are responsible for more than three million civilian deaths in just that war . . . and roughly 2-4 million in Korea, which also was primarily about keeping capitalist markets open. The vast majority of our “official” wars in the 20th and 21st centuries, along with dozens of coups, covert wars, covert backing of right-wing dictators and the like . . . . these were all about protecting, defending and expanding capitalism globally.

Throw in the famine you talk about, in Ireland, in India and in pretty much every British, American and European colony, along with flat out chattel slavery and slave-like working conditions . . . and you’ve got tens of millions more deaths attributed directly to capitalist practices. The Black Book of Capitalism estimates several hundred million deaths directly attributed to capitalism, and as many as a billion if we add indirectly. Hell, just cigarettes alone kill millions of smokers every single year worldwide, and hundreds of thousands non-smokers. In America, it’s roughly 400,000 and 44,000, respectively.

If anyone has to justify their allegiances and ideologies, it’s capitalists.

Patrick @ 149: all good points. Although I don’t think it’s so easy to dismiss “organic society” as nonsense. The idea is often used as cover for nonsense, but there is a core of value there, just not necessarily a core that lends itself either to conservative or to progressive agendas.

@ragweed: you don ‘t use html for paragraph [breaks]. Double return at the end of the last sentence of the para does the trick.

Attributing the horrible deaths in Cambodia simply to Khmer Rouge bad minds excuses the US war. Years and years ago it was common to estimate one million dead. As the realization that the bombing disrupted the hydraulic economy of Cambodia, and must have caused many, many deaths, the number of dead was doubled…apparently to make sure the Khmer Rouge were worse.

I know some of the scholars involved in this revisionism. Attributing their careful analysis to a desire “to make sure the Khmer Rouge were worse” is both stupid and rude.

steven @149: Did I really imply all those things? Sorry, I didn’t mean to. — george

I don’t care about Dreher’s views and haven’t been closely following the thread, but I wonder whether steven johnson views Eric Hobsbawm as a ‘propagandist’ when he writes (The Age of Extremes, p.380-81, emphasis added):

Stalin…was an autocrat of exceptional, some might say unique, ferocity, ruthlessness and lack of scruple. Few men have manipulated terror on a more universal scale. There is no doubt that under some other leader of the Bolshevik Party the sufferings of the peoples of the USSR would have been less, the number of victims smaller. Nevertheless, any policy of rapid modernization in the USSR, under the circumstances of the time, was bound to be ruthless…. Difficult though it may be to believe, even the Stalinist system, which once again turned peasants into serfs attached to the land and made important parts of the economy dependent on a prison labour force of between four and thirteen millions (the Gulags) (Van der Linden, 1993) almost certainly enjoyed substantial support, though clearly not among the peasantry (Fitzpatrick, 1994).

This is from a roughly 20-year-old book by a leftist historian who was a member of the Communist Party for a large chunk of his life. Not even Hobsbawm describes the Stalinist system as a matter of some “kangaroo courts and administrative punishments” (to quote the comment @149).

The Stalin vs Hitler body-count contest is mostly simply tedious. But it’s telling that almost all the feverishly-obsessed counters omit the 40 million plus dead of World War II in Europe from Hitler’s total, despite near-universal agreement that Hitler started the war and the centrality of aggressive war to Nazi doctrine. It’s like “oh, well, everybody did war..”

near-universal agreement that Hitler started the war

If you use the most-common starting point (the invasion of Poland), Hitler and Stalin BOTH started the war. (Also, I’m not sure where 40 million comes from, unless it includes late-30’s USSR deaths, which are very difficult to blame on Germany.)

Salem @163,

I’ve never seen you here before. We have no history of discussing anything. So not sure where you get off saying “another of your tedious rants on capitalism,” but, whatever.

I didn’t blame Rand for what came before her, obviously. But I do blame her for giving (faux) intellectual underpinnings for otherwise despicable, sociopathic beliefs, and egging on millions of Americans — especially young, white, Christian right-wingers — to turn their own selfishness and sense of victimhood into a movement. That movement has greatly influenced many Congress critters, governors, mayors, state reps and scads of CEOs, which in turn has made it easier for them to treat their fellow human beings like shit, and the earth as their cash cow.

Now, if you want to defend Rand, I suggest you engage with someone else. I despise her and everything she and her followers stand for, so it would be a waste of your time and mine.

Returning to repeat my earlier point and more importantly, to provide a complicating link–

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/02/fernando-cardenal-rip

Weinberg’s statement was simply wrong–religion is not the only thing that can make a good man do evil things. All the evidence regarding how religion has inspired countless atrocities is true (or largely true–I wouldn’t accept every individual claim), but it doesn’t support Weinberg’s statement. This is elementary logic.

Now on the link– someone might try to argue that only religion can inspire a person to the kind of moral greatness attributed to Cardenal in that post. They could point to people like Dorothy Day, etc… And this would be equally illogical.

@SamChevre 164

According to wikipedia, the total death toll of ww2 was

“c.70,000,000 to c.85,000,000” people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

so I’m not sure why the 40,000,000 number for Europe sounds strange to you, if anything it sounds small.

Of course, the religious might take the view that religion is a path by which people come to distinguish deliberately good and ethical behavior from chaotic impulse, and not incidentally acquire (and generate) the social support and spiritual motivation to act accordingly. That hypocrisy lurks in the shadows cast by the light religion shines isn’t evidence against religion’s power of moral illumination.

In other words, Obergefell was not a case that rested on an equation of homosexuality and heterosexuality. It was a case that held sex was not of the essence of marriage.

I’m not sure of the logic behind this, unless you are under the impression that gay people don’t have sex. I give you my personal assurance that they do.

Trader Joe @173,

No. I’m really big on nature and nurture. A positive environment helping to bring out the best in all of us. I also believe a negative environment can suppress the good and reward the bad, or give it wings, etc. And all the variations between good and bad.

Obviously, it’s complex.

This is why I favor the kinds of systems that have never been tried on any national scale, and it’s why I despise the one currently in place. Because I think the one currently in place rewards selfishness, competition, pits us against each other needlessly, focuses far too much on climbing the ladder instead of living, loving, caring for each other now, in the present, here. I think hierarchies, especially towering hierarchies, bring out the worst in humans, and we need to flatten them as much as possible. And we shouldn’t be thinking about rewards in heaven, especially not on an individual basis. It’s hard enough to focus on the present. John Lennon really said it beautifully in Imagine.

Other key studies recently: It’s been shown that children have an innate sense of fairness and equality, which is later beaten out of them. Several studies have shown that when it’s left up to little kids, they will insist that toys and food be apportioned equally to everyone in a room, even if it means extras are thrown out. They see this as “fair.” They see it as unfair if one child has more of something than another.

And, in Virginia, a recent experiment showed that humans, when confronted by threats to their safety, have roughly the same brain patterns when they see themselves under threat or their friends . . . and that merely holding the hand of that friend calms those brain waves.

We often unlearn things that are quite positive, naturally, and learn things that encourage selfishness and brutality. I just don’t see the three monotheisms of the Levant as effective sources for the good. They have far too much negative history and deeply offensive texts . . . and we can easily find their positive elements elsewhere without that baggage.

Ragweed,

I agree with a lot of that. It does depend on the time, place, era and denomination. But even if you go with the “good deeds” angle, you still have to look at what were considered “good deeds” by the originators of church doctrine. They had nearly as many bizarre and truly despicable rules and expectations about purity, cleanliness, gender, power relations within families, etc. etc. as the monstrous laws depicted in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. “Christianity” was still primarily a Jewish sect for its first three centuries, and it really didn’t break free from the vast majority of Iron Age repression until well after the Enlightenment, even in “progressive” circles . . . and it seems not to have done this yet among right-wing evangelicals.

I’m just not seeing a religiously based source for the good things done by Christians (or Jews or Muslims) over the centuries — as strange as they may sound. I actually think they do good things despite Church history and the original tenets of Christianity, which, after all, call for an End Times finale of mass slaughter of every human on the planet who does not accept Jesus as savior.

Yes, you and many others can respond that not every Christian believes these things literally, etc. But that actually means you reject the words in the bible and what they call for. Thankfully, of course. But it’s still a rejection. As you would also reject Yahweh’s call for dozens and dozens of death penalties in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, etc. Again, thankfully.

So where does that rejection come from? Since it’s a rejection of Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) texts, how can it be religiously based?

hix,

I think “belief” became a key point of attraction for converts, and was pushed by Paul to bring in gentiles. Jews were expected to conform to extremely tough laws, rules, regulations, etc. etc. in order to get “right” with their god. Belief wasn’t enough by any means for Jews. Paul tried to expand the pool of potential converts by saying you didn’t have to obey Jewish dietary and other types of laws. Belief was more important than anything else . . . . but ragweed is correct that this didn’t really take on critical mass until the Protestant Reformation. It was, however, in embryonic form as early as Paul, his followers and their wresting control of the Church from James and his followers.

“Yes, you and many others can respond that not every Christian believes these things literally, etc. But that actually means you reject the words in the bible and what they call for. Thankfully, of course. But it’s still a rejection. As you would also reject Yahweh’s call for dozens and dozens of death penalties in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, etc. Again, thankfully.

So where does that rejection come from? Since it’s a rejection of Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) texts, how can it be religiously based?”

Why should any of these texts be read literally? Why is a failure to read the texts literally a rejection of the texts? In some cases it is non-sensical to take the texts literally. You keep citing the end-times slaughter, and yet I think Revelations (and much of John for that matter) is clearly an example of a text that was allegorical to begin with and encoded with many levels of meaning, none of which were ever meant to be literal. The Talmudic laws and the various reasons for death penalty are part of the historical record of a people. Why do they need to be followed strictly 4000 years later, when god sent a new revelation that overturned many of those laws, some explicitly, with Christ (for Christians)? or when the laws were no longer possible after the destruction of the Temple that was at the heart of them?

Or to put it another way – what theological justification is there to read scripture literally? Judaism dispensed with that notion at least two millennia ago. What religious justification is there for doing otherwise?

[Side point – the Gospels of Luke and John, and many of the Pauline letters for that matter, were not part of a Christianity that considered itself a branch of Judaism, which is why they thought Jesus was a divine being, as opposed to Mark and Matthew, where he wasn’t.]

I’m just not seeing a religiously based source for the good things done by Christians (or Jews or Muslims) over the centuries — as strange as they may sound.

It’s Christ. Christian’s believe Jesus turned up, preached his revelation, founded the church and that they have a personal relationship with God. That’s the source. You don’t believe this and don’t have access to it, so you assume Christianity is basically just a book. It’s not.

But that actually means you reject the words in the bible and what they call for. Thankfully, of course. But it’s still a rejection… So where does that rejection come from? Since it’s a rejection of Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) texts, how can it be religiously based?

Jews wrote the books that form the OT roughly 800BC-100BC, Christians wrote the NT 50AD-150AD. These then were turned into bibles (very late, the Catholic canon became dogma at Trent in 1442AD). So the important bit of Christianity is tradition and the Church, not scripture. Bibles are the product of the church, not the other way round. You can’t deduce Christianity from the bible, it an oral tradition that existed before bibles.

Ragweed,

I’m not suggesting it should be read literally. At all. I’m tremendously grateful than many Christians don’t. My point is that the good things about organized religion develop largely as a rejection of the texts used as the ostensible foundation for that religion — rejection or selective avoidance and emphasis of certain texts.

The Christian Church has for centuries referred directly to those texts when it wants to claim “god said” this or that in order to provide authoritative support for doctrine. Since it is a religion of revelation, it must do this. It can’t (generally) point to things unsaid, or the flock will just take this as the opinion of the church and not divine revelation, which often weakens the force of their doctrines and dogmas. Yes, they can often squeeze out things that don’t exist in the bible, like the Trinity, or brush past key texts that render everything else moot, like Jesus’s prophecy of the End Times happening in the 1st century . . . . but this does take masterful sophistry by the Church, and they can’t go to that well often.

