Posts Tagged ‘power’
“Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage”*…
To observe the obvious, power– and the exercise of power– is having a moment. It’s a little surprising that there’s not a broader discussion of Michel Foucault (and here) afoot… but then, the subjects and terms of our civic discourse are effectively being set by the powerful; and it’s hard to read Foucault as anything but a thorough-going critic.
It’s not so surprising that Thucydides is much discussed; it’s been easier for the powerful to find consoling, justifying “lessons” in his History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens— “Thucydides Trap” and so much more. Indeed, even critics are invoking Thucydides.
But, David Polansky and Daniel Schillinger argue, we need to listen wisely, not too well: the powerful wielding Thucydides are misreading him…
It’s almost never a good sign when Thucydides is in the news. The ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War is typically invoked either to alert us to the possible return of a bygone age of terrifying great-power conflict, or to confirm that strong states can and should advance their own material interests, irrespective of justice.
Earlier this year, the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney earned much acclaim when he quoted, at Davos, the most famous lines in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War: ‘The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.’ While Carney intended his reference to be a critique of US behaviour under the Trump administration, Thucydides is also invoked in defence of aggressive or even imperialistic policies, especially in the United States. Yet those who look to Thucydides for either a justification or a critique of empire should be disappointed. Thucydides pulls no punches: he writes to expose the delusions of both the strong and the weak, the unjust and the just. Self-deception is a leitmotif of his History. Because self-deception is perennial, and because it can prove disastrous to victors and vanquished alike, Thucydides’ work remains timely and timeless, as he expected it would…
[The authors outline the war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians and Thucycides’ vantage…]
… The line Carney invoked is often associated with ‘realism’ in world politics. This is a somewhat woolly term that encompasses both a moral position of scepticism about the possibility of justice in political life and an analytical approach to understanding political events in terms of material power and interest. Thucydides is a plausible originator of realism inasmuch as he offers an unvarnished and unsentimental account of the operation of political power among Greek cities. His realism may be contrasted with the ‘liberal institutionalism’ of a thinker such as Immanuel Kant, who holds out hope for mutual cooperation and even perpetual peace among states.
During the 20th century, these lines of ideological disagreement came to define discussions of international politics in both academic and political discourse. For example, the British historian E H Carr warily observed, during the Second World War, the spread of what he called ‘utopianism’, as reflected in the excessive hopes that international institutions such as the League of Nations might foster world peace. In response, Carr offered a qualified defence of realism for providing a pragmatic and flexible guide to politics in a dangerous world: ‘realism is the necessary corrective to the exuberance of utopianism, just as in other periods utopianism must be invoked to counteract the barrenness of realism.’
Thucydides’ own relationship to realism is more ambiguous than his reputation might suggest, however. For one thing, he never uses the term itself (which does not much predate the 20th century – in fact, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who first applied the term to Thucydides). He also rarely issues judgments under his own name. Many of the most notorious lines in his History are spoken by historical figures. Would anyone suppose that lines spoken by Richard III contain clear statements of William Shakespeare’s own views?
No doubt, Thucydides provides ample material for those who hope to find realist perspectives in his work. It is also true, however, that his History elicits a range of searching reflections on war’s causes and consequences. Note that Thucydides emphasises, humanely, the suffering occasioned by the Peloponnesian War. Some of this suffering was caused by disasters coinciding with war, not least the plague at Athens, which killed as many as a quarter of Athenian citizens by 425 BCE. But much suffering was caused by the Greeks themselves, including the Athenians and Spartans, whom one might have thought too ‘civilised’ to become so violent. In Thucydides’ words: ‘Never had so many cities been taken and laid desolate … never was there so much banishing and blood-shedding, now on the field of battle, now in factional strife.’
Thucydides himself was hardly exempt from events that shook the Hellenic world. He suffered from the terrible plague that struck Athens. He served in the war as an Athenian general, only to be exiled by his fellow citizens as punishment for failing to prevent the revolt of Amphipolis in 424 BCE. Yet Thucydides writes about the war with sobriety and restraint. There is little editorialising in his History; the author all but effaces himself. Thomas Hobbes, who was the first to translate him directly from Greek to English, observes: ‘Thucydides is one, who [does not] digress to read a lecture, moral or political, upon his own text, nor enter into men’s hearts further than the acts themselves evidently guide him.’ It is this same reserve, meanwhile, that seems to invite readers to impose their own interpretations upon the work.
The most well-known line in Thucydides’ History – and the one still encountered by undergraduates the world over, not to mention the attendees of Davos – is the one delivered by the Athenians to the Melians: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ This episode, the Melian Dialogue, occurs in 416 BCE (more than halfway through the war), when the Athenians send an expedition to the neutral island of Melos to compel the Melians to submit to Athenian rule. Prior to the siege, nameless representatives from both cities meet for parley.
