Reconstructing Hegelianism

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Here’s why Charles Mudede has become one of my most closely followed blogger-thinkers: because his project is my project (“The End of Internalism,” SLOG, The Stranger, 9 June 2009):

I’m quietly building a case for the importance of Hegel in an age that cares neither for him or his direct descendant, Marx. A part of the case will, one, link Hegel’s concept of geist and its movement in time (world history) with the idea of the evolution of noosphere in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man; and, two, link Hegel’s idea of absolute spirit with the ideas expressed in Alva Noë’s new book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness — some of these ideas can be heard on the Brain Science Podcast.

I am very interested in using contemporary information economy concepts such as the noosphere or general systems theory to reconstruct the Hegelian system. I’m less sure where Mr. Mudede is going with the second part of this, but Out of Our Heads is on my list now.

34

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10 June 2009, 34th birthday, spent in my cubical

I’m 34 today.

I intended to take the day off and do some biking around like I did last year, but the project that I’m working on was presented to the client and the COO of the company today, so office birthday it was. During the run through yesterday we discovered a show-stopping system flaw and I spent one of the most stressful days of my career in a panicked flurry of debugging and emergency releases. I’m giving myself an IOU on birthday.

Amazon.com gave me a birthday present by delivering a copy of Infinite Jest two days in advance of their estimate (their logistics people are geniuses). Between the book, my twitter and this blog I’m all geared up for Infinite Summer.

Petrified Onions

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The latest controversy to sweep the blogosphere is the outing of previously pseudonymous blogger John Blevins, a.k.a. Publius by Ed Whelan (Whelan, Ed, “Exposing an Irresponsible Anonymous Blogger,” The Corner, National Review Online, 6 June 2009; Blevins, John, “Stay Classy Ed Whelan,” Obsidian Wings, 6 June 2009; Whelan eventually apologized, “My Apologies to Publius,” The Corner, 8 June 2009). This prompts some musings on the subject of on-line personae by Matthew Yglesias (“The Metaphysics of Pseudonymity,” Think Progress, 9 June 2009):

And of course it’s a fallacy to assume a perfect identity between any Internet persona and its author(s). A whole bunch of different writers collaborate on producing Think Progress and they write in what I think is a pretty uniform voice. But like the writers behind The Economist, they’re actually all beautiful unique snowflakes who are often quite different from the TP persona. And by the same token, Matthew Yglesias “in real life” is not the same as the character I play on the Internet. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s quite right to say that the in-the-flesh [ME] is “real” and the on-the-Internet one is somehow “fake.” This blog has existed for over seven years now, and it’s almost certainly the case that more people “know” the persona than know me. And I think that should hold all the more strongly for any prominent pseudonymous bloggers. The well-known, stable character is a person with integrity, influence, a personality, a reputation, social connections, etc., the same as anyone else. To be sure, they may be artifice in terms of the presentation of the character. But our various “in real life” self-presentations (to a boss, to a first date, to family, to friends, to people we run into at a high school reunion) involve artifice as well.

In the past you body was at least the skeleton on which your personae hung. They depended on you to take them places, to animate them. The dutiful son only existed at the family get-together, after which he was de-emanated. The nightclub alter ego only came out to play when the costume was dawned.

Media personae persist. In the era of mass participation mass media, your personae don’t need you anymore. They’re out there, being recreated by anonymous onlookers while you are sleeping.

The Hegemony of Neoliberalism

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A roundup of some recent thinking on the hegemony of neoliberalism:

  1. Taking off from what Matthew Yglesias calls “Prestige Cross-Pollination“1 and Ezra Klein “The Tyranny of the Economists,”2 Mike Konczal at RortyBomb relates of the,

    … “credibility gap” between sociologists and economists, even when they deploy the same methods, when it comes to the public debate over the issues we face.3

    It helps to have a paradigm, and in recent years economics has rather forcefully acquired one.4

  2. In his review of Steven Teles’s new book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement,5 Henry Farrell makes a brief assessment of the state of the tyranny of the bureaucracy:

    If you win the technocrats (and [the law and economics movement] arguably has won the technocrats), then you very nearly have won the entire game.6

    This strikes me as about true. The shift rightward of the economics and policy intelligentsia since the New Frontier / Great Society heyday of Keynesian fine tuning has played a significant part in the general right-ward drift of the polity. There aren’t exactly dais upon dais of unreconstructed Keynesians offering policy makers intellectual cover on the Sunday morning shows.

  3. Via Charles Mudede7, Steven Shaviro reacts to Peter Ward’s new book, The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?8 Using the purported instability of ecological systems — one of the paradigm cases of self-organization — Mr. Shaviro sets himself against emergence, evolution, complexity, network theory, et al. He identifies Friedrich Hayek as one of the key thinkers of self-organization — the market would be one of the other paradigm cases —

    But the most significant and influential thinker of self-organisation in the past century was undoubtedly Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual progenitor of neoliberalism. … inspired by both cybernetics and biology, Hayek claimed that the “free market” was an ideal mechanism for coordinating all the disparate bits of knowledge that existed dispersed throughout society, and negotiating it towards an optimal outcome. Self-organization, operating impersonally and beyond the ken of any particular human agent, could accomplish what no degree of planning or willful human rationality ever could.9

    Friedrich Hayek, cyberneticist.