Also, it’s important to remember, when one talks about the supposed early severance from Judaism: Jesus was a Jew, raised by Jews, surrounded by Jews, and he taught the coming of the kingdom of the Jewish god. Everything he said, at least as recorded in the bible, indicates he had no intention whatsoever of founding a new religion, or that he himself believed he was god or the son of god. That all came much later. He also insisted that he came to fulfill scripture and the laws of the prophets, not revoke them or destroy them. Which is why it’s a bit of a stretch to say the OT can be dismissed. Unless we call it something else. Perhaps Paulism. The early proponents of Jesus as Messiah all thought of him as the Jewish messiah, not something separate and new. From what we know — and it isn’t really very much — most believed he was mortal, not divine, and the “adopted” son of Yahweh, not equal to or the same as the Jewish god.

Again, that all came much, much later. Bart Ehrman is very good on this transformation, as is Richard E. Rubenstein. The latter literally wrote the book in the subject.

dave 187,

Since those teachings exist all over the globe, throughout recorded time, and are in no way unique to Christian cultures, it can’t be said to be dependent on Christian beliefs or the Christian religion. They’re not something that was absent from the world before Christianity came about. They were here before it and widespread.

I’m still trying to find something good that is dependent upon Christian belief or religion itself, rather than humans, regardless of religious affiliation or belief. And I’ve been looking ever since I saw the light at age nine. Grew up in a Christian household, then discovered mythology and comparative religion, and the light bulb went on for me. Over time, this led me from agnosticism to atheism.

Throughout time, all across the world, in thousands of different cultures, humans have had this same desire to get answers to the basics. Why are we here. Why do people die. What happens to us after we die. And they have always sought divine help, protection and support. Thousands of different gods and goddesses. Thousands of names whispering in our heads. If there is only one god, why the multitude? Why did it take 200,000 years before Home Sapiens ever even heard the name Yahweh or Jesus? And why was that only with one small, relatively insignificant tribe, in one small place in the world?

One would think that if they truly were the creators of heaven and earth, there wouldn’t be different gods and goddesses in China, India, Africa, the Americas, Europe, etc. etc. One would think this would have been “revealed” to us 200,000 years ago, or at least with the dawn of the “higher civilizations” like Sumeria. Why is it the case that no one in history has ever worshiped gods and goddesses that were unknown to them via the usual route of cultural transmission? As in, if Christians today, even the most passionate and certain, had been raised in ancient Egypt, they wouldn’t have worshiped Yahweh or Jesus. It would have been Isis, Horus, Osiris, and so on.

It’s all fiction we invent to help us get through the darkness and out of the cave, or find others to fellowship and warmth. We invented the gods and goddesses. They didn’t create us. And we don’t need them in order to thrive and do great things in the world.

@Patrick/EB/RJ:

Any references on the “organic society” thing? I’m vaguely familiar with the term but don’t know a ton about it—and would like to know more. (That, by the way, seemed to me the one interesting subthread on here.)

I don’t have any good links off the top of my head… I’d be googling the same as you. Its a concept that originated with Burke.

But the basic idea is this:

There is a major and traditional strain of conservative thought that argues that societies develop over long periods of time as complex, interdependent sets of values and ways of living, subject to an almost evolutionary pressure that causes values and ways of living that don’t “work,” where “work” means something like “functions well as part of the whole,” eventually die out, leaving behind only values and ways of living that have something to recommend them.

But because society is a complex and interconnected set of values and ways of living, the reasons these things “work” may not be immediately apparent. Specifically, the down stream effects of making widescale changes to the value systems and means of living in a society may be astronomical, but they may not immediately kick in (because values don’t change in an instant) and they may not be easy to identify.

This point of view is generally coupled with a precautionary principle that argues that social engineering and rapid progressive change amounts to monkeying with a complex system without understanding how and why it works, and that we should be extremely reticent to do so unless we can be absolutely sure that we aren’t going to break society in the process.

To give an example, conservatives like Dreher, in fact Dreher specifically, typically draw on these ideas when discussing things like the change from a society endorsement of marriage as a sort of vocation to the current ideal of companionate marriage- in Dreher’s world view, the value shift that led to thinking of marriage in modern terms was a monkeying with the machinery of society without understanding its implications, and in retrospect, people like Dreher view all sorts of changes as having stemmed from it- high divorce rates, out of wedlock births, community breakdown in poor neighborhoods, etc. In fact, I’d be pretty surprised if Dreher doesn’t view that companionate marriage thing as a subset of a larger societal shift he probably similarly opposes, from a sort of role based society in which people find their place within a larger whole, to an individualist society that does a poor job of teaching people what we might call templates for how one “ought to live.” I don’t know everything Dreher writes, but if that’s his view, it would certainly be true to the typical form for conservatives of his apparent type.

Now to be clear, I don’t believe in the organic society concept.

But I’m sure Holbo is aware of it. Which is why I see him as being deeply disingenuous in this thread. Under Dreher’s world view, asking for specific negative consequences to SSM is ridiculous. Under Dreher’s world view, society is like a car being driven blindly down a rocky hillside by progressives, smashing into rock after rock along the way- and gay marriage is like swinging the steering wheel slightly to the left on the way down. At most, its going to change exactly which rocks we hit as we continue to careen out of control. Under Dreher’s world view, the best he can do is advocate maybe hitting the breaks, hoping that we’ll slow a little, and hoping that we don’t hit quite as many rocks on the course we’ve already set for ourselves.

Patrick — thanks! That’s very helpful, tho I am realizing that I am rather more familiar with the view than with the term. (Oddly, or not so, Google’s turning up lots of links to Durkheim on organic solidarity!)

In any case, I am very much inclined to agree with you, and will try to find out more.

Cranky Observer @ 193,

The key reconciling concept, for people who believe both (I’m one), is frequently unexpressed, or badly expressed. That is that the revealed truths are both factual, and interpreted in functional rather than dysfunctional ways because the dysfunctional ways didn’t work.

For factuality, there’s a great quip: the reason that you don’t put diesel in your car’s gas tank, and the reason the instruction manual SAYS don’t put diesel in your car’s gas tank, are the same reason; it will stop working if you do that.

I tend to think that the most prominent test, in a U.S. context, is Social Security. A supporter of organic society should, by now, have accepted that our society has come to terms with it, absorbed it or whatever, and that taking it away would now be a larger change than leaving it. But instead the right wants to do away with it. Basically nothing that goes against authority / hierarchy can ever be organic enough to be part of organic society: society always has to be reverted back to before it existed.

@Peter
LFC My comment was not intended to rebut yours, but just a side-note.

Sure, understood, I just figured I’d take the opportunity anyway to clarify what I meant.

195: it would be (mildly) interesting to pursue the Organic Society aspect further. For example, how do people like Dreher manage to convince themselves that whenever some tradition they particularly like is in decline, that is not evidence of the “organic society” evolving “naturally” as it has always done but must be due to “social engineering”, progressive elites “monkeying with the machinery of society without understanding its implications” etc. Marriage would of course be a prime example.

Ze K at #202 writes: why not simply create a new, parallel, government-sponsored mating contract with the same exactly legal characteristics and consequences?

You mean something separate, but equal?

I tend to think that the most prominent test, in a U.S. context, is Social Security. A supporter of organic society should, by now, have accepted that our society has come to terms with it, absorbed it or whatever, and that taking it away would now be a larger change than leaving it. But instead the right wants to do away with it.

Sure, but if they think that it’s worked out badly, then they can still want to do away with it, on balance. It’s not “never ever make a change,” it’s “changes carry large, unknown risks.” Changing things “back” can never quite happen, for the reasons you point out, but changes “back” should be less risky than novel changes. They would not favour a sudden abolition, because of adaptation, and reliance, and transition costs, but they might favour phasing out the programme over time.

Ze K: If that’s a yes, you may want to look up “separate but equal”, it has some legal history.

To answer your new point: I do regard my preferred mating contract/ritual as superior, which is why I was delighted to vote to allow same sex couples to use it.

Regarding it as superior and voting to prevent same sex couples access is very clearly bigotry.

TM, that’s the product of the Republican party, which had two wings to satisfy: its business elite and its (racist) social conservatives. They sold the conservatives on the need to promote capitalism by equating the later with hard work and just desserts, and equating the losers (particularly the black woman with children) with laziness and greed (the welfare queen). Hence the Republicans could unite these groups and strengthen as a party through issues like welfare reform.

Joe Soss et al’s Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race synthesizes this history very well.

207 et al, this is a red herring. In the US in particular, (hetero) people have always been free to choose whatever marriage contract they prefer. In most of Europe, the legal act of marriage is performed by the state according to state law using a specific legal formula, and the church marriage which people may opt for separately has no legal force in itself. In the US, it is the priest, guru or minister of the church of Star Trek (not sure if that exists but I would be very surprised if it doesn’t) who performs the actual legal act using whatever religious or non-religious language they prefer.

212 agreed, we know who benefits, but it doesn’t really *explain* the inconsistency.

Ze K @216,

The downsides are many. Among them: encouraging more religious nutcase activism on behalf of “changing the meaning” of our system from democratic republic to theocracy.

Seriously. It’s far easier for you to just go about your own business, mind your own business, live and let live. If you are against same sex marriage, don’t get married to someone from the same sex. Problem solved. Case closed.

That works for the Kim Davises of this world, too.

Ze K – you seem to be under the impression that the two sides are gays and traditionalists.

Here in Ireland, the referendum result was 62% Yes to 38% No. Most of the people who voted to allow SSM were not gay, and most of the straight people who voted, voted Yes.

Creating a separate-but-equal civil-marriage-that-isn’t-called-marriage, apart from the legal issues with such a thing, would not satisfy the majority of straight people who want gays to have access to the same civil marriage status.

John Holbo: “…can’t know that until we hear the argument – which I think we still haven’t; so the ball is in Dreher’s court. But it seems like the premises will have to concern the sociology of SSM; not pure MacIntyre-style reflections about philosophical mistakes leading to global tendencies towards social collapse… ”

Dreher may not really care. This has nothing to do with intellect, intellect will be twisted as required; and the sexual fear is a separable issue. The main mechanism seems to be that Dreher is trying to answer his need for further spiritual experience within the framework of traditional ritual religion.

I predict that Dreher’s return-of-ball would continue to exhibit his mistake in believing that traditional religion is the only source of transcendent consciousness.

I further predict that the modernist response will continue to exhibit the opposite mistakes, in believing either 1. that transcendent consciousness doesn’t exist, or 2. that it is attainable by modern moral codes or Dylan lyrics, and/or 3. it is fully achieved in epiphanies, creative flow states, appreciations of nature or sunsets, etc.

I think we should ask everybody involved in this conversation, including Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, to enroll into one of the many university-sanctioned programs of psychedelic experience. Stop wasting your own time, people!

Then afterward, ask everybody to write a book review of this excellent new release from Columbia University Press:
http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Knowledge-Psychedelics-Religious-Experiences/dp/0231174063

@222,

Thing is, very few Americans know what “capitalism” is, how it came to be, its effects, or what makes it unique and unprecedented. Fewer still if they’re conservatives. They tend all too often to confuse “capitalism” with commerce and trade, and think the latter can be used interchangeably with the former.

They also don’t realize that America wasn’t close to being a capitalist society until after the Civil War. Prior to that (at least) 80% of Americans weren’t capitalists, didn’t work for capitalists, could avoid capitalist markets, worked for themselves, were small farmers, craftspersons, artisans, and engaged in self-provisioning and small scale production. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that we flipped that 80/20.

See Steve Fraser’s The Age of Acquiescence for the history. And for the (conveniently) forgotten history of American anticapitalist resistance.

They also really need to read The Origin of Capitalism, by Ellen Meiksins Wood, and The Invention of Capitalism, by Michael Perelman. The former is possibly the best single description of what makes capitalism unprecedented and why . . . and the latter is among the best books ever written on primitive accumulation and the impact of the early political economists on the rise of capitalism . . . . how it rose and why.

