Two Quotes

These are both from a book by Michele Le Doeuff entitled Hipparchia's Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. The first speaks well to my current frustration with philosophy in general with its abstractions and cozy little systems. I read philosophy now like poorly written fiction since I am certain most of it has little to nothing to say about the real world that the rest of us have the misfortune of living in. The second I just enjoyed and it needs no explanation.

"We might as well acknowledge the gap between radical freedom of thought, which philosophy promises, and the narrower freedom of which "I" am (anyone is) capable."

"It is an illusion to think that one can be an absolutely free spirit, soaring high above convention and paying no attention to the 'rest of humanity,' a rest who feel uneasy when little girls are not dressed in pink slippers and little boys in blue. Like everyone else I need to recognize that the absurd strength of convention is within me."

Heidegger on "Being-Lonely"

Now, I don't expect everyone unfamiliar with Heidi (as I call him) to get this. But give it a shot! It's actually not that complicated.

Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no Other is present-at-hand or perceived. Even Dasein's Being-alone is Being-with in the world. The Other can be missing only in and for a Being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with; its very possibility is the proof of this. On the other hand, factical Being-alone is not obviated by the occurence of a second example of a human being 'beside' me, or by ten such examples. Even if these and more are present-at-hand, Dasein can still be alone. So Being-with and the facticity of Being with one another are not based on the occurence together of several 'subjects'. Yet Being-alone 'among' many does not mean that with regard to their Being they are merely present-at-hand there alongside us. Even in our Being 'among them' they are there with us; their Dasein-with is encountered in a mode in which they are indifferent and alien.

Kinda sad, huh?

Complicity, Passivity and the Extension of Tacit Support

I have often said, to no shortage of criticism, that passive acceptance of an unjust institution is tantamount to the commission of an active injustice. I usually justify this by pointing out the the passive participant both accepts the benefits of an injustice that flow toward him/her and does not do anything to actively disrupt the continuance of this injustice. Well, I have just completed an essay by Hannah Arendt entitled "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship" where she addresses this phenomenon more eloquently (I will be quoting directly from Arendt without citation, and paraphrasing even more extensively, it should be clear that the ideas are to be attributed to Arendt from the aforementioned essay and then applied by myself in the final analysis).

Arendt is speaking in this instance about those who tacitly supported the Nazi regime by not retreating from public life (it is important to mention that one premise of this is that under a Totalitarian regime the dictatorship makes an ideological monolith out of public life, whereby even the most insignificant public functionary is a prop under the regimes power). In particular, she is addressing those who claimed they were merely obeying the laws of the land, and that "obedience" is a political virtue without which no body politic could survive. This she claims is a common fallacy in political theory that runs all the way back to classical philosophy.

The fallacy appears plausible because of its close relationship to the theoretic truth that all governments rely on the consent of the governed ("consent" can also be forced or coerced, it just needs to be present) and then the fallible identification of consent with obedience. She suggests that this is a lingering effect of the classical conception of government as a relationship between the rulers and the ruled whereby the former give orders and the latter obey. This conception, Arendt claims, supplanted an earlier and more adequate conception of participation in concerted action.

This earlier conception saw concerted action as a two stage process. In the first stage "leadership" initiates the action, and in the second stage many join to support a "common enterprise." The idea behind this theory of concerted action is that nobody can accomplish anything in the realm of public and concerted action without the help of many others. The leader, in essence, is just the first among equals in the concerted action needed to achieve the common enterprise.

From here Arendt suggests that the "nonparticipators in public life under totalitarian dictatorship," by shunning responsibility in those places where their support was needed "under the name of obedience," were the only ones who were not responsible for supporting the regime. Therein lies the power of nonviolent resistance or civil disobedience. Where enough people act irresponsibly when leadership demands their "obedience," it is clear what a disruptive effect this would have on the commission of political injustice. In the end Arendt suggests that one should not ask functionary participants, "Why did you obey?," but, "Why did you support?" There is no such thing as obedience among equals, only support, and concerted action requires the support of many.