Combine these three and where are we for policy making and policy debate?

  1. Yglesias, Matthew, “Prestige Cross-Pollination” Think Progress, 2 June 2009
  2. Klein, Ezra, “The Tyranny of the Economists,” The Washington Post, 2 June 2009
  3. Konczal, Mike, “Economists, Methods and Government,” RortyBomb, 3 June 2009
  4. “The Future of Economics is Here: The Arational and the Irrational,” This is Not a Dinner Party, 28 September 2008
  5. Teles, Steven, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008)
  6. Farrell, Henry, “Fabians and Gramscians in Law and Economics,” Crooked Timber, 30 April 2009
  7. Mudede, Charles, “Self-Made,” SLOG, The Stranger, 28 May 2009
  8. The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)
  9. Shaviro, Steven, “Against Self-Organization,” The Pinocchio Theory, 26 May 2009

8,000 Page Fantasy Life

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I’m just wrapping up twelve weeks of Hitler and Stalin at the University of Maryland, and has been my experience with every class I have ever taken, I end with not much more than the sense of just how little I know about the subject. I then spend a postmortem of fantasy about actually becoming an expert in something-or-other. The 540 pages of Geyer and Fitzpatrick’s Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared and similar number of pages of selected journal articles weren’t enough. Thus, a Year of Hitler could be in my future as well (Barnett, Erica C., “My Year of Hitler: Six Things I Learned from Reading 8,000 Pages About the Nazis,” SLOG, The Stranger, 26 May 2009). Coincidentally, I’m tentatively titling my paper “Seven Ways to Think about Stalin during the Interbellum.”

The Wolf-Girl of Chita

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Wolf-men (or Mowgli Syndrome) seem like legends left over from the Nineteenth Century, but in fact a few turn up every decade, most famously the case of Genie, discovered in Los Angeles in 1970 and most recently Dani Lierow / Danielle Crockett in Florida in 2005 (DeGregory, Lane, “The girl in the Window,” St. Petersburg Times, 31 July 2008). The most recent case is from Chita, Russia (Wikipedia | Google Maps | “Feral Girl in Siberian City of Chita Was Brought Up by Cats and Dogs,” Times, 27 May 2009):

“For five years, the girl was ‘brought up’ by several dogs and cats and had never been outside,” police said in a statement. The child refuses to eat with a spoon, insisting on lapping up her food straight from the plate, and has taken on many other behaviours of the animals with which she lived, police said. “When carers leave the room, the girl jumps at the door and barks,” the police said. … The girl could understand Russian but could not speak it and tried to communicate through barking instead.

As if in an attempt to tip us off to some Times / BBC fabrication by taking the story over the line, the city where this story originates bears the name, Chita, of the sidekick to that most famous, fictional wolfman, Tarzan.

Flowers of Evil on L Street

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Nasty mushroom pile in the sidewalk planter box, L Street NW, between 15th and 16th Streets near the Washington Post building, 26 May 2009

I’ve been working where I have for starting on my fourth summer, which means the same commute for approaching four years. Modern society is clockwork so the monotony is murder. I know all the timing on all the lights at all the intersections from the bus stop to the office. And it’s that way for everyone so I swear that I must step in front of the same guy preventing him from make the same right turn on red every morning.

But there are cycles with cycles, so with enough perspective there are higher orders of monotony. Every year for four years now, after the first summer storm this same nasty pile of mushrooms bursts forth from the sidewalk planter box on L Street NW, between 15th and 16th Streets, near the Washington Post building.

Most years they are normal mushroomy brown. This year they look bizarrely like some flower of evil native to Mordor.

Kurzweil Will Die

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Apropos the latest Terminator film, The New York Times has a decent rundown of singularitarianism, transhumanism, A.I. and so on that touches on most of the figures in the field (Markoff, John, “The Coming Superbrain,” 24 May 2009). The conclusion:

“Kurzweil will probably die, along with the rest of us not too long before the ‘great dawn,'” said Gary Bradski, a Silicon Valley roboticist. “Life’s not fair.”

Moses never gets to enter the Promised Land. Such a shame — to be the last generation to die.