Ze K writes So you divorce and get maried, thus making the conscientious choice.

No, thank, I’d rather extend equal rights to gays than jump though hoops to avoid offending bigots.

But perhaps your scheme could be used in other areas. Saudi women could be allowed to chip even though they could still not drive. We could have Miscarraige for mixed race couples, Totes for women, faux-reedom for blacks.

It could catch on!

But does “Holbo” = “panda”?

Random comments.

1. Having two types of marriage seems like both a giant waste and an arguable first amendment violation.

In the status quo, I am in no way obliged to personally view your marriage as equally valid to mine. If I want to join some sect that claims that marriages are fraudulent unless you jump through some theological hoop, that’s my religious right. But that’s a personal judgment. I have to accept that the public sphere is shared, and that my personal religious judgments only extend to that territory that is properly private and my own.

Creating multiple forms of marriage so that I can pretend that my true marriage isn’t being equated to that of you heathen non believers, well, I know excessive entanglement precedent took a lot of shots from our recently deceased friend, but this doesn’t seem to be an area the government needs to fiddle with. It seems more appropriate to do the usual- let everyone have their own churches that so their own things and preach awful stuff about each other, and stay out of it. One legal marriage, a million private religious opinions on what counts as religiously valid marriage, done. Everyone is being treated equally.

2. Dreher may be a reactionary who pretends to be a Burkean conservative, but if he explicitly argues in Burkean conservative terms and you try to refute him by imputing reactionary politics to him, refuting those, and declaring that you’ve defeated his position, you are indeed derping. If nothing else, at least make explicit that you’re not answering what your opponent said, you’re reconstructing what you think he meant and attacking that.

3. TM at 203- the usual argument is to either 1) claim that the shift in attitudes is being imposed top down by the courts and media, or 2) claim that the underlying problem is essentially the way modernity causes all cultural change to happen too fast across the board, and that conservatism is a needed break on an out of control train. I personally don’t buy it, to be clear. I don’t think the entire “society was the way it was because it works and changing it might break things” argument works. For every example you can name of a cultural group having it’s traditional way of living broken by modernity sending it’s members into a spiral of social distress, you can make another that adapted just fine, or still another where insistence of maintaining the old ways in the face of modernity seems to be at the root of their distressed situation.

233. “the usual argument is to either 1) claim that the shift in attitudes is being imposed top down by the courts and media, or 2) claim that the underlying problem is essentially the way modernity causes all cultural change to happen too fast across the board, and that conservatism is a needed break on an out of control train.”

Again it’s interesting that traditionally, when argument 2) was made by conservatives (e.g. the Popes – not just the current one but really any modern Pope), it included at least some suspicion of capitalist materialism. A “conservatism” that laments cultural change but embraces its major driver – capitalism – is a contradiction in terms.

TM makes good points. If we had Christian Democrats as a voting option in the US–and if organized religion in the U.S. had a different history, maybe–someone like Dreher would see that as an option, or might have twenty years ago, and wouldn’t have been politicized the way he was. It seems like the point is mostly academic, though.

But Ze K – your wish is already granted! No-one wants to force religions to marry gay people in their rituals or sacraments or whatever, just like we don’t oblige them to remarry divorced people.

We had a civil partnership law in Ireland too. Quite rightly, activists treated it as a stepping stone only to full equality. The same will happen in Italy, and the folks who fought civil unions will suddenly decide they are great if marriage is on the table.

Ze K- I agree that the only thing people are entitled to is the legal component of marriage. But I don’t see why that would entail needing a civil union setup as opposed to the status quo, in which we’re all free to privately believe that each other’s marriages aren’t “real” in a religious sense, if that’s what we’re wont to do.

We already have civil unions. They’re called “marriages.”

Ze K 247: That was some very effective trolling but it should be enough. Please no more feeding the troll.

Ze K writes @#247: There is a large number of your fellow citizens who perceive ‘marriage’ in quasi-religious, traditionalist terms, not as a legal contract.

I would strongly advise any such people to consult a lawyer before entering into any form of marriage.

I don’t believe Dreher has any consistent philosophy. I think he just takes whatever he read last week and tries to work it into the usual cultural-conservative talking points. I don’t think he cares much for the detail of “After Virtue”, beyond the executive summary that Modern Liberalism Is Bad.

OK, we’re all agreed that Dreher is a reactionary in addition to being a Burkean conservative (or possibly, faking being a Burkean conservative). This is the peanut butter and chocolate that conservatives long ago smashed together. What seems to distinguish Dreher is the role reversal of who he imagines kicking out of society. Usually conservatives are all about sending various social rejects to the camps. Dreher has given up on that and is envisioning retreating to a sanctuary with like-minded people.

But there’s nothing about this that is really argumentatively different, is there? In both cases there’s supposed to be separation of us and them. When the conservatives imagine victory, they imagine sending us away. When they imagine defeat, they imagine having to seclude themselves.

192 “But because society is a complex and interconnected set of values and ways of living, the reasons these things “work” may not be immediately apparent. Specifically, the down stream effects of making widescale changes to the value systems and means of living in a society may be astronomical, but they may not immediately kick in (because values don’t change in an instant) and they may not be easy to identify.”

211 “And as often has been pointed out, divorce and teen pregnany rates are highest in the most conservative red states with the highest religious observance. An inconsistency that Dreher et al. simply ignore, which to us ordinary rational people means that they don’t really care about these social effects at all, they are just a pretext for supporting a reactionary agenda”

Case in point:

“The abortion rate was lower … where more women live under liberal abortion laws.”
Why? Because laws restricting abortion tend to be most prevalent in places where contraception and comprehensive sex education are hard to obtain, and in which sex and childbirth outside marriage are anathematised. (…) Western Europe has the world’s lowest termination rate: 12 per year for every 1000 women of reproductive age. The more godly North America aborts 19 embryos for every 1000 women. In South America, where (when the figures were collected) the practice was banned everywhere, the rate was 32. In eastern Africa, where ferocious laws and powerful religious injunctions should – according to conservative theory – have stamped out the practice long ago, it was 38. (…)

Facts, who needs ‘em? Across the red states of the US, legislators have been merrily passing laws that make abortion clinics impossible to run, while denying children effective sex education. In Texas, thanks to restrictive new statutes, over half the clinics have closed since 2013. But women are still obliged to visit three times before receiving treatment: in some cases this means travelling 1000 miles or more. Unsurprisingly, 7% of those seeking medical help have already attempted their own solutions. (…)

The religious conservatives who oppose these measures [contraception etc.] have blood on their hands. They are responsible for high abortion rates; they are responsible for the injury and death of women. And they have the flaming cheek to talk about the sanctity of life.

George Monbiot, http://www.monbiot.com/2016/01/13/sex-pests/

@Rich,

One problem is that it’s not entirely clear how what Dreher’s proposing really could come out of MacIntyre’s argument, because (a) the idea of a new Benedict Option is playing a rhetorical role, a defeatist one at odds with what’s presumably MacIntyre’s preferred doctrine, as the extended analogy John quoted from is, and (b) Dreher and his family
are not in a position to do literally what a Benedict Option would entail, or to call for such a thing for lots of other people in their position, because what it literally calls for is letting lay religion pretty much universally collapse. So what Dreher is actually doing is calling for a kind of adaptation of Russell Fox’s ideas to the right, and using those ideas in support of tradition conservative exclusion. All that part doesn’t really come from MacIntyre.

Lee @263,

Trump’s supporters, in large majorities, significant pluralities or sizable percentages, support denying entrance to all Muslims; shutting down mosques; establishing a database just to track Muslims; outlawing Islam; support the display of the confederate flag; the Southern side in the Civil War; believe Lincoln was wrong to free the slaves; support banning of gay people from America.

(From the NYT)

Measuring Trump Supporters for Intolerance

Our media (with exceptions) have done a tremendous disservice by trying to say good things about his supporters, and more than a few TV pundits have all but mainstreamed Trump’s fascism. It’s not enough to say, or suggest, that it might all be for show — and it might be. They still owe it to Americans to say clearly, and often, that what he proposes, and what his fans support, is fascism.

This is why Ze K has always been my favorite troll! Toleration of Islam isn’t universally accepted yet! Don’t you think your support for the First Amendment is sort of . . . unfair?

“tell me, please, are you just trolling? Am I missing something?”

Does a bear shit in the woods? Is the Pope catholic? (:rolleyes)

Lee @263: Soon we may be running headlong into World War III.

This is quite a shock. Based on your previous predictions, I’ve been looking forward to a future of universal leisured abundance and vibrantly hyperconnected democracy.

Lee A Arnold@263: “Trump is preaching that ol’-time economic nationalism — “get the jobs back, take their oil”, etc. … This was the predominant kind of political-economic argument on ALL sides, just prior to World War II.”

If you had written BOTH sides I would have supposed you might have meant the US Democrats and Republicans, pre-Pearl Harbor. I’m not sure that would have been an accurate description, but I don’t always understand the US.

But since you wrote ALL sides I can only suppose you meant all states involved in the war that started rather earlier. As a description of the arguments prevailing immediately pre-war in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Greece, Jugoslavia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China … well, inaccurate doesn’t begin to describe it.

Which should not be taken to mean that I do not regard Mr Trump with hatred, ridicule and contempt.

Ian Welsh (linked by BW):
What Trump wants to do is to use tariffs to return production to the United States. He has mentioned a 35 percent tariff on cars produced in Mexico, for example.

This will severely hurt the Mexican auto industry and increase immigration pressure. The Trump wall won’t keep it back b.c it’s impossible effectively to wall off a 2000-mile border. A laid-off Mexican auto worker, incensed and driven to despair, will take flying lessons, get his hands on (with the help of a Mexican drug cartel) a small private plane, and manage to fly it directly into the White House while Trump is in residence. Trump will be seriously injured and hospitalized, during which period his vice president, Charlie Sheen, will run the country. Hooray.

Bruce,

Welsh makes a coupla sensible points, but seems to leap over his own remedies, attributing to Trump things he has no intention of doing. Such as, making sure Americans learn how to craft/produce things they can’t right now, or won’t — to make up for those imports they won’t be buying. He’s never talked about investing enough in education, training, trade schools, artisan schools, or doing the necessary government prodding to ensure capitalists shift or add new industries.

And his tax plans — while incredibly vague — call for deep cuts for the rich. He will have YUGE deficits, like every other Republican candidate.

He’s also never supported universal health care in this campaign. Not sure where Welsh is getting that.

Welsh also sounds incredibly naive when he says Trump will tax the financial sector. He’s a billionaire, and highly dependent on that sector, with no history of interest in hurting them. He’s also always been highly dependent on government bailing him out. Several bankruptcies, and he’s always taken advantage of the obscenely unfair way the laws are written to crush the poor and help rich debtors.

Unless he’s writing something for the Onion, most of it is nonsense.

Plume @ 277

Welsh’s view is not my view. I think Trump’s 3rd Grader’s rhetoric is stream-of-consciousness, not anything like a political program.

Welsh is angry, angrier than I am by far, and it doesn’t do his argument any good. But, he has a point about Trump being something other than a neoliberal. In a kleptocracy, set a thief to catch some thieves.

Bruce,

I can see a lot of that. Especially your description of Trump’s speeches. I forced myself to sit through one and came away from it rather amazed at its incoherence. It reminded me of Sarah Palin word salad, though Trump takes this further by often interrupting himself and seemingly having quick discussions, Trump with Trump. Zig zagging all over the place. All in short hand, accented with a lot of hand gestures.

But he has his audience riveted, apparently.

To catch a thief. That’s interesting as well. Perhaps that’s what the Clintons, Obamas and presidents in both parties tell themselves when they appoint the endless stream of folks from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, etc. etc.

We are so screwed.

LFC @ 275

I thought Lee A Arnold @ 263 had a valuable and instructive point.