It is clear that our society is not totalitarian and that mere participation in the public realm is not the commission or support of monolithic injustice. However, there are places of responsibility where injustice requires "obedience." This is most clearly illustrated in the way that the nonviolent resistance to apartheid in America in the 60's made it impossible to (explicitly) maintain such a system. By removing support for explicit racial inequity the "leaders" no longer had the support necessary to achieve concerted public action.

Non-explicit racial and gender injustices are more complicated issues because it is much more difficult to locate where one's support is aiding in the commission of a concerted action whose end is social injustice. To further complicate the matter in many cases these "spaces of responsibility" have been "privatized." Nevertheless, it is still true that where such "spaces of responsibility" are found, a failure to remove one's support is tantamount to direct complicity in the action since these actions rely on widespread support. So when one locates a law that reinforces an unjust social order (and I am not demanding the imposition of a certain moral perspective, there are certain occasions where we can achieve an intersubjective consensus, a sensus communis, that a given end is unjust) if one does not then withdraw their support, act "irresponsibly," defy the laws, then one is supporting an injustice.

Some of these "places" have been located and nothing has been done to end the injustices they perpetuate, and its not enough to ignore or refuse to learn of these "places," because its widely accepted that ignorance is not an excuse for the commission of a wrong, especially when it is an intentional ignorance.

Do I need a Culture?

A few additional things... There is an interesting article in the Guardian today about the loss of the German sense of national identity. A few months ago there was something about the loss of the French identity that had been in French newspapers all summer (to be fair though the French have searched for their "identity" since the Revolution, ironic that the nation that produced Sartre may well suffer from the worst existential "bad faith!"). This seems to be a phenomenon playing out around the world.

Another question, could this be the logical end of liberalism? One of the Enlightenment projects was to untie man from his unchosen identities (read here, imposed cultural identity), man would become cosmopolitan and "choose" his identity. Maybe the liberal/enlightenment project has succeeded in limiting the role of social identities and allowing the limited rational being to choose his "self." We have created a right to chose one's culture and the government will stay out of it as far as possible (we do "nation-build" here, our language, our education, etc...are all tools to create some kind of common thing, "American").

Every society has a culture I think, perhaps America has decided to stick with a very thin, "intersectional," baseline culture and left it up to us to decide beyond that. We have chosen not to chose so our "culture" is that thin liberal/market culture that America has used to hegemonize or congeal its society. Maybe, as is hinted at in the above mentioned article on the loss of the German identity, the loss of culture corresponds to the scaling back of the nation-state and its sovereignty. Perhaps it has to do with globalization and the rapid and successive melding of cultures that an international market and technological advances in telecommunications/transportation have fostered. Is a cry for a culture Fascist? This is a question that arises in Germany, if you long for a return to a "German" Germany are you a Fascist?

There are certain uncertainties that follow upon the decline of, or radical change in, culture. It has to be linked with a corresponding decline, or radical shift in "society." Culture has historically been one of the glues that hold societies together (common language, common religion, art, history, etc...these have all been indicators of a "society"). Man is a social animal, there is no human "being" without other human "beings." This is something that has always gotten me about the liberal assumption that man is naturally individualistic and egoistic, (and why I offered that the "self-interested man" is a self-destructive liberal construct),...if man were disposed to destroy the social, then man is naturally inclined to destroy himself. Man must be naturally cooperative or else things like language would never have emerged. Back to the point though, if we destroy culture, and society collapses without this foundation, then are we paving the way to the destruction of humanity?

As a final thought, are culture and society just changing so much and so quickly that we barely recognize them? Maybe as the world gets more interdependent the scope of the "society" that culture must create expands. In order to accommodate this vast social expanse, to gain consent from such a diverse body of peoples, culture must be reduced to the lowest common denominator. This raises two questions. Have we stretched the bounds of culture beyond its capacity (this is the Fascist model, a reversion back to a "National" or "tribal" culture), and ultimately is this project is doomed to collapse on itself? Or are we just in a transitional period, a cultural ebb, where we have had to rely on a razor thin, "bare minimum" in order to start building a massive global society? This implies that as we grow closer as a world a culture will blossom, as we begin to identify as a cosmopolitan society our lowest common denominator culture will begin to grow more robust.