Note, however, that the standard translation of the famous line is more ominous than the Greek verb, συγχωρέω, really warrants. A more accurate rendering of the line would be: ‘Those who are superior do what they can, and the weak yield.’ Perhaps the translation issue explains, in part, why many readers suppose that the Athenians here say that ‘might makes right.’ What the Athenians actually say is that the language of justice only has a place in negotiations among relative equals in power. Between the powerful Athenians and the weak Melians, the Melians must yield to Athenian interests. So, even if the Athenians’ line contains a threat, it also invites the Melians to speak without pretences.
The Melians reject this offer to find common ground on the basis of shared interests. Although we do not hear from the Melian people but only from their oligarchic rulers, these announce that the Melians will fight the far-more-powerful Athenians, even as the Athenians ask only that the Melians become tributary allies of Athens, supporting the Athenian empire with cash and ships. The Melians even seem to expect that they will defeat the Athenians – because they will receive the help of the gods (as just men) and the Spartans (as Spartan colonists). In their own words: ‘We trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the [Spartans], who are bound, if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred.’
The Athenians explain to the Melians that neither nature, the gods nor the Spartans will protect them: ‘As you have staked most on, and trusted most in, the [Spartans], your fortune, and your hopes [for justice], so will you be most completely deceived.’ And the Melians were deceived: the Athenians destroyed the island, killing all the men and enslaving the women and children.
The Athenians would soon suffer a similar fate. On the heels of the Melian massacre, within six months’ time, the Athenians would launch an expedition to Sicily, ending in the total destruction of their forces – about 40,000 men, the size of a whole city. For many readers, the Athenian disaster in Sicily represents punishment for the annihilation of Melos.
In one of his rare direct statements on the war, Thucydides himself declines to blame its outcome on any particular military encounter – not even the Sicilian expedition – nor upon the Athenians’ pursuit of empire. More broadly, the Athenian response to the Melians holds true for other cities. There is nothing in Thucydides’ History that refutes the Athenians’ central claim: the strong are simply in a greater position to impose their preferences, which the weak disregard at their peril. Every city rules to the limits of its power.
The question, rather, is whether any city does so wisely, without illusions. What, after all, did the Athenians gain – except infamy – by destroying tiny Melos? Why did the Melian rulers prevent the Athenians from speaking to the people, and why did they insist on self-destruction when they needed only to pay tribute to Athens? The pathos of the Melian dialogue, for Thucydides, lies in the self-deceptions of both the Melians and the Athenians – and the disastrous consequences to which these give rise.
he Melians represent one instance of a broader psychological phenomenon depicted by Thucydides: a fervid attachment to justice, especially in times of war, can carry with it certain delusions. In Thucydides, the just are self-deceived, both because they think that they will prosper on account of their justness, and because they overrate their own attachment to justice.
Sparta is a case in point. The Spartans and their allies insist on the justness of their war against Athens. To hear them tell it, the Athenian empire imposes slavery on its subject cities, since these are compelled to contribute tribute and ships to Athens. By contrast, the Spartans call themselves ‘the liberators of Hellas’.
This rhetoric of justice masks the Spartans’ true motivations, which Thucydides unmasks. Thucydides comments on the Spartan decision to declare war against Athens in the first place: ‘The [Spartans] voted that the treaty had been broken, and that the war must be declared, not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians.’ While the Spartans denounce the injustice of the Athenians and proclaim the freedom of all Greek cities, they act as they do because they see their own hegemony on the Peloponnesus threatened. At the very moment the Spartans vote for war and prepare to invade Attica, they remain nominally in treaty with the Athenians. Evidently the Spartans do not care about the injustice of breaking the treaty so much as they care about protecting their interests, whatever they may think or say – though they do make sure to say, as a pretext, that the Athenians have broken the treaty.
The Spartans also commit many of the worst atrocities reported by Thucydides…
… At best, the Spartans are hypocrites, trumpeting the causes of justice and liberation while quietly acting out of fear and self-interest. Yet the truth is worse and more complicated. The Spartans are moved by a passion for justice, which burns hot when they mete out punishment. Those who threaten the interests of the city – including their own best slaves, whose only fault is their excellence – incur the wrath of the Spartans. They are self-deceived because they do not seem to realise that their passion for justice has grown into a monstrous taste for punishment. The crimes of the Spartans receive a fraction of the attention paid to the fate of the Melians, partly because the Spartans committed their atrocities without the Athenians’ famous (or infamous) rhetorical flourishes.
Meanwhile, the Athenians may appear not to be self-deceived. After all, they talk tough about the weakness of justice in affairs among cities, and aren’t shy about pointing it out to others. In a conference at Sparta before the outbreak of the war, envoys from Athens offer a tripartite defence of the Athenian empire. First, human passions – especially fear, but also desires for honour and profit – compel cities to rule to the limits of their power. Second, experience confirms this account of the psyche. Only weaker cities appeal to justice; the strong simply act, securing their interests as they can. Third, because human nature and experience together compel cities to seek expansive rule, no city should be blamed for so acting. Necessity excuses the Athenian empire.