Political anacyclosis never stops, but it does tend to bring us back around sometimes.

TM #266: “what mechanism would ‘trying to uncover the hypothetical arguments of reactionaries’ avoid bloodletting?”

If it hasn’t happened yet, then either 1. something is holding them back, therefore find out what that is, –and/or– 2. there must a number of people in the middle, as yet unconvinced by them, so make sure you are prepared to counter the arguments that are coming. Doesn’t mean it will work, of course!

Lee A. Arnold @263
You may think I contradict myself. Because as you know (and as you have admonished me), I occasionally argue at Crooked Timber for a hundred comments and more, in order to follow a reactionary interlocutor. This is usually when I don’t understand the underlying psychological mechanism. (And occasionally I pursue the intellectual egotists who write egregiously offensive stupidities. No matter which side they are on.)

See, I believe I understand the underlying psychological mechanism.

[on the Trump issue: As near as I can figure, Trump wins votes because he is, genuinely, the best candidate on the republican podium. He’s pretty terrible, but there’s essentially no criticism you can make of him that can’t be made just as well or stronger about all the other options.]

He described “alienation” more or less an economic condition, a divorce from profits.

For Marx, alienation under capitalism is more like separation from the process and products of one’s own labor (in contrast to an artisan or craftsman, say) and, at a more metaphysical level, from one’s ‘species-being’. Bertell Ollman wrote one of the classic studies on Marx’s concept of alienation. Prob. still in print.

Raisuli @291
Maybe right. OTOH there are U.S.-based companies heavily entangled w China’s export economy, and they might exert pressure in the other direction (i.e., vs. a Trump effort to play ‘hardball’). I don’t know.

Stephen @287: I suppose I am guilty once again of my own sort of fuzzy expressionism, and shouldn’t have written, “just prior to”, but just, “prior to”. Because I find it hard to understand the War Guilt reparations as anything other than born from the same attitude also exhibited by Trump in last night’s debate in the US, for example. The fact that public attitudes later changed, to be more sympathetic to Germany’s plight, then to justify Hitler’s seizure of German-speaking territories, and finally to attempt to avoid more war, does not amount to a sudden acceptance by Depression publics of the wonderful promises of open international economic policy. So this is all I meant, but your isolation of the arising of military dictatorships from the economic-nationalist components in the origin of this chain of causation, suggests that my explanation may not appease you.

294: Then Marxism is really advaita Vendantism, minus the Hegelian immanent Absolute, plus a theory of a quasi-quantifiable relative value for the reflected image.

Re “oversimplification”: Also worth remembering what Marx was arguing against. The emphasis would be extremely different if Marx were arguing against the background of doctrines prevalent in the 20th century or early 21st century anglosphere.

I have no liking whatsoever for Rubio, but watching on youtube just now the clips of the portions of last night’s debate where Rubio questions Trump on health care reveals Trump’s discomfiture and total inability to explain his health care ‘plan’, such as it is, beyond one or two stock phrases.

Trump has less understanding of public policy and issues than an intelligent fourteen-year-old. He is contemptuous of the electorate he purports to empathize with. That contempt is reflected in the fact that he cannot be bothered to even *pretend* to have thought about policy.

Meanwhile kidneystones is concerned about HRC’s flaws and failings. What about Trump’s much larger flaws? kidneystones says little or nothing about them. It’s not just the xenophobia. It’s the basic contempt for the electorate: Trump thinks people are idiots. People are justifiably angry about all sorts of things, but they are not, on the whole, idiots. That’s a main reason I think Trump will lose to the Dem nominee, whoever the nominee is.

Even reading that Lacan passage quoted by mcmanus, I think I’d almost rather read people slinging vile insults on youtube.

Geo,

This is really concise:

“Instead, through the mystification of capitalist property relations, they are separated (“alienated”) from what they have collectively produced and ought collectively to own. To explain how capitalist law and ideology accomplishes this neat trick is the purpose of Marxist theories of alienation.”

And most Americans can’t fathom this. Nor could I as a young person. I, too, had been brainwashed by our system into believing that, of course, the owner of a business gets to own the production of his — at the time, it was pretty much always a male — workers. Now? After exposure to leftist thinkers, especially over the last three decades, it’s difficult for me to see how I could ever have thought that okay — other than noting the brainwashing.

Also, when you bring up Darwin and Marx. Kristin Ross’s excellent (but too brief) Communal Luxury provoked so much thought . . . the text and what I read between the lines. When she mentions how (19th century) Russian evolutionists differed from Darwin about his survival of the fittest. Their take was that we humans survived and thrived not by fighting each other, in direct competition for scarce resources, but in uniting to fight against obstacles in our environment. This led me to think that Darwin may well have been influenced by the ascendant capitalist mode, its competitive laws of motion, its kill or be killed, Grow or Die, survival of the fittest logic . . . . and how that may have crept into his theory. The Russian evolutionists had a different take on the way humans interact, cooperate, survive. They drew different lessons from different economic forms, perhaps.

Yuval Harari’s take seems much closer to the Russians, and is a fascinating update.

The Rise of Humans TED Talk

> Trump has less understanding of public policy and issues than an intelligent fourteen-year-old.

Like I said, he’s clearly, indisputably, the most suitable of the republican candidates.

Aw hell.

The use value of a drill press is making rivets.

The exchange value of the drill press is something like “the depreciated amortized and securitized expected future earnings in a projected global political economy in equilibrium with assumed factors of production blah blah.”

And I am accused of mystification while Krugmanites are hard nosed realists.

Paragraph two above is not an objective reality, the drill press gets exchange value in and only because of a discourse network, a social communication system, overlapping linguistic communities.

Part of this is cybernetics and information theory. But then if you read the Lacan above, I think people are also language. We can know nothing else.

mcmanus @309
can’t respond now. later.

Trump being something other than a neoliberal

It is true that ethno-nationalists are something other than neoliberals. Cold comfort for some of us; apparently warmer for Bruce Wilder.

The angers of Sanders supporters is entirely unjustified once we take the broader view.

I most definitely did not say that (speaking of reading skills).
Let me spell it out as clearly as possible: the anger of Trump supporters is understandable but does not ‘justify’ their supporting Trump. I didn’t say anything about Sanders.

bob mcmanus,

“The commodity ain’t a thang. The microchip ain’t worth nothing outside of it’s supportive environment.

The commodity is a relation. Do you see relations existing outside of language and discourse? The commodity as category (?) was created with a material change in forms of discourse.”

If the commodity is a good or involves a good (meaning something material not necessarily something ethically good) rather than wholly a service, the commodity is both a thing and a relation/category.

This is a topic of interest to me presently, due to a group of indie musicians and their film maker friends using their employment status as creative industry content providers to comoditise stalking and harassing me, over an 18 year period, 1998-2016ongoing.

In this case the commodity is a number of things, and the categories are products – such as records – and services – such as live concerts – and also promotional materials – such as photos – and they are also crimes.

I can’t think of many other examples of this sort of commodity except something like snuff films, which are murder and products.

The police are not happy at me telling them they need to investigate this as I am reporting an incident 1998-2016ongoing, as they are not pleased at having to investigate metaphors and allusions etc in 18 years of indie music, but there is no regulation that prohibits stalkers from use of metaphor and allusion , as you cannot regulate crimes.

As you see, no customers knew these commodities constituted crimes, until I started bring this to public attention. So the commodities category in the social imagination can begin to change due to me bringing new information to light which was previously hidden, being another crime, conspiracy, which I am trying to popularize as the collective noun for indie musicians.

But the commodities remain as things, once I change how they are perceived as a category, being a crime, the continuing material existence of which is very upsetting, as even once I get them all withdrawn from sale and from circulation in law abiding sites like YouTube I see no way I can get everyone in the world to destroy their physical copies of the criminal commodities – so the material existence is quite a significant factor in commidities, as while discourse about them can change, and classification can change, the material stuff of them remains.

You @310: “Shd Obama have paid more attention to this? yes, definitely. But it would not have been reasonable in any case to expect much more than a start at reversing the trend.”

Therefore, (it follows implicitly), any and all anger with Obama’s efforts (ahem) to stem the flow of money from everyone to the richest, to employ your terminology: “would not have been reasonable.” Your bizarre choice of ‘would’ rather ‘is’ offers further proof that your regard the crushing burden of income inequality as an abstract, rather than a fact.

Not so: you’re deriving an absolute conclusion [“any and all”] from a statement framed as a tendency [“much more”].

[and no doubt you’d quibble about making firm conclusions on the basis of minor wording variations… but you’re doing the exact same thing with “Your bizarre choice of ‘would’ rather ‘is’ “. You’re trying to do the same thing, it’s just that you’re shit at it.]

I guess I always knew that CT threads were a place where crotchety old white men (#notallcrotchetyoldwhitemen) hung out and wrote treatises that three of their five best internet-friends read and big-upped. But along certain lines, the predilections of the crotchety old white men were not so dissimilar from mine, and also along certain lines, the crotchety old white men had smart things to say that I liked reading. So it was all good times.

And then Bruce Wilder starts talking about how a white ethno-nationalist, one who wants to kill Muslims with bullets soaked in pigs’ blood and who, when asked about a black dude severely beaten at one of his rallies, says: he had it coming to him (roughly)—Bruce Wilder, who practically reigns supreme on these threads—starts talking about how this white ethno-nationalist is in fact preferable to the likely Democratic candidate, who—well quite simply is not a white ethno-nationalist.

And… everyone nods their head sagely. Presumably at least, because other than myself, I can remember maybe 4-5 people objecting or providing pushback. It’s a clarifying moment, just in the most horrible kind of way.

Of course, for Bruce Wilder the clarification is probably that I am a neoliberal. Or worse, that I am brown, so any concern that I have could never be more than “tribal”. More power to him, I guess.

Ok. I confess to being a (non-grumpy) old white man.

Well said, js. And gracefully acknowledged BW.

Geo @298, Thank you, once again.

I had always thought the Marxist notion of economic alienation was alienation from the process of production, not the product of it.

js.: “Presumably at least, because other than myself, I can remember maybe 4-5 people objecting or providing pushback.”

“Providing pushback” is a tremendously bad-faith activity, at least on CT threads. It’s an excuse for condemnation by various people who do little for social justice themselves other than denounce people — the favored method being to denounce other people for not denouncing enough.

Bruce Wilder is valuable on these threads because he can actually read and understand what other people write, something that very few people here can do. If I was going to have a serious discussion about this, I’d point out that — as evidenced by the recent discussion on global warming issues — I’ve already implicitly concluded that neoliberalism is better than a lot of the likely reactions to neoliberalism, such as Trump’s. “At least it’s an ethos”, etc., or rather, at least it’s a currently existing world system that is capable of addressing certain problems. But it’s impossible to have that conversation here without counter-denunciations by people writing about how can I be an anarchist if I “support” neoliberalism etc.

With regard to the “kill all Muslims” eliminationist speech, I don’t whether you live in the U.S. or have done so for a while, but eliminationism has been a feature of discourse on the right here for as far back as I can remember. That doesn’t excuse it, but puts it in context. Bruce Wilder has written that he believes that Trump wouldn’t really follow through on his speeches. I think that’s a mistaken calculation, for what that’s worth, and I think that it’s sad that BW wrote about how people obsessively compared candidates to see which was marginally better and then proceeded to do just that. But I’m not planning to vote so I don’t have to compare.

The Reification of “-Isms”. …Now playing, in all theatres!

Neoliberalism is not a thing. It is a name for the current pushback of lassez-faire, with a tiny bit of redistribution acknowledged to help keep everyone in the big churning maw. “Current” meaning, “since the Hayekian bafflegab.”

To take one exhibition, Philip Mirowski’s book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (which came after The Road to Mount Pelerin) lists over a dozen different tendencies (I don’t have it sitting in front of me to do a recount) of neoliberalism. With, (again as I may faultily remember,) no simple definition.