Without the Bugaboo of the Soviet Union

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Marx display, Borders at 14th and H Streets, Washington, D.C., 19 May 2009

Well of course — this is just the media pushing its left-wing agenda. I doubt it. The media has their finger to the wind. During the Bush years they shamelessly kowtowed to Ari Fleischer’s admonition to watch what they write and now that the times are a’ changing, the media is putting up sails for new seas. The mood questioning capitalism is welling up from the ranks with the media wondering how to be relevant. Witness:

“Until 2004, we sold less than 100 copies of Das Kapital per year,” Schuetrumpf [managing director of the Berlin-based publishing house Karl-Diez Verlag, publisher of the German edition of Marx’s collected works] said. “In the 10 months of 2008, we have sold more than 2,500 copies. It is clear that people are interested in learning what Marx has to say about why capitalism does not work.” (Godoy, Julio, “Economy: Turning the Pages Back to Marx and Keynes,” Inter Press Service, 7 November 2008)

And from the picture above, apparently Borders thinks there’s enough interest amidst their customers to turn the Marx collection face-out.

Craziest of all, according to a recent Rasmussen survey, a whopping 20 percent of Americans currently believe that socialism is superior to capitalism (“Just 53% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism,” 9 April 2009).

During the Cold War, Americans’ strongest association with socialism was the Soviet Union, and after the collapse of communism we were told that left-wing economic ideas had been roundly refuted by events. So the right currently believes itself to be effectively tarnishing the program of President Obama by labeling him a socialist. But it turns out that the existence of the Soviet Union wasn’t just culture jamming socialist ideas, but the negative associations that it generated was lending undue credibility to right-wing ideas as well. The collapse of communism may end up not so much taking left-wing ideas down with it, as depriving those of the right of their cudgel of existent socialism. The association of socialism with Stalinism has lost its effectiveness now that the Soviet Union has become just another historical anecdote. This might explain the even more pronounced positive view of socialism among young respondents in the survey (33 percent of young people favor socialism versus 20 percent among the general population).

Republicans would be advised that in constantly pointing to the popular President Obama as the primary exemplar of socialism, the outcome isn’t so much to tarnish President Obama so much as to burnish socialism in the minds of the young generation. “If Obama is socialism,” they think, “I guess that makes me a socialist.” (Yglesias, Matthew, “The Declining Unpopularity of Socialism,” ThinkProgress, 9 April 2009).

Marx is Back!

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April-May 2009, Marx is Back! / 1 de Mayo immigrant's march posters

Out of character for the city, there have been a number of lefty signs around. Some of my recent favorites are the two above. The one on the right is for a Mayday immigrant march. Notice that the flag in the hands of the native American is the United States as a tree with its roots in the shape of the rest of the world. The little plaque on the man’s chest reads both “Sise puede” and “Yes we can.” And the rally is meeting in Malcolm X Park, the unofficial name for Meridian Hill Park (Google Maps | Wikipedia).

I love the socialist conference poster. “Marx is back!” One may wonder where he ever went. I guess some people though that Marxism went into remission after the end of the Cold War. But everyone is on notice that he’s back now.

March 2008-May 2009, Newsweek, Foreign Policy and BusinessWeek, varying degrees of questioning capitalism

With Newsweek going beyond declaring us merely Keynesians now and portraying George Bush, Jr. in the style of Che Guevara, Foreign Policy putting Marx on the cover of their “Big Think” issue (“Why he matters now”), BusinessWeek making Ben Bernanke look like Lenin and including Henry Paulson in Stalinist Soviet style collages and Richard Posner titling his current book A Failure of Capitalism, things are feeling positively European.

But the return of Marx is more than just media camp. With respect to national security, Charles Krauthammer referred to the liberal internationalism of the Clinton years as a “holiday from history” (The Washington Post, 14 February 2003, p. A31). Robert Kagan is now referring to the post-1990s as The Return of History and the End of Dreams. Supposedly September 11, 2001 and the ensuing clash of civilizations has woken us up from our Fukuyam-esque ex-historical state. Similarly, we might refer to the phenomena of “Marx is Back” as the return of history to the economic sphere after 20 years of economic dreams (given that the current crisis has wiped out nearly 15 years of stock market value, it does seem as if it was all a dream). Just as September 11, 2001 broke the exclusive claim of liberal internationalism upon the thinking of the foreign policy establishment and showed that the future would be one of continuing world-historical ideological contention, so the holiday of political-economy that was the Washington Consensus has been knocked askew. The future of the economy will be one of political conflict.

But I kid myself. The legitimacy of capitalism within a given polity has nothing to do with the soundness of ideas and little to do with events. It is primarily a function of the Gini coefficient: the more money there is sloshing around in the upper social strata, the more inassailable the reputation of capitalism. And since that’s hardly going to change in the current crisis, I doubt that the Washington Consensus will emerge with anything more than a few fast forgotten slights.

In this regard the conservatism of the Obama administration should be noted. They are doing whatever they can to handle the current situation with as little enduring systematic change or publicity as possible. And I guess I’m in favor of this. While I may sympathize with dialectical materialism and Marx’s critique of the corruptions of capitalism, he was grossly wrong in his assessment of capitalism as ineluctably hell-bent-for-crisis. I’m essentially an advocate of Keynesian tinkering in a mostly stable system. And besides, alienation is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. The last thing I want is to be railroaded into a syndicate with a bunch of hippies. Those guys are fascists.