Since I spoke of Gramsci again last time I will leave with a link to an old post I did on hegemony so that people can look to refresh on the theory if they wish, it is very relevant (perhaps a bit reductionist, even though it was meant to combat reductionist Marxists at the time, so for a more complex account that confronts the Foucaultian model of disbursed and fragmented power centers see the work of Laclau and Mouffe). http://the4thcentury.blogspot.com/2004/07/nihilism-hegemony-and-rebellion.html

Do I Have a Culture?

More later cause I have little time. When I discussed "self-interest" in a previous post it was intended to be a facetious claim. This fits your model I think because there really is not organic culture of self-interest. Self-interest is a top-down ideology created by elites to keep the mechanisms of our state operating and maintain their role of prominence. This seems to be a recurring trend in many of our "cultural principles" (I would add "manifest destiny," to those ideas of "pioneerism," and the like, i.e., exploitation and imperialism).

Again referring to Gramsci's theory of hegemonic leadership, he argues that culture is one of the most effective tools of domination employed by the elite. It is easily disseminated and often consented to by the subordinate. So one may ask what any "cultures" are other than one of many congealing forms of ideology that order and accumulate societies. Culture is one of the places where ideology materializes.

Interesting timing on this discussion though, since I am beginning an essay written by Arendt addressing the "Crisis of Culture." Particularly, Arendt is addressing what in her time was seen as the "crisis" of the rise of a mass or "popular" culture. I have only just begun and will have to add more later, but many on this site know that I have always been critical of popular culture, which I see as little more than the dissemination of a consumerist ideology and the destruction of art through its commodification.

Arendt discusses a theory of how popular culture arises. She sees "modernity" as a rebellion against the court cultures (best embodied by Louis the 14th's court culture), "society" as it is called. Prior to industrialization there was no "mass society" because the masses did not have enough leisure time to create one. As conditions improved a mass society developed and was accompanied by a mass culture (they always arrive together, society and culture). She talks about how the modern rejection of high society by the elites was most evident in the fact that the revolutionary ranks were often filled by intellectuals and many "modern" novels glorify the proletariat.

Much of the crisis of modernity was a battle of individual man against society, and prior to the rise of "mass society" the individual of society always had a refuge to where he could retreat from society, the "masses" (again, the glorification of the proletariat in 20th century literature and the tendency of intellectuals toward revolutionary movements). With the rise of "mass society" the refuge disappeared and the tension between individual man and society heightened. This is as far as I am in the article, but you can see how interesting it is going to be!

I will take off here from that Arendtian point of departure and suggest that now the individual man has to reject society and culture altogether to alleviate this tension (one can already see a future "dialectic of the individual man and society", I will get right on it). Hence, there is the notion, clearly espoused by me, that popular culture is a contradiction of terms. What happens when man is separated from culture, well its not completely clear and I think our lifetimes will probably answer this question more fully as we systematically destroy cultures, but Hitler had a suggestion. Hitler proposed that one of the ways the Nazi regime would gain domination over the German peoples was to reunite the German people with the German culture, hence the idea of a "National" Socialism and Hitler's ban on modern art. Maybe this can help explain the rise of religious fascism in the world today as certain factions in the world (and this is not limited to the Muslim world, see the rise of Hindu fascism in India, the rise of the right-wing Jewish leadership in Israel, and the rise of the Christian Right in America for just a few examples) try to "reunite" the people with a "culture" whose existence they see threatened by the spread of liberalism and the like.

Not sure where I stand on all this, but for the most part I agree with Occy. I do not feel as though I have a "culture." I know I explicitly reject popular culture as my culture and I feel I do so with good reason, but on some level am I just fighting that battle between individual man and society that Arendt points to? Another question I have, and here is the one Occy has been dreading, is what is "culture." I have expressed in this post and others that culture is just a tool to order (usually hierarchically) a group of people, a "society" (again, Arendt suggest that culture requires a society to arise, cannot remember the direction of the relationship, but maybe society requires the antecedent imposition of a culture). Is a culture just a tool of domination in hierarchical social orderings? Is it "synthetic," is it created to impose a social order, or is it "organic," does it arise naturally and then is potentially appropriated and used to create a social order?