I do remember that Mirowski comes back to all the features of the social cognitive-bias which emerged fully into public consciousness late in the 18th Century:

A. lowered use of cognition, & imperviousness to evidence, which is explained away. B. reliance upon in-group opinion for risk assessment and response. C. justification of the status quo, & tendencies to authority, authoritarianism, and stereotype of the “other”. D. fear of death and thus the need to find meaning in it.

Recognize this yet?!

Fear of “neoliberalism” as the foremost monster under the bed, has SAME etiology and epidemiology as the fear of naive Marxists that material relations must make psychological realities (and therefore, capitalism must be smashed, before even beginning to improve society) and the fear of religious reactionaries that traditional social doctrine must be adhered to (or else people cannot find the transcendent state of consciousness).

js. @ 21: Bruce Wilder, who practically reigns supreme on these threads

The people have spoken–who are the rest of us to disagree with the Chosen One?

“Marx took the mystery/metaphysics out of social and political history”

Not all metaphysics is mysterious. I think “materialisms” of the past are often misunderstood as just claiming that all that exists is formless, mindless stuff; and that everything else is a fiction, or an illusion, or an emergent epiphenomenon. But Marx isn’t that sort of materialist at all: social history can’t be understood without understanding man as species-being, for example. This is metaphysics!- it’s part of an argument at the level of first principles about what really exists.

@321! It’s easy for a lot of people to forget just how threatening for many of us Trump’s fantasy of a Muslim-American celebration over 9-11 was. Trump is in some ways the lead clown at the circus, but he would not have to follow through as President to make life hell for many Americans. In fact he can make life hell just by keeping the national stage that he now enjoys.
But he has said such things and got to be a jokester on Saturday Night Live and have MSNBC throw softball pitches at him.

I really think the Sanders opposition to Clinton has misfired by attacking her on her positions on crime and welfare in the 90s. Sanders record was not much different; he is not proposing a reintroduction of welfare. Clinton has strong support among African-Americans.
The real issue remains the contributions of actors from the UAE, Qatar and KSA made to the Clinton Foundation as Hillary Clinton was approving arms sales to those countries. She also oversaw a huge spike in sales to Australia, and the Clinton Foundation received $10 million from Australia. Perhaps Sanders has been discouraged from making these attacks because the Republicans are unlikely to run on a platform of tying arms sales to human rights records, but a super PAC could certainly hit her hard over this in the election season. I want to know how she is going to respond.

Mackenzie Wark “Althusserians Anonymous” Feb 26, 2016

“Even as a recovering Althusserian, I am thankful for this break Althusser makes from the metaphysics of essence and appearance. That metaphysic remains the ideological field of theories of eternal capitalism, in which the essence of its economy never changes, and any new feature is ‘just circulation’ or some other such non-thought. Althusser is the beginning of a way to think historically again”

“One might pause here to note that this set Althusserians on a course of seeing the relations of production as the crucial and determinate component of the economic ‘instance’, not the forces of production. This had a certain utility when expanded out into a concept of relations of production and reproduction…”

Rich @330: I’m not planning to vote

You should vote for Jill Stein: http://www.jill2016.com/plan. And so should everyone else who lives in a non-swing state.

One way in which “neoliberalism” is useful, is in designating a kind of point along a downward trajectory of fewer and fewer governmental checks on capitalist doings. It’s more destructive than the Keynesian model, because it gets us closer to no checks at all. No checks is basically just slavery. Currently, in Thailand, for instance, especially in their fishing industry, we see something far worse than “neoliberalism,” and very, very close to chattel slavery. Capitalism with next to no government interference — other than to prop it up and externalize most of its costs.

Neoliberalism is heavy deregulation — but regulation still exists; increasing privatization — but there is still a public sector; lower and lower taxes on the rich and on business — but taxes still exist, etc. etc.

The other end of that spectrum, however, has never been what conservatives believe it’s been: Heavy, anti-business interference, which necessitates “capitalism unbound” as an antidote. In reality, at least in America, even at the height of the regulatory state for business — arguably the 1930s thru the early 1970s — business and capital were still granted massive advantages by our government. Labor has never had that time in the sun. Not at our most “liberal” times via the three branches or the state apparatus overall. We’ve always pushed through massively pro-capital trade agreements, signed on to or created pro-capital international governing bodies, and directed the vast majority of bailout funds toward business and the rich. And despite the endlessly silly complaints from the right about the EPA, it has been largely nothing more than a speed bump in the way of business, and still has yet to even test roughly 79,500 out of the 80,000 chemicals in use . . . . while banning only five.

In short, once capitalism became dominant in America after the Civil War, “the state” has never, not once, worked to balance the interests of labor and capital, and has always put its thumb down on capital’s side. It’s just been a matter of how much weight over time.

bob mcmanus @ 339

We think we are capital when we think we own ourselves.

Yeah, well…. Refuting the neolibertarians of Silicon Valley is a bit like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel — a temptation to the frustrated and belatedly bloodthirsty leftist, but pretty thin gruel when all is said and done. The complexities of the relationship between the individual in all his 21st century glory and the social-political-economic collective of ancient renown have become more visible, and more fraught, since the great intellectual upheavals of the Enlightenment, but as late as this very moment, they remain as fundamentally impenetrable as ever. If everything is language, how do you explain music, dance, masking, or any other absorbing, yet arguably pre-linguistic engagement between us and the rest of creation?

Far from being anti-democratic capitalism seems to be the only economic system compatible with democracy. On taking control of Hong Kong China almost immediately abolished democracy. It seems that the far left are afraid that given the choice the people will chose to reject socialism, while capitalism works most effectively in free society. Capitalist South Korea and Taiwan are robust democracies officially socialist North Korea and China are totalitarian tyrannies.

I’ve already implicitly concluded that neoliberalism is better than a lot of the likely reactions to neoliberalism, such as Trump’s

Yes, you have—quite clearly.

eliminationism has been a feature of discourse on the right here for as far back as I can remember.

In some sense, sure. But—and I do live in the US and have lived here for two and a half decades—this feels qualitatively different. Give me one example from the last 2-3 decades where a political candidate from one of the major parties was openly saying the kinds of things that Trump is and getting the kind of traction Trump is getting.

That aside, I’m glad you’re actually talking about the right. Part of my problem is that with all the focus the evils of neoliberalism (which are real), the specific dangers posed by the right, esp, in the US, have been all but forgotten.

Bruce Wilder has written that he believes that Trump wouldn’t really follow through on his speeches

But we don’t need to speculate. Black and brown people being beaten up at Trump rallies is a thing that’s already happening, not a distant future possibility.

Also, objections needn’t be ad hominem.

——

bianca steele @334:

I should perhaps have rephrased that bit.

348: Wiki on “Signifiers and Signified”

“And while words are the most familiar form signs take, they stand for many things within life, such as advertisement, objects, body language, music, and so on. Therefore the use of signs, and the two components that make up a sign, can be and are – whether consciously or not – applied to everyday life.”

Of course post-structuralists (Lacan) trying to get past metaphysics, Idealism, and imaginary distinctions of essence and appearance deny the existence of signs and signifieds. Only signifiers, metonymy and metaphor.

And I stop short of signifiers and pre-linguistic perception/cognition because of the dangerous temptation to the metaphysical, for example much feminism with its direct knowledge of the different body.

Brett @350,

Capitalism is, by definition, anti-democratic. It’s an autocratic, top down, hierarchical economic system, at the micro and macro levels. The boss decides. He or she doesn’t hold votes or give equal say to workers before making decisions. It wouldn’t be “capitalism” if he or she did. And the boss also appropriates what workers produce, steals the fruit of their labor from them, and then decides how much to pay them for what he or she stole — which shouldn’t be legal in the first place.

And there is no real democracy in a society if it does not include the economy. In Western liberal democracies, it does not.

And, please, there are thousands of different ways to organize society and the economy. It’s not a Binary choice. It’s not just our way or the State Capitalist systems of NK, the old Soviet Union or China — none of those countries ever remotely approached “socialism,” much less “communism,” which is the absence of the state.

If people could choose between actual socialism and capitalism, they’d chose the former. Actual socialism has never been attempted on any national scale, the biggest being in parts of Spain in the 1930s before Franco crushed them. Boiled down, it just means the entire society is democratized, including the economy, and the people own the means of production, not political parties, juntas, dictators or private autocrats. Everyone has equal voice and equal say, and “the state” is actually a fraction of the size we have currently. Real socialism radically flattens hierarchies and moves society toward an end to all class divisions, period.

Capitalism requires a massive state, and one that must always grow to keep up with the Grow or Die First Imperative of that system. Real socialism, OTOH, is local, small is beautiful, cooperative not competitive, fully democratic and federated, and needs a mere fraction as much government, etc. It’s democracy incarnate.

The question of power has been central in the Republican debates–the project of freely exercising US power without concern for human rights or the need for other foreign leaders to appease their citizens, the right to assert sovereign control over US American territory, the willingness to use others’ greater dependence on the US to extract more concessions from them.

There has been little recognition of the structural power the US enjoys not necessarily in any given dyadic relation but in writing the rules of the game in regards to trade, intellectual property, adjudication of disputes, decision making in the IMF and the World Bank. The power talk has been more relational than structural, one could say.

I do think Trump has hit on one real issue though he has no idea what he could do about it, and that is the role of the dollar in the US international system. As an anchor currency, US actors may be free of certain exchange rate risks and transaction costs; and there could be a whole host of other advantages (I have to read Benjamin Cohen and Eswar Prasad http://www.thedollartrap.com/). But the US is not free to devalue its currency to boost its economy since its actions may be counteracted by movements in the currencies that are pegged to it.

My last is a response to RP @355, the last paragraph in particular.

Neoliberalism is center-right, ideologically. When a person is critical of it, they are being critical of the right, not the left.

The “liberal” part in the word refers solely to “liberalizing” the markets, which is an old-timey desire of the right. But, as Rich mentions in 355, it is compatible with “social liberalism,” which is center-left, basically, because billionaires couldn’t care less if the power elite is diversified, as long as the hierarchies themselves hold. It doesn’t matter to them that Tim Cook, for instance, is gay, because he will make decisions that conform with the interests of the financial elite, and not seek the flattening of hierarchies. See workers at Foxconn for proof of that.

There is a massive difference between removing certain barriers for people who seek to rise up the ladder . . . . and making it unnecessary to climb anything in the first place. The real left wants to end the necessity of the climb, to remove that as something we have to waste our life-time doing. The center-left basically wants to make sure there is no racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality discrimination preventing that rise. Boiled down, an identity politics versus a class thing. The illusion of meritocracy versus the reality of economic apartheid.

To me, if we flatten the pyramid, we all but eliminate those social barriers in the process. We achieve a far greater form of equality and defund all apartheids. But if we concentrate on identity politics and avoid class, the massive class divisions remain. And they disproportionately impact women and minorities in the first place.

Bruce Wilder @343
Noted. Thanks.

Partisan manicheism.

There has been little recognition of the structural power the US enjoys not necessarily in any given dyadic relation but in writing the rules of the game in regards to trade, intellectual property, adjudication of disputes, decision making in the IMF and the World Bank.

Panitch & Gindin, directly on point, got a lot of attention in 2012. Also Varoufakis, Streeck . You may have missed them cause they are Marxian.

362: Women-men, gay-straight, Republican-Democrat, anarchist-communist, high culture-pop culture, Ford-Chevy, Pepsi-Coke

Difference can be productive, profitable and fun! Viva la difference and jouissance! Push it til it breaks capitalism!

My difference is that I think moral and ethical dimensions of difference are simply means of gaining comparative advantage in the commodification of affect and aesthetic preference.

Bruce Wilder #343: “the way thinking and perception are distorted by combining obsessive lesser evil comparisons and partisan manicheism.”