Yet, Thucydides exposes the delusions of the Athenians no less than those of the Spartans. If the Athenians grasp the weakness of justice among cities, they overestimate the power of reason – including their own. It was the Athenians, after all, who insisted on a dialogue with the Melian elites, trusting (mistakenly) that they would be able to persuade the Melians to accept Athenian rule. By destroying the island in the end, the Athenians school the Melians in the weakness of justice, but they commit two blunders of their own: they lose the resources that Melos might have provided to their empire; and their massacre of the people hurts their reputation as the ally of the people in oligarchic cities.
Likewise, in the war conference at Sparta, the exposition of the Athenian position works not at all to dissuade the Spartans from declaring war (indeed, it seems almost calculated to enrage them). Again and again in the History, the Athenians browbeat their enemies at the bargaining table. It is unclear whether the Athenians care more about realising their strategic aims or vindicating their own cleverness.
It is not enough, in other words, for the Athenians to realise their ambitions; they also want the satisfaction of seeing the other cities acknowledge the truth of their worldview. But its truth should not require other cities to grasp it. Silent conquest would work just as well – or better, insofar as it avoids needlessly offending those whose acquiescence would be of benefit to them.
Finally, for all their vaunted realism, and even when they focus their deliberations on material realities, the Athenians make bad decisions, or fail to understand their own motivations. For example, when the Athenians decide, under the influence of the charismatic Alcibiades, to invade faraway Sicily, there is surprisingly little discussion of the actual strategic value of this venture. Rather, the citizens of Athens vote as they do for a variety of more personal incentives, with the older men seeing opportunities for vicarious victory, and the young seeking glory and adventure with little fear for their lives. And yet, as though mistrusting their own judgments, they elect to place the cautious Nicias in charge of the expedition, as if his personal moderation would somehow balance out their immoderate goals. In the event, this mismatch leads to disaster.
More broadly, this misunderstanding of their situation extends to the nature of their empire itself. Pericles, the pre-eminent Athenian statesman, admits that the Athenian empire is ‘like a tyranny’. Yet he does so only in the final speech (before his death), with the plague raging through his city. Even then, he cannot help urging the Athenians to hope for glory. He claims that, even in defeat, Athens will be remembered for having ruled over more Greeks than any other city.
In one sense, at least, Pericles was not mistaken: we do still recall the exploits of the Athenians. Yet our remembrance is owed less to Pericles than to Thucydides. But, where Pericles poetically declares that ‘heroes have the whole earth for their tomb,’ Thucydides depicts the end of the Sicilian expedition: the Athenians leaving behind the unburied and the wounded, drinking their own blood in the river Assinarus, and dying, ignominiously, in the stinking quarries of Syracuse. And where Pericles promises his fellow citizens that they will leave behind them ‘imperishable monuments’, Thucydides leaves us his far more ambiguous History of the war.
Thucydides saw in the Peloponnesian War ‘a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.’ Observing the United States’ present conflict with Iran, which has increasingly severe implications for the global economy, it is evident that those who embarked on the war had outsized expectations of success at minimal cost, and the tough talk that accompanied its outset was a reflection of those same expectations rather than a true apprehension of events. This kind of faux-realism has a way of excluding the subject from the harsh logic of their own claims about political life.
Meanwhile, others routinely predict the decline of US power as a cosmic punishment for its repeated aggression against other countries. While decline may be inevitable over a long enough timeline, the many announcements of it are also a form of wish-casting for a just universe, in which the unjust inevitably receive their comeuppance. After referencing Thucydides, Carney offered some tough-minded talk of ‘middle powers’ banding together, which was rather vague on actual power analysis: how sure are we that these states really do constitute middle powers (as opposed to small ones)? And what do their aggregated capacities really amount to?
A similar self-deception pervades the Hellenic world throughout the war. The Athenians deceive themselves as to their true capacity to rule over their fellow Greeks, especially as to the power of their reason to control events and persuade others. And they even go so far as to deceive themselves as to how their exploits will be remembered by those they conquered. The Spartans deceive themselves as to the justness of their cause, no matter their own acts of manifest injustice. Finally, the Melians deceive themselves that their own just cause in facing a stronger invader will be rewarded through salvation by either their Spartan allies or the gods themselves.
By contrast, Nietzsche accords Thucydides the highest praise for his ‘unconditional will not to deceive [himself]’. He sees the world as it is, and he does not attempt to find in it confirmation of what he already believes he knows. Thucydides’ self-knowledge defines the distance between him and us, which is not merely temporal but psychological. It is ironic, then, that so many with greater confidence and less self-awareness apply their own purposes to a work concerned with the vast human capacity for self-deception…
As Thucydides said, “Ignorance is bold, and knowledge is reserved.”
On learning from a still-timely ancient history: “Thucydides the perspicacious,” from @aeon.co.
See also: “Thucydiocies: How Not to Read Thucydides in Contemporary Political Discourse.”
* Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
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As we fumble with force, we might recall that on this date in 48 BCE, Julius Caesar‘s forces defeated the Roman Republican army led by Pompey in the Battle of Pharsalus. A climactic event in “Caesar’s Civil War,” the victory boosted Caesar’s power and legitimacy. While the civil war dragged on until 45 BC, Caesar grew steadily stronger until his ultimate victory, after which he was appointed “Dictator,” and set into motion the conversion of Rome into an imperial state, completed by his heir Octavian (or as we also know him, Augustus).