Where do you see serious evidence of these distortions, or of any pernicious effects? Voters pretty much make up their own minds in consultation with their friends, not due to some lesser-evilism argument by an op-edder or talking head. The evils of “lesser evilism” are usually understood at a young age, by teenagers in their B.S. sessions. Whereas belief in light v. darkness is usually restricted to the likes of Dreher columns and Crooked Timber neoliberalism threads.

Lee 287, with respect, I asked a straightforward question and I can’t make out any meaning in the words of your answer, at least nothing related to the question.

So far democracy has been pretty strongly linked to capitalism. Those attempting to build an economy on non-market lines have done so without establishing genuine political democracy with competitive elections, apparently afraid that given the choice the people would reject them. While there are several examples of a dictatorship with a capitalist free market economy successfully becoming a democracy.

I’m with js. American liberals have this particular delusion that they think things here won’t ever get really bad, something like fascism will never happen here, and therefore we shouldn’t really worry about the threat posed by right wing extremism. The delusion comes in different flavors. On the more radical side, you hear the view much expressed around here that it’s all neoliberalism anyway and there’s no real difference between the system parties and so on. The more centrist version used to be to flatout deny that there was anything extremist going on in US politics – there are simply liberals and conservatives alternating in democratic government, nothing to see here, and anyway both sides do it (the radicals also have their version of the “both sides do it” myth). Ironically it seems that while, forced by Trump, the centrists are finally starting to come to terms with their delusion, the wannabe radicals still remain determined to pretend that it doesn’t really matter whether a centrist liberal or an openly racist right wing extremist wins the presidency. Thanks guys great job of promoting the revolution.
(Btw memo to Plume: you must be in serious condition if you really think that “the vast majority” Americans left of center want capitalism “obliterated and replaced”.)

I wish people around here, before making up their minds about “lesser evilism”, would contemplate the sheer cruelty unleashed in recent years on poor and minority people, the vicious attacks on women’s reproductive freedom, the rollback or attempt thereof of practically any kind of regulation of the fossil fuel industry and other polluters, wherever Republicans have had the power to enact their political vision. The reckless poisoning of thousands of residents of Flint by a Republican government in order to save a few dollars is emblematic and should be front and center in this election campaign at all levels, if progressives are worth their salt.

js.: “As I said, this feels qualitatively different.”

Well, you asked about when this last happened, and it didn’t take long to recall the last GOP President. At the beginning of the contemporary GOP sainted Reagan became prominent by calling out the National Guard on protestors at Berkeley. In between there were a whole lot of other incidents, including quite a few done by police against Occupy protestors as Obama shrugged.

But those were political protestors and not people of some ethnic or religious category and presumably that’s the difference. But of course police and non-police have been shooting black people in America for the crime of being black continuously during this period. This is the wonder of democracy that Brett Dunbar extolls: the state carries out the people’s will and tortures, kills, and imprisons just as the people want it to.

So I’m losing track of what’s supposed to be extra special about Trump saying kill them all. That he’s saying it openly? I don’t think that it’s really a secret to most people.

TM @ 376

I think many centrists are in denial about the extent to which things have gotten worse, much worse, and the two Parties have openly cooperated in making worse, normal.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-trump-chant-20160226-story.html

Democracy gives you a choice. In a two party system Hotelling’s law predicts that they will tend to very close together and more or less in the centre of the effective electorate. If the left’s response to believing that the centre is too far to the right is either not to vote or to vote for irrelevant and unelectable left wing candidates (Nader in 2000 for example) the perverse effect is to move the centre of the effective electorate to the right. The fringe right doing same thing has the same effect in the other direction.

One argument for lesser eviling is that that way you end up with less evil. In the case of the US currently either of the Democrat candidates are better than any of the Republican candidates.

Some of the problems with US policing seems to be excessive localisation. Each tuppence ha’penny town wants its own police force, each of which wants its own SWAT team,the SWAT team want to use their toys so they can get funding renewed so they end up deployed in the field in situations that don’t call for it.

Brett,

We went through this before. Capitalism has caused many, many times more deaths and far more destruction than any other economic (or political) system in world history. It’s not at all close. It is also the first economic system in history that is, itself, innately imperialistic. Its own competitive laws of motion and Grow or Die imperatives lead inevitably to imperialism — require it, guarantee it. No other economic system, in and of itself, has ever had the need to constantly conquer new territories, both within a nation’s borders and beyond them. No other economic system has ever required so massive a bureaucracy to keep it propped up, defend it, expand it or bail it out.

Yes, the Soviet Union was indeed a state capitalist system, as Lenin said when he first implemented it. It never moved on from there to actual socialism, which would have required full on democracy, including the economy, and the people owning the means of production. That obviously never happened.

You, like most conservatives, constantly confuse capitalism with commerce in general, or commerce in general with capitalism, and simply don’t get how unprecedented and unique it is. Do yourself a favor and read The Origin of Capitalism, by Ellen Meiksins Wood, and The Invention of Capitalism, by Michael Perelman, and then we can make some headway, perhaps, in these discussions.

kidneystones: “We have the “severely beaten” protesters and Trump proclaiming that he’d like to “kill them [black people] all.”

Well, you can find a lot of fantasy statements if you take things that aren’t supposed to be Trump quotes and instead pretend that people think they’re quotes.

I await instructions about the exact calibration of the degree of concern that I should have about a possible Trump presidency. Especially since there is nothing substantial that I can do about it in any case.

From someone considered a HRC shill: jeez, I am not happy about Sanders’ yuge loss in SC today. I do not want him to go away, and thankfully he won’t heed calls to drop out. Also, what are to make of big primary wins in states that your party has no chance of winning? This result surely does not prove that Sanders is not electable in a general election or that Clinton is more electable in a general election.
We still have unfavorability number on Clinton that is higher than 50%. But I don’t imagine that more than 65% of the eligible electorate will vote in the general, so she only needs to turn out, say, 35% of the electorate to vote for her. She’ll have older women mobilizing for her. She has more enough people favorably predisposed to her. They just have to be the people who vote, and those who are unfavorable have to be disproportionately among that 35% of the population that is too cynical or alienated to vote.
Also Sanders does not seem to have turned out the youth today, and this raises concerns about a campaign heavily dependent on a historically unreliable part of the population.

Trump is just another somwhat cultural adapted version of people like Le Pen, Haider or Wilders. Had to happen eventually that someone like that would get the nomination on the republican side in a primary system to select the candidate. In a way its surprising it took so long. The candidate that is much harder to understand from experience with european politics is Sanders.

More steps toward fascism? Yesterday Trump advocated changing the libel laws beyond current protections, so public figures who don’t like negative press coverage can claim that they are purposeful “hit pieces”, and thus drag the press into court for massive damages. In other words, intimidation. No matter what political party you belong to, & no matter whether you like the New York Times and the Washington Post or not, this is an anti-First Amendment proposal. And totally crazy unnecessary — fSupreme Court case, NY Times v. Sullivan (1964) put protections already in place — is this all about him? Video:

Brett and others: If you’re at all interested in debating/discussing capitalism and its possible alternatives with me, my email is ctplume at yahoo dot com.

That way we can avoid at least one possible sub-thread here — though, at this point, it looks like it’s not the only one.

;>)

Ah, yes.When all else fails, accuse your opponents of being irrational and melodramatic. Nicely played (if a tad obvious). Well, you (BW), kidneystones, et al can have your white nationalist playground. Enjoy the win, I’m fucking done.

So called state capitalism bears no relationship to capitalism it was a simple command economy. While a capitalist system depends on the market and private investment to build privately owned businesses. Lenin was not only a tyrant far more vicious and murderous than the Tsar had been, he was also a liar.

Capitalism is pretty pacifist internationalist and anti imperialist, once you have substantial trade links with another territory then you have wealthy lobbyists against war, as they export to and/or import from there and warfare destroys trade.Even if their are negligible trade links it is most unlikely that the value of trade would justify the cost of war. Mercantilism could provide an apparent justification for war but as Smith argued the benefits of monopolising colonial markets was far less than the costs of warfare, hence his support of the American rebels. Capitalist states were rich enough that they could afford to waste money indulging nationalism with imperialism without going bankrupt, it was still a massive money sink. Egypt attempted to engage in imperial expansion in Sudan and went bankrupt, imperialism was a cost not a benefit.

China isn’t really a command economy anymore. It’s still a despotism but it has shifted to an increasingly market based economy.

Europe’s poor performance seems to be due to basically ignoring the lessons of the 1930s, austerity feels virtuous and is therefore popular stimulus feels self indulgent and is therefore unpopular. So repeatedly democracies have engaged in self destructive austerity.

There seems to be good reason to be sceptical of China’s official economic statistics. Both other data is inconsistent with the claimed headline figures and the fact that in 1989 the published statistics of the defunct east European dictatorships turned out to have been almost entirely fictional.

Ze K, 1) China’s growth claims are lies. Everybody but you seems to know that. 2) China is still crashing, and has a long way to go. They had a massive bubble, which is bursting little by little, because the government keeps stepping in to stop it. People who are paying close attention generally seem to think this will be going on for a few years.

Also, capitalism is M-C-M and exchange value. The capitalist purchases labor power (as a commodity) in order to produce commodities for sale/revenues, which he or she appropriates from workers. It’s based on the slave model, where the workers do not own their own production, the fruits of their own labor.

In the Soviet Union, a political party replaced private ownership, but kept the same basic model in place. Workers didn’t own their own production under the Soviet system. They had no say in pricing or their own remuneration. The “owner” was the state.

That’s state capitalism.

The Soviets also built national markets — which is capitalist. Capitalism unifies once disparate, separate, unlinked and local markets, and forces everything to become subject to competitive laws of motion under that unity. Non-capitalist economic systems remain fragmented, autonomous, and in the case of actual socialism, cooperative, not competitive. Two centuries of socialist theory and practice also point to use-value production, not exchange-value production. The Soviet system chose exchange value and raced with the West to produce the most (Red Plenty). It also completely ignored yet another of the main goals of real socialism:

Radically increasing leisure time, as a kind of “peace dividend” that comes from the end of for-profit work.

@411,

Interesting analysis.

Your second example could also show a bit of the exhaustion of “revolution.” Hard to pin its start down, but if we say 1776; war’s end in 1783; Constitution in 1788; French Revolution from 1789-99; European revolts in 1830 and 1848 . . . then pretty quiet again until 1871, with another failed revolt in the Paris Commune . . .

Steve Fraser, in his excellent (though slightly flawed) The Age of Acquiescence, notes the huge difference between American reactions to the First and Second Gilded Ages. A strong, fierce, vibrant anticapitalist revolt in the first case; a weak, often apathetic one in the second case . . . . makes me think that the neoliberal consensus has major advantages existing now as opposed to a hundred or two hundred years ago. People seem far less willing to fight back.

Science may hold a pretty basic answer for a good bit of this: We humans tend to fear losing stuff we already have a great deal, and are often willing to endure horrible circumstances (and systems) if they just . . . let . . . us . . . . keep our stuff.

Good TED talk here by Laurie Santos:

Laurie Santos: A monkey economy as irrational as ours

capitalism uses open competitive markets as the primary structure of the economy

Speaking of lies, that’s one.

A capitalist economy is a money economy; it uses scarce money and debt as the primary system for scorekeeping and resource allocation for a system in which the means of production is largely controlled and concentrated as private property.

As Nick Rowe has pointed out, Keynesian demand management works because aggregate demand is effective demand — that is, demand with money behind it and the structure of production and distribution has ready, excess capacity: firms want to sell more at current prices if only someone will show up with cash in hand wanting to buy it. The Soviet economy, back in the day, had money, but money wasn’t the scarce element and it wasn’t used as the primary mechanism of scorekeeping. Very often there was more effective demand than goods available for sale and people stood in line.

But, a capitalist economy is not a “market economy” at all. There are very few actual markets in the U.S. economy, most of the important ones are financial, exchanging financial securities or key commodities which have been financialized for some reason. It’s all about the money. But, for the most part, the economy is composed of often vast administrative hierarchies. It isn’t an absence of bureaucracy that distinguishes a command economy from a capitalist money economy.

There’s an economic theory of price formation in markets, but it is irrelevant to the actual economy, except as a dogma of the civic religion. Actual prices are administered and actual resource allocation is accomplished by administrative fiat. The doctrine of a self-regulating market is just a political shield for the predatory conduct of the capitalist elites that dominate the society thru corporate hierarchies.

Brett,

It’s as if you’re stuck in the 18th century, having a talk with Adam Smith over a scotch, next to his fireplace, completely removed from the real world, as you both describe utopian systems to each other that will never be and can’t ever be. You keep ignoring the entire history of capitalism, how it rose, the massive damage it wreaked in its ascendance, and how this continues to this day.

In short, you believe in fairy tales.

At least I admit that theoretical socialism has never been implemented, beyond small-scale practices, anywhere in the modern world. You continue to assert that your utopian dream-vision of capitalism has, and that everything is beautiful and free and perfectly wondrously democratic and peace, love and joy for all and sundry, simply because of this magically beneficent system that exists solely in your head.

And Bruce is correct here:

“There’s an economic theory of price formation in markets, but it is irrelevant to the actual economy, except as a dogma of the civic religion. Actual prices are administered and actual resource allocation is accomplished by administrative fiat. The doctrine of a self-regulating market is just a political shield for the predatory conduct of the capitalist elites that dominate the society thru corporate hierarchies.”

The idea that the Soviet Union can’t be capitalist because it was “command and control” completely ignores the fact that the capitalist system can’t survive anywhere without a massive state bureaucracy . . . You’re just confused because Western “command and control” by the state is spread out more than in the Soviet system . . . spread out between governments, too. But take away their global “command and control” system(s), and it dies in days. We know this because it keeps going into recession or depression and the “command and control” powers of capitalist states keep bailing it out — oftentimes beforehand to prevent these crises. Before, during and after them, in fact.

After Lenin, Stalin used a piece-rate system, where workers could earn more by producing more. They were incentivized to do so. Sounds quite like commission-sales work in the capitalist system. And Russia was always in an intense competitive war with America and the West to outdo us in production.

Nowhere is that a part of socialist theory or small-scale practices, going back two centuries. Socialism, the real thing, was always based on a cooperative model, and one major goal was the reduction of work hours, taking the “peace dividend” earned by throwing out the profit motive. No need to create profits for the bosses . . . . that instantly makes it so most workers could cut their days in half. At least. This never happened in Russia, China, Cuba, NK, etc. etc.

The Soviet Union (et al) was never “socialist” in any way, shape or form.

Geo @419,

Good one.

;>)

No. Not my real name. Plume comes from the brilliant imagination of a certain Belgian surrealist, Henri Michaux, one of my favorite poets. I just set up an email address to help organize some online chaos.

@421,

As a consumer, you get to choose from among the products and services capitalists pick for you. You have zero say in any of that. You have zero say in pricing, wages, variety, quality, work conditions, benefits, waste, duplication or pollution. And as companies get large enough, they tend to work things out with other companies, so the “competition” is largely cosmetic, as are the differences between products and services.

Ever really price cars, for instance, and notice how close they all are to one another? And how much they look alike?

Capitalism started out mastering mass production for the masses, which destroyed small farmers, artisans, craftspersons, and so on. This drove these people into the factories, when once they were their own bosses. Through the decades, this has only gotten worse, and products more and more alike — in price, quality and so on. Mass production for the masses by mass man. Soon to be by robots.

Now, my guess is it wasn’t the director’s intention of make this a kind of statement on capitalism and consumerism, but it was the first thing I thought of when I watched it. The main character had just come back from Iraq, goes shopping for groceries, and finds himself staring up and down the aisle at endless sameness of sameness.

@Plume
“endless sameness of sameness”

I see a few things going on when I look at the shelves of the grocery store (supermarket, whatever) I go to most often. Among the national brand-name companies there is not a lot of price competition, but there is some effort to ‘differentiate’ the products and churn out ‘new’ wrinkles on old products. E.g., what lawyers call the ‘trade dress’ (for instance, the way a box of crackers looks on the outside) is periodically fiddled with in an attempt to create at least the appearance of novelty (which is often more irritating than anything else, but that’s a side point). Or a cookie manufacturer will add a different flavor and then trumpet it as ‘new’ on the box. Well, it is new, though the reaction of many consumers may well not be the rhapsodies into which the company hopes to propel them.

Static ‘sameness of sameness’ in a literal sense is abhorrent to this kind of capitalism, which assumes that consumers must be periodically presented with variations, however trivial in some cases, on what they’ve seen before. It’s the same with technology products like software: I don’t want ******* Windows 10, I’m fine with Windows 7. But the imperative to continually offer ‘new, improved’ twists on things seems hard-wired into the executive mentality.

As for price competition in the supermarket, I do see it when the store-chain itself (which is typically owned by a big conglomerate of some kind) creates its own line of products and sells it below what the national brand names sell for. But that’s about the only instance in which price competition in this setting is really noticeable, afaict.

402: Words of reason from Brett Dunbar. Never expected to write that on a CT thread.

BW 411: Great analysis, now we just need to know when the cycle starts.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Aquarius.

Plume 387, my mistake. Still, if Sanders counts as “to the left of the center left”, he certainly doesn’t stand for “obliterating” the entire system of capitalism.

@426
“Getting back to MacIntyre, I thought his point about appropriate conduct deriving from the ongoing practice of the relevant community was useful (and parallels Wittgenstein’s point about language). But on the issue of whether our moral intuitions are now so fractured as to provide no coherent basis for communal agreement, he is wrong to think that they were ever whole or coherent. The more we explore subaltern history, the less whole and the more contested the past appears. The nodding agreement of the VSPs should not be taken for the assent of the whole.”

Yes – this is the trouble with Philosopher’s History, it focusses on ideas, and hand-waves about “world-views” which are presumed to be shared and important. And then propagandists like Rod Dreher pick out the bits they like the sound of, to weave a tale about how the past was “enchanted” and the wicked scientists/liberals/whoever ruined it all.

I think MacIntyre’s disquieting suggestion is a correct picture of how western religion has collapsed in to a void in which terms like “grace”, “salvation”, “redemption”, “free will” and so on get debated without reference to the frameworks that gave sense to them, and instead there is a fruitless preoccupation with “religious belief” as a phenomenon detached from its historical contexts. But that’s not a suggestion that suits anyone’s reforming/reactionary agendas.

TM @427,

Never said Sanders was in favor of that. I think he’s a Democratic Socialist, pushing new New Deal proposals, none of which are “radical.” As in, his agenda isn’t even DS, much less S. It’s just that the American political center has shifted so violently, tragically to the right for the last 40 plus years, his rather tame, common sense proposals are seen by all too many as “far left” and crazy. They likely wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in the 1960s — especially on free public school tuition. New York and California already did that, and most states paid for the bulk of tuition costs at that time.

I prefer him to every candidate running for the two major parties, but I don’t think he goes nearly far enough. Probably because he doesn’t think he can push the envelope further than he has. The Dems have done too good a job truncating the left, setting up their firewall, working always from the Republican side of the aisle instead. Clinton probably did more to kill the left’s place in our political system than Reagan, and Obama has continued that legacy. I see Hillary as more of the same.

I think relevant to discussion of consumer choice that I have not been following
http://evonomics.com/nobel-prize-economists-say-free-market-competition-rewards/

No discussion of the New York Times piece on Clinton’s advocacy of bombing Qaddafi’s forces? If one reads Jeffrey Sachs in conjunction with the articles, Clinton appears as an agent of the deep national security state using any opportunity to oust by military force a regime more favorable to a US rival (Iran, Russia or China) than to the US and its allies (France, UK)–whatever the social cost on the people living under the targeted regime. For Sachs, Clinton continues the foreign policy thinking that reached its apotheosis under George W. Bush.

I think that this misreads the evidence of Clinton’s views on Libya. Haunted by her husband’s inaction in Rwanda and Srebrinica, Hillary Clinton seems to have thought that something had to be done to protect civilians against the desperate, dying Qaddafi regime. Her thinking here seems to have been similar to Juan Cole’s, not George W. Bush’s. Both Clinton and Cole underestimated how the NATO bombing would escalate the situation and the nature of the opposition to Qaddafi and the violence that they could do to innocent partisans of the Qaddafi regime.

But it’s not clear what violence Qaddafi would have carried out in the absence of a NATO counter-weight; but certainly this was not a fabricated threat such as Cheney’s about WMD in Iraq. Qaddafi was already striking civilian populations. And it seems that France and the UK would have carried out bombings regardless of US involvement.

At any rate, I do not think Clinton’s actions indicate that she is an agent of the deep national security state. Perhaps her actions in Syria would bear out this claim. But then there is the evidence of her willingness to engage in diplomacy with Iran (something Sachs ignores) and her choosing the chief negotiator Jake Sullivan as her senior policy adviser.

Again I welcome much more critical evaluations of HRC’s foreign policy record and views.

If you want to condemn an action by HRC, how about her flying in to Haiti to view the disaster area straight after the earthquake?

How many relief supplies were delayed while her plane took up runway space for a photo-op?

Casmilus @437,

Yes. Actually, they bet wrong a lot. Which is why most start ups fail. This is yet another bit of evidence regarding capitalism’s overall inefficiency — which also produces mass waste. Because it doesn’t produce to order. It produces in hopes of future sales — in hopes that good marketing can provoke those future sales. And these companies often borrow money to get those start ups going, which then fail, and they can’t pay back their loans, and then our pro-Capital laws kick in and “we the people” all too often end up paying for that bad debt.

What if we produced according to democratic ordering? At the community level. Asked up front, “Town, what do you want? What do you need? How much of X, Y and Z? Held town meetings about this, for everyone. Not just for “reps.” But actually so that everyone has a voice. We could mix in person debate with online and no permanent “leadership” to facilitate this. Rotational, temporary, by lottery, perhaps. All of this under the umbrella of a new constitution, with communities federated across the country . . . . grouped, perhaps, by regions, regions under national umbrellas. But autonomy from the local on up, rather than from the top down. Basic foundational laws, human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, green, sustainable, etc. etc. But as long as communities adhere to these broad parameters (democratically derived) . . . . they have a ton of room to maneuver.

All production to order, all non-profit, all cooperative, non-competitive, local-centric, use-value-centric, citizen-centric, green-centric, etc.

You bet badly wrong on what the consumer wants and you lose enough you go bankrupt. Your creditors are compelled to eat the loss. The populace in general are not liable.

Exchange values is something of a fiction pretty much anything that has value has value as it ultimately has a consumer. An individual transaction might not involve the ultimate consumer but the purchaser anticipates that there will be an ultimate consumer.

I don’t really see the problem with producing a thing in anticipation that some unspecified person will want it. Imposing a ban on production except to order is a massive restriction of efficiency as well as liberty. It makes having shops essentially impossible.

Sebastion H,

I think they could hold this once a week at first, and then space it out monthly, once they grow accustomed to it. Most people would repeat their previous orders. If they chose, they could just hit a form on the Internet and boom. It’s done for the week, month, quarter, what have you. Could be a pull-down menu sort of thing that provided those options.

With enough data and analytics over time — if the locality chooses to go that route — there are further ways to streamline this. And all of this could be left extremely flexible. As in, if you want to show up weekly, cool. If you want to stay home and click on links, that’s cool, too.

It would be from the household on out, to the neighborhood, to the community, to the region and the nation. Federated. Again, with autonomy starting locally, bottom up, not top down.

Actually supermarket prices within many classes of product vary dramatically. Supermarkets will often have products of the same type at three markedly different price points, in the value or budget range, in the normal own brand range and in the quality range. The quality range of say mince pies can be ten times the price of the value range.