Scholars disagree as to whether the Battle of Pharsalus was the inciting event for the collapse of the republic or a symptom of the republic’s collapse. Either way, Caesar’s victory there was the turning point from republic to imperial rule.
“The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts”*…
Scheduling note: your correspondent is hitting the road again, so regular service will be interrupted; it should resume on Friday the 7th…
Author and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen on Byung-Chul Han’s critiques of digital capitalism…
I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010. Han’s descriptions of neoliberalism’s culture of exhaustion hit me with that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions.
At the heart of Han’s conception of a burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) is a new paradigm of domination. The industrial society’s worker internalises the imperative to work harder in the form of superego guilt. Sigmund Freud’s superego, a hostile overseer persecuting us from within, comes into being when the infantile psyche internalises the forbidding parent. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. The achievement society of our time, Han argues, runs not on superego guilt but ego-ideal positivity – not from a ‘you must’ but a ‘you can’. The ego-ideal is that image of our own perfection once reflected to our infantile selves by our parents’ adoring gaze. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.
With this triumph of positivity, the roughness of the demanding boss gives way to the smoothness (a key Han term) of the relentlessly encouraging coach. On this view, depression is the definitive malaise of the achievement society: the effect of being always made to feel that we’re running hopelessly behind our own ego-ideal, exhausting ourselves in the process.
The figure of the achievement subject gives rise to some of Han’s most vivid evocations of psychic and bodily debilitation:
The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down … It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself…
… Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being…
… Under the rule of digital capitalism, time itself is severed from any ‘narrative or teleological tension’, that is, from any discernible purpose or meaning, and so, like the digital paintings in an immersive show, it ‘disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction.’ In such a regime of time, there is no possibility of Erfahrung, which depends on a sense of narrative continuum and duration. There is only the proliferation of its pale counterpart Erlebnis: the discrete event that ‘amuses rather than transforms’, as Han would later put it in The Palliative Society…
… Because power so often involves coercion, Han argues, there has been a tendency to see them as inextricable. But it is only when power is poor in mediation, felt as alien to our own lives and interests, that it resorts to threatened or actual violence. Whereas when power is at the ‘highest point of mediation’ – when it seems to speak from a recognition of its subjects’ needs and desires – it is more likely to receive those subjects’ willing consent. One could conceive of a power, therefore, that has no sanctions at its disposal, but which is nonetheless rendered absolute by its subjects’ full identification with it.
The less it relies on the threat of punitive measures to back it up, the more power maximises itself. ‘An absolute power,’ writes Han, ‘would be one that never became apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying.’ This is precisely what happens in digital capitalism’s burnout society, where the power of capital consists not in its power to oppress but in the voluntary surrender of its subjects to their own exploitation.
Han draws on the German-American theologian Paul Tillich’s conception of power as ipsocentric, that is, as Han puts it, centred around ‘a self whose intentionality consists of willing-itself’, cultivating and bolstering its own status. God is the ultimate embodiment of power because, in the words of G W F Hegel, ‘he is the power to be Himself’. This will to persist in one’s own existence, to cling to one’s own selfhood, is the basic premise of the Western mode of being. We can discern it at work in the empty narcissism of social media and the culture of self-display in which we’re all enjoined to participate. Self-exploitation is, in a sense, a twisted variant on the Cartesian cogito: I am seen therefore I am. In making myself perpetually visible, I may empty myself out, lose the last vestiges of my interiority. But, in cleaving to the bare bones of a self-image, some form of my existence survives.
The fundamental basis of this erosion of meaningful experience, argues Han, is felt at the level of temporality. The accelerated time of digital capitalism effectively abolishes the practice of ‘contemplative lingering’. Life is felt not as a temporal continuum but as a discontinuous pile-up of sensations crowding in on each other. One of the more egregious consequences of this new temporal regime is the atomisation of social relations, as other people are reduced to interchangeable specks in the same sensory pile-up. Trust between people, grounded in both the assumption of mutual continuity and reliability, and in a sense of knowing the other as singular and distinct, is inexorably corroded: ‘Social practices such as promising, fidelity or commitment, which are temporal practices in the sense that they commit to a future and thus limit the horizon of the future, thus founding duration, are losing all their importance.’…
Consumer culture, with its compulsion for novelty and perpetual stimulation, likewise erodes the bonds of shared experience that engender meaningful narratives. The fire around which human beings would once have gathered to hear stories has been displaced by the digital screen, ‘which separates people as individual consumers.’ Time, love, art, work, narrative; these are the key zones of experience hollowed out by the disintegrative logic of digital capitalism. Each is a rich store of transformative encounter, or Ehrfahrung, which the ‘non-time’ of the present has reduced to empty instances of Erlebnis…
How the “suffocating system” of digital capital creates hollowed-out lives: “The winter of civilization,” the thought of @byungchulhan.bsky.social in @aeon.co. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
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As we analyze ambition, we might send careful birthday greeting to Charles Ponzi; he was born on this date in 1882. A con artist, he swindled his way across Canada and the U.S. in the early 1920s, promising clients a 50% profit within 45 days or 100% profit within 90 days, by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries and redeeming them at face value in the U.S. as a form of arbitrage. In reality, Ponzi was paying earlier investors using the investments of later investors. While this type of fraudulent investment scheme wasn’t invented by Ponzi, it became so identified with him that it now is referred to as a “Ponzi scheme“. The scam for which he’s known ran for over a year before it collapsed, costing his “investors” $20 million (over $300 million at current value).
Ponzi schemes have grown since Ponzi’s time (Bernie Madoff‘s version is estimated to have totalled around $65 billion) and are alive and well in the U.S.
“Morning, boys, how’s the water?”*…
Dan Bouk (whom I knew primarily for his fascinating book on the census) on the challenge of fielding a carefully-grounded critique of power. He begins with Emerson on Napoleon…
I imagine Ralph Waldo Emerson (Waldo, to this friends) entering a lecture hall in the mid-nineteenth century. His listeners packed tightly against one another, the better to fend off the winter cold. The old sat alongside the young, “bald heads and flowing transcendental locks” abutting “misanthropists and lovers.” This would have been the sixth day and the sixth lecture on this leg of a five-year-long tour for Emerson. Those in the audience who had stuck it out this far would have already heard the great man Emerson explain PHILOSOPHY by explaining Plato, and MYSTICISM with the (now forgotten) Emanuel Swedenborg, and SKEPTICISM through Montaigne, and POETRY via Shakespeare. The critic Andrew Delbanco reports the crowds were “rapt and grateful,” and so we can presume that most in fact stuck it out to the end. Recall that there was no internet to distract them. And so on the final day of the lecture series, Emerson turned his audiences’ attention to the “man of the world,” the practical man, the person who could GET THINGS DONE. His subject was Napoleon Bonaparte, a subject he had every reason to believe would fascinate the entire auditorium…
… Emerson, in the late 1840s, could presume that his audience already knew a lot about Napoleon, that they were likely among the “million readers of anecdotes or memoirs or lives” of the great man. People in the mid-nineteenth century US read about Napoleon for many reasons, and yet it seems that many treated him as a hero. The great social thinker, activist, and feminist of the turn of the twentieth century, Jane Addams, also studied Napoleon’s life. According to her biographer, Louise Knight, Addams spent much of her childhood reading from her father’s library. He paid her a nickel for every book she read and discussed with him. According to Knight, “Great men such as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Cromwell, and Napoleon were heavily featured.” Napoleon sat alongside the American founders. These were the lives that Addams would later try to emulate. When she founded the settlement project Hull House in Chicago, she was seeking a way to overcome the limits society put on her because of her sex. She too could get things done. Knight says that the biographies of great men taught Addams that “her gender was irrelevant to heroic dreams.”
Emerson’s or Addams’ contemporaries read about the life of Napoleon the way that people today read biographies of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, and, well,…Napoleon, I guess…
[Bouk then provides a close reading of Emerson’s account of the Le Petit Caporal…]
… I have, over the last fourteen years, assigned this lecture to students many times. I give it to them because it is fascinating, and also because it is confounding. As I seek to get them to think about how and why an author might lead an audience in a strange or unexpected direction, there is no better text, nor a more frustrating one. Because the reader sticks with Emerson for 30 pages; we are pummeled by story upon story and assertion atop assertion of Napoleon’s greatness; then, in the last five pages, Emerson takes it all away from us, and makes the sudden forceful case for the opposite of everything we’ve just been reading.
Early in the lecture, Emerson explained that Napoleon “wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth.” His advantage was always that he cared nothing for feelings or morals: “all the sentiments which embarrass men’s pursuit of these objects, he set aside.” And yet, it is still shocking when Emerson turns on Napoleon with full force and asks us to sit with exactly what it meant to be untroubled by sentiment:
His doctrine of immortality is simply fame.
He was thoroughly unscrupulous.
He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown and poison, as his interest dictated.
For thirty pages, Napoleon surpassed all in his abilities and powers.
For the final five pages, he is revealed to surpass all in sociopathy.
What does it all mean?
Here is a recapitulation of the entire lecture: an accounting of unbelievable effects, and then somehow the assertion that NONE OF IT MATTERED…
[Bouk analyzes similar trajectories in Robert Caro’s account of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, and in Jack London’s fictional account of a similar character, Burning Daylight, observing that in each case, as with Napoleon, the vivacity of the portrayal of the subjects actions can overshadow the summary critique…]
… This is the fundamental problem of a well-constructed critical expose. The act of exposure can attract at the same time that it condemns. (See also, every book or film about Wall Street. I’m thinking especially of Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, which asserted the emptiness of investment banking and still drove masses of its readers to seek out jobs on the street.)
When we swim in the sea, who is prepared to condemn the water?
The dilemma of critique is that it requires using the values of a society to win and keep the attention of readers. But having used those values, what effect can the exposure of their limits really have?…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Oceans of Power and a Tincture of Reproof,” from Bouk’s terrific newsletter Shrouded and Cloaked.