It isn’t totally surprising that similar quality products have similar prices. The manufacturers have similar costs, raw materials, distribution, labour, capital equipment &c. so the lowest price at which they can cover their costs and make a reasonable profit is about the same. Prices will tend to be similar in a well functioning marketplace dominated by price competition.

One function of the capitalist state is to prevent and punish collusion. This contrasts with the corporatist and mechantilist approaches where the state would foster and encourage monopoly and cartels.

The situation with things like operating systems is that as they are under continual attack from criminals the security needs to be repeatedly updated. So there is an ongoing cost to maintaining support.

Under capitalism, which always tends toward more and more imperialist expansion, consumers get lower prices at great cost, ultimately. They don’t come from magical innovation on the producer side. They come from a combination of cheaper and cheaper labor, often overseas, which is sometimes outright slavery, plus shortcuts on quality, working conditions, special taxpayer supports, grants, no-bid contracts, exemptions and massive externalization of overall costs.

Nothing is “free,” of course. We pay for our lower prices with our own loss of labor leverage, quality of the products and services, and higher pollution and waste.

Plume, believe me I’m wishing you the best but, seriously, do you have to make such a caricature of anticapitalism? If you have no idea how many anti-capitalists there are, wouldn’t it be advisable to refrain from claiming any vast majorities for that position?

TM @449,

What caricature? And I don’t make any claims for currently existing majorities. I merely state that if people knew the truth about alternatives, and really understood the history and effects of capitalism, there would be vast majorities against it — and for those democratic, egalitarian alternatives.

Imagine a nation indoctrinated by one religion over the course of well over a century, and this religious indoctrination includes teaching that all other religions are the work of the devil. Imagine how difficult it would be to put together a majority against it.

That is the current situation, boiled down, with regards to our economic system and the possibility of non-capitalist alternatives.

Brett, I hope you’re writing this for the Onion.

“Ultimately all production is for the benefit of the consumer.”

Do you include cigarettes in this, or the decades upon decades capitalists lied to us about their deadly effects? Or the thousands of pesticides and chemicals out there that cause cancer, poison our water, land and air . . . . Every day we discover some new carcinogen inside consumer products, plastics, BPA, etc. etc. Big Pharma is always having to pull shit from the shelves after it’s discovered they cause severe damage or death to humans. Fracking is good for us? It doesn’t poison our water or cause earthquakes? Keeping pigs and cows penned up their entire lives, so they get sick and need endless amounts of anti-biotics to keep them alive, which in turn radically weakens the effects of antibiotics when we need to take them . . . and so on.

The list is endless, Brett, of the harmful shit produced for profit by capitalists, and the lies they tell us that all is good for us.

It’s one thing to say that we’re stuck with capitalism, and we need to make the best of it. But you consistently whitewash its history of death and destruction, and try to portray it as if you were blindly cheerleading for the home team. You’re not dealing with reality, Brett. It’s not a Disney film.

> I already am part of the process of determining what is produced, as a consumer.

Sure. Noone disputes this. Noone’s said otherwise. What you’ve been told, what you haven’t responded to and don’t seem to appreciate, is that the economy, the economic activity, “markets” that you see and partake in, is only a fairly small part of the whole.

[I mean… you say “as a consumer”. Which is true, but “consumer” isn’t the only economic activity people take part in, you need producers as well, and…. do you perhaps not have a job, perchance?]

Well, we were talking about the real world for awhile.

While I have some sympathy for Plume I find much of what he says a broken record of wild-eyed idealism that does not give actual human behavior. But compared to the consumer sovereignty story, Plume’s libertarian socialism is clear-eyed reality.

“…the consumer is the ultimate justification”? Not in the real world. Just a widely and massively discredited a priori hypothesis.

The consumer sovereignty hypothesis and the hypothesis that Obama is a Kenyan Marxist mole? The latter is many, many times more plausible given the evidence. And of course, wildly implausible given the evidence. Consumer sovereignty – don’t be ridiculous. Not the real world.

Brett,

I mentioned it above. But think about cigarettes for a moment. It was perhaps, along with slavery, the most important kickstarter for capitalism worldwide. Those two “products” made and make vast fortunes for capitalists directly, and for financial houses directly and indirectly.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs339/en/

Key facts

Tobacco kills up to half of its users.
Tobacco kills around 6 million people each year. More than 5 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while more than 600, 000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.
Nearly 80% of the world’s 1 billion smokers live in low- and middle-income countries.

If we count deaths due to policies that led to famine in China, Russia and elsewhere — of course, we’d have to also count this for capitalist countries, too — if we play the morbid game of “most deaths,” then surely cigarettes, all by themselves, top all the lists. Hundreds of years, now, with a century or more of millions of death per. And right now, WHO estimates 600,000 non-smokers die each year — in America, it’s about 44,000.

The consumer is always the beneficiary of capitalist production? Really?

459 “You consistently distorted what I said” by quoting you verbatim. Won’t let you falsify the record.

Brett @461,

“You make a profit ultimately due to the product being bought by a consumer and used.”

Capitalists make profits by radically underpaying their workers — by collecting the sum of all unpaid labor. That’s where the vast majority of their profits and their own compensation comes from. If they paid their workers in accord with their workers’ production, in accord with the surplus value they generate, capitalists couldn’t make big profits, and their own compensation would be little more than their workers’. In many cases, it would actually be less.

The biggest part of those costs is labor. That is also the cost most easily slashed by ownership. Workers are kicked to the curb or their pay slashed when businesses get into trouble. It’s the first thing that happens. People are fired and/or their wages slashed. Again, without underpaying workers for the surplus value they create, there is no money left over for profits or large compensation for ownership.

If capitalists ever paid fair wages, they could not possibly accrue large fortunes for themselves. The math doesn’t work. They can’t possibly, mathematically, pay fair wages to their workers and pay themselves large amounts. The mere existence of profits and high executive compensation is proof of theft from workers, and it’s getting worse.

In the 1950s, the average CEO made roughly 20 times their rank and file. In the 60s, it was 25 times. Today, after a slight fall from pre-recession norms, it’s 300 to 1. In Fortune 100 companies, it’s 1000 to 1.

The way a Larry Ellison, for instance, made his billions was to make sure he radically suppressed the wages of the workers who made his compensation package possible. He has, in the past, made 10,000 times more than his rank and file, in fact.

In the end the consumer is the ultimate justification for production. At times the link is extremely remote but ultimately it is there. For example the connection between a child purchasing a pencil and a business manufacturing equipment for mining graphite is extremely long but ultimately it is the child who is providing the reason for mining the graphite.

Sure. Noone disputes this. Noone’s said otherwise. What you’ve been told, what you haven’t responded to and don’t seem to appreciate, is that the economy, the economic activity, “markets” that you see and partake in, is only a fairly small part of the whole.

Most decisions are company-internal and technocratic, not market-based: the actual parts of the economy that are directly market-managed are actually quite small. Real, yes, important, yes: but not the entire thing, or even most of it.

Indirectly market-managed, sure. Soldiers exist to fight wars and kill people, but most of the work that soldiers actually do is supply-chain and management, not fight-and-kill-people work. There being a difference between “fighting and killing people” and “work in support of fighting and killing people” that shouldn’t be obfuscated, just as there’s a difference between “market-based allocation processes” and “technocratic allocation processes that affect the result of a market-based allocation process”.

Ultimately any business is producing for ultimate consumption. Without the consumer there would be no reason to do any of the other stuff that a business does. All of the other things are secondary to that. The business as a whole exists to satisfy some consumer demand.

You are the one with the incoherent definition. A business makes a profit by satisfying a consumer demand. That it is doing so in order to make a profit doesn’t alter that it is satisfying a consumer demand. It is irrelevant to the consumer why you are doing a thing as long as you are doing the thing.

I’m prepared to trust that the individual is best placed to determine what they want. You appear to want to impose the will of some planning committee about what the consumer ought to want and what price they ought to pay. We’ve tried that in the past, you get shortages, gluts and an opaque inefficient black market. While a free market works much better than that.

An interesting demonstration of a well functioning market with no state support is Silk Road. The illegal drug market was highly opaque with high prices unreliable quality and violence. Silk Road allowed customer reviews and fairly transparent pricing in illegal drugs. This allowed some dealers to get a reputation for reliable quality and brought in competition on both price and quality. The result was lower prices, higher quality and less violence.

It is impractical for the entire population to vote on how many mopeds are needed in Chiswick, so it is going to end up as a committee. At the moment it is entirely a matter for the manufacturer of Mopeds and those residents of Chiswick who want Mopeds. You either have planners vetoing desired Pareto optimizing trades or the committee is irrelevant and all you have is a market economy with a somewhat different ownership structure.

We’ve tried a wide range of structures, something you determinedly ignore. Both non profits such as John Lewis Partnership (employee owned), the Co-op, Nationwide Building Society (customer owned mutual society) or IKEA (owned by a charity). And for profits businesses some private and some public. There is nothing preventing you from setting up a company that has no shareholders and distributes profits to its employees, the John Lewis Partnership is exactly that. It owns the UKs sixth largest supermarket, the rather posh Waitrose.

Brett,

The community itself would vote, not the entire nation, and it’s very, very practical. Each community would have autonomy over the production that exists in their community. There would be parameters to follow, a legal framework as guide, which we all vote in place. A Constitution with those parameters spelled out. But day to day decisions would be for localities.

And this all takes place without capitalism anywhere in sight. It’s a distant nightmarish memory. Another piece of garbage in the dustbin of history. So there is no need or logic in trying to make sure this all works out according to capitalist laws of motion — which you keep avoiding. Capitalism doesn’t exist in this scenario, anywhere. It’s as if it never existed.

There is no profit anywhere to deal with. There are no competitive laws of motion, as under capitalism. It’s a cooperative economy. No employer/employee relationships. No power dynamics of master and slave, or master and serf. They don’t exist. We’re all co-owners, and the entire economy is publicly held. No private ownership of the means of production. That would be illegal.

And, no, this has never been tried.

It needs to be the entire system in order to work and to be “practical.” It won’t work if it’s surrounded and overwhelmed by the larger capitalist system. So that’s gone. Obliterated.

So basically you want to replace a system we know works with a fantasy system you have invented which has never been tried anywhere?

I think the reason that I am sceptical about that should be obvious. Previous attempts to implement a post capitalist economy have resulted in large piles of skulls. I want to see it in action on a small scale first.

Economic systems have changed when the newer way developed inside the old system. The cash economy gradually developed within the feudal system, as labour rents were gradually transformed into cash rent. Then within the mercantile economy some parts were less regulated than others and those worked better so the market liberalisation was gradually extended.

The market takes localism by devolving decisions about what is required down to the individual.

You really don’t get it do you?

You have an exclusively producerist perspective. The free market is a consumerist system. What can be profitably produced is determined by consumer demand. If there is a substantial unmet demand then outside businesses can enter the market in order to take advantage. If one business doesn’t make what you want then there is a good chance a competitor will.

What you are advocating is a unicorn. It’s a very nice unicorn and I might even buy it, except it you have never demonstrated it exists. You are suggesting we replace the most successful economic system ever developed with a system that only exists in theory. I am not going to support a radical change unless I have some evidence that it can actually work without the piles of skulls racked up by Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, when they tried to replace capitalism.

Yes capitalism is messy and at times doesn’t work. Market failures exist and there are a variety of methods of dealing with specific cases without discarding the whole thing.

You cannot even tell capitalism from mercantilism or corporatism which are pretty fundamentally different. That does not give me any confidence in your analysis.

Brett,

btw,

I’ve never seen you post an article to back up your assertions regarding capitalism — or inequality, for that matter. Or refer to books. Where do you get your info? What authors do you read to help you with your Disney, fairy-tale visions of capitalism?

I seem to recall that I recommended some of Tim Harford’s books as giving a nice basic introduction to microeconomics and macro0economics. The Undercover Economist [micro] and The Undercover Economist Strikes Back [macro] are both pretty clear. Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is also pretty good.