[Image above: source]
* “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” -David Foster Wallace (source)
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As we draw conclusions, we might that it was on this date in 1815 that Napoleon boarded the “Bellerophon” and was officially informed that he was being deported to St. Helena.
… At 10.30 am, Admiral Lord Keith, accompanied by Sir Henry Bunbury, Under Secretary of State for War, boarded “Bellerophon” and asked to be received by the one which the English refuse to address as “Emperor” and that they refer to simply as “General Bonaparte”. Without preamble, the Admiral, with the help of General Bertrand, the Grand Marshal of the Palace who acted as interpreter, communicated the decision by the British government to deport him to the island of St Helena so as, he said, “not to allow him the opportunity again to disturb the peace of Europe.” Lord Keith added that the “General” could be accompanied by the three French officers who had accompanied him aboard “Bellerophon,”, as well as a surgeon and ten servants. He concluded by stating that the departure would take place in a few days.
Lord Keith, at the request of the French, then provided some details on the conditions under which the proscribed transportation to the place of their future residence would take place. Since “Bellerophon” was unfit to accomplish such a trip, the French would board “Northumberland” [a few days later]…
Napoleon, indignant, reminded them that he had boarded “Bellerophon” voluntarily; he was the host and not the prisoner of England; that that nation would be covered with opprobrium if it performed such action against him and in violation of its own laws. Both Englishmen remained unmoved. When Napoleon finally stopped talking, they simply replied that they would transmit this protest to the Prince Regent and insisted that “the General” swiftly make known to them the names of his future companions in exile.”
“I’m not a member of any organized political party…. I’m a Democrat”*…
As we face the prospect of a post-Biden election, a consideration of the mechanics that will come into play. Much ink has been (justifiably) spilled dissecting the differences in the Republican and Democratic approaches to governance, their goals, and their potential implications for our future. Tanner Greer suggests that there are other important differences too– more specifically, he explains the difference between patronage (Republican) and constituent (Democratic) parties…
The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same: power flows differently within them. The two big political news items of this week—the happenings of the Republican National Convention and the desperate attempts of many Democrats to replace their candidate before their own convention next month—reflect these asymmetries. Nevertheless, many discussions of American politics assume that that the structures and operational norms of the two parties are the same. If these party differences were more widely recognized, I suspect we would see fewer evangelicals frustrated with their limited influence over the GOP party platform, fewer journalists shocked with J.D. Vance’s journey from never-Trump land to MAGA-maximalism, and greater alarm among centrist Democrats about the longer-term influence that the Palestine protests will have on the contours of their coalition.
My perspective on all this has been strongly shaped by two research articles penned by political scientist Jo Freeman. In her youth Freeman was a new left activist, one of the founding activist-intellectuals of feminism’s second wave. She is perhaps most famous today for two essays she wrote in her activist days (both under her movement name “Joreen”). The first, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” is a biting critique of the counterculture dream of eliminating hierarchy from activist organizations. The second, “Trashing: the Dark Side of Sisterhood,” is one of the original descriptions of “Cancel Culture.” There Freeman provides a psychological account of how cancellation (she calls it “trashing”) works and the paralyzing effect it has within leftist organizations, where cancellations are most common. If you have never read these essays I recommend you do. Freeman’s internal critiques of left-wing movements at work are more insightful than most rightwing jeremiads against them.
Neither of these essays shed much light on the Republican Party. For that we must turn to her later, more academic work. In particular, her 1987 article “Who You Know vs. Who You Represent: Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican Parties,” and her 1986 “The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties.”
Freeman’s academic interests were framed by her activist experiences. She was deeply involved in the seventies attempts to get feminist planks onto the Democratic and Republican party platforms. Up to that juncture the Republican Party had far stronger feminist credentials than the Democrats did; had the feminist of 1960 been forced to predict which party would champion her cause thirty years later, she would have guessed the GOP.
This is not what happened. That is the mystery that drives much of Freeman’s late ‘80s work: why did the feminist movement succeed so brilliantly with the Democrats, but fail so miserably with the Republicans? Freeman argues that this had less to do with demographics or deep ideological alignment than with the structures and operational culture of each party. Although both parties have changed in the days since Freeman stalked the convention floors, many of the differences she observed between the two parties still hold true today.
The place to start is a 1980 vote on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. That year the primary feminist organizations working the convention hall were the National Woman’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and the National Organization for Women (NOW). Their pet cause was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The Democrats had already endorsed the amendment, so NOW and the NWPC decided to up the ante: they would support a party plank that read “the Democratic Party shall offer no financial support and technical campaign assistance to candidates who do not support the ERA.” This measure, known as Minority Report #10, became the focus of their efforts.
Jimmy Carter’s delegates controlled the floor. Though no enemy to feminism, his team thought Ten was ill advised. The Democrat’s existing support for the ERA was robust, Carter balked at draconian single-issue “loyalty tests” that might erode his shaky coalition, and he did not wish to make feminist issues central to his campaign. He had the numbers to defeat this change. NOW and the NWPC understood this. They decided to push for a floor vote anyway. As expected, they lost that vote decisively. The platform was not changed.
What did this public defeat portend for the movement? Victory. Losing the fight on the floor did not set the movement back an inch. Far from it: at the next convention these same women’s organizations were given a greater share of decision making authority. All potential presidential candidates courted NOW’s endorsement months before the 1984 convention began; their preferred amendments were incorporated into the platform without issue. “Because feminists got pretty much everything they wanted prior to the Democratic Convention,” Freeman comments, “there wasn’t much to do there except celebrate.”
This is somewhat mysterious. The feminist movement leaders sought an intentional defeat—but only gained power because of it.
We still see this story play out on the left today. Though the contest for clout has shifted out of the convention halls and out onto social media, when you look at the trajectory of leftist movements over the 2010s—such as the Black Lives Matters movement—you find a similar pattern. Protests that closed with policy defeat, changing nothing but media coverage, did not lead to the marginalization of protest leaders or their moment. Quite the opposite: with each defeat the influence these movements held over the Democratic establishment grew.
Why does this happen? Freeman argues that peculiar features of Democratic Party organization and political culture allow activists to profit from defeat. Here is how she describes the salient Democratic Party features:
Both parties are composed of numerous units, which have a superficial similarity… In addition to these formal bodies, the Democratic Party, especially on the national level, is composed of constituencies. These constituencies see themselves as having a salient characteristic creating a common agenda which they feel the party must respond to. Virtually all of these groups exist in organized form independent of the Party and seek to act on the elected officials of both parties. They are recognized by Democratic Party officials as representing the interests of important blocs of voters which the Party must respond to as a Party. Some groups have been recognized parts of the Democratic coalition since the New Deal (e.g. blacks and labor); others are relatively new (e.g. women and gays). Still others which participated in State and local Democratic politics when those were the only significant Party units have not been active as organized groups on the national level (e.g. farmers ethnics).
Some of the Party’s current constituencies have staff members of the Democratic National Committee identified as their liaisons. In addition, in the last few years an informal understanding has arisen that one of each of the three Vice-Chairs will be a member of and represent women, blacks and hispanics. Labor — still the largest and most important constituency — does not feel the need for a liaison as it has direct contact with the party chair. However, a majority of the 25 at-large seats on the DNC, as well as seats on the Executive Committee and the Rules and Credentials Committees at the conventions are reserved for union representatives. Party constituencies generally meet as separate caucuses at the national conventions. Space for these meetings is usually arranged by the DNC. While caucuses are usually open to anyone, the people who attend are generally those for whom that constituency is a primary reference group; i.e. a group with which they identify and which gives them a sense of purpose. With an occasional exception the power of group leaders derives from their ability to accurately reflect the interests of constituency members to the Party leaders. Therefore, while leaders are rarely chosen by the participants, they nonetheless feel compelled to have their decisions ratified by them through debate and votes in the caucuses. The votes usually go the way the leaders direct, but they are symbolically important.
For Freeman the most important fact about the Democratic Party is that its representative constituent groups exist in an organized form independent of the party apparatus proper. This means that the position (and to a lesser extent the power) of the men and women who lead these constituencies is not dependent on the favor of party leaders. To the contrary, Democratic Party leaders tend to think of their personal power as being dependent on the support of the constituencies the activist leaders represent.
This has two important implications. The first is that the power and career success of Democrats who either lead or strongly identify with a minority constituency “is tied to that of [their minority] group as a whole. They succeed as the group succeeds. When the group obtains more power, individuals within that group get more positions.” Democratic leaders think of their party as a bargaining table: various groups looking for representation in the Democratic Party come to this table, demonstrate what they can do for the party, demand that the party do something for them in turn, and negotiate with competing constituencies on matters of policy and personnel. The more electorally important an identity group is, the more personnel slots it will generally receive.
The preceding paragraph is an imperfect model of actually existing Democratic politics—but it is the mental model of Democratic politics that Democratic politicians use as a reference point when evaluating the real thing. Ideals shape behavior…
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… This leads to the second implication of the Democrats bottom-up structure. It is not always obvious who speaks for a given constituency. Activists and group leaders thus not only need to pick fights that demonstrate the importance of their group, but also need to pick fights that cement their legitimacy as representatives of this constituency…
This is why the feminist maneuvers in the 1980 convention made sense: whether the feminists won the floor fight was less important than demonstrating that the women’s groups were a constituency capable of forcing a floor fight in the first place. The activists lost their battle, but successfully proved that their army could be mustered, and that its soldiers looked to them for marching orders. They demonstrated that they deserved a larger spot at the negotiating table—and during the next convention they were given one.
The Republicans are different. In the ‘70s and ‘80s Republican feminists refused to bring losing battles to the floor. Where most Democratic activists view their constituency identity as primary and their party identity as secondary, most of the Republican feminists Freeman worked with saw themselves as Republicans first. Many were the wives of sitting Republican officials. They were not outsiders clamoring for clout but insiders maneuvering for influence. Their party worked in a very different way from the Democrats:
The basic components of the Republican Party are geographic units and ideological factions. Unlike the Democratic groups, these entities exist only as internal party mechanisms. The geographic units—state and local parties— are primarily channels for mobilizing support and distributing information on what the Party leaders want. They are not separate and distinct levels of operation.
Ideological factions are also not power centers independent of their relationship to Party leaders. Unlike Democratic caucus leaders, Republican faction leaders do not feel themselves accountable to their followers. Sometimes there are no identifiable followers… The purpose of ideological factions—at least those that are organized— is to generate new ideas and test their appeal. Initially these new ideas are for internal consumption. Their concept of success is not winning benefits, symbolic or otherwise, for their group, so much as being able to provide overall direction to the Party.
…The Republican Party does have several organized groups within it such as the National Federation of Republican Women, National Black Republican Council and the Jewish Coalition, but their purpose is not to represent the views of these groups to the party. Their function is to recruit and organize group members into the Republican Party as workers and contributors. They carry the party’s message outward, not the group’s message inward. Democratic constituency group members generally have a primary identification with their group, and only a secondary one with the Party. The primary identification of Republican activists is with the Republican Party. They view other strong group attachments as disloyal and unnecessary…
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… the Republican party is fundamentally a leader oriented political organization. Power flows from the top down. Convention battles were not contests between constituencies, but contests between patronage networks. The party is organized around powerful leaders and those who fly their colors under their patron’s banner:
Legitimacy within the Republican Party is dependent on having a personal connection to the leadership. Consequently, supporting the wrong candidate can have disastrous effects on one’s ability to influence decisions. Republican Presidents exercise a monolithic power over their party that Democratic Presidents do not have. With the nomination of Ronald Reagan, many life-long Republicans active on the national level who had supported Ford or Bush had to quickly change their views to conform to those of the winner or find themselves completely cut off. Mavericks, who do not have any personal attachments to identified leaders, may be able to operate as gadflies, but can rarely build an independent power base. Since legitimacy in the Democratic Party is based on the existence of just such a power base, real or imagined, one does not lose all of one’s influence within the Party with a change in leaders as long as one can credibly argue that one represents a legitimate group.
While the importance of personal connections works against those Republicans who have the wrong connections it rewards those who spend years toiling in the fields for the Party and its candidates. The longer one spends in any organization the more personal connections one has an opportunity to make. These aren’t lost when one’s Party or leaders are out of power, and thus can be “banked” for future use. Occasionally a dedicated party worker can develop sufficient ties even to competing leaders to assure continued access, if not always influence, regardless of who’s in power. Those Democrats whose legitimacy derives from leadership of a coalition group find it is quite transitory when they can no longer credibly represent the group. The greater willingness of the Republican Party to reward loyalty and dedication to the Party in preference to any other group makes it is easier for the Party to discourage extra-Party attachments…
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… There are advantages and disadvantages to both operational cultures. “In the short run [Democratic political culture] appears disruptive,” Freeman argues, but in the long run “it is more stable. Once a consensus develops about the desirability of a particular course of action, whether it be programmatic or procedural, it is accepted as right and proper and is not easily thwarted by party leaders, even when one of them is the President.” In contrast, “the Republican Party is more likely to change directions when it changes leaders.”
Is there a better example than the ascension of Donald Trump? The GOP was once a party of full of men like J.D. Vance, eager to condemn Trump as the American Hitler. The GOP is now a party full of men… like J.D. Vance, eager to fête Trump as the savior of the Republic. How could this happen? The Republican Party offers neither power nor refuge to those who have not hitched their cart to its reigning star. A Republican Party that won in 2012 or lost in 2016 would look fundamentally different—much more fundamentally different than a Democratic Party helmed by Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders instead Obama or Biden. The ability of democratic presidents to reshape their party is limited unless, like FDR, they bring in a new suite of constituencies to the coalition…
… It is possible this structure may change in the future. From the 1860s forward Republican Party leaders governed secure in the belief that they defended the American mainstream. In the late 20th century that meant middle and upper-middle class white families. That demographic is not as aligned with the Republicans as it was in the pre-Trump era; the upper-middle class now defaults Democrat. Moreover, the relative share of the population occupied by the old American core is shrinking. In many states it is already a plurality demographic. Increasingly, Republicans see themselves not as defenders of the American mainstream but as the tribunes of the American outcasts.
Some on the right wing would prefer if the GOP adopted Democratic forms. This would mean framing itself as a coalitional party like the Democrats with formally recognized constituencies whose interests must be explicitly catered to. In this vision the white working class would become the most important of these constituencies.
Freeman’s analysis suggests why it will be difficult for the Republicans to follow this path. It will be hard enough for the GOP to abandon an operational culture a century and a half old. It will be harder still to restructure the party apparatus itself, building out caucus-like civic organizations to represent the interests of its constituencies. At the moment it simply is not clear which organizations or individuals might represent the white working class within party circles; with the exception of the evangelicals, most of the potential Republican constituencies lack the group-consciousness needed for Democratic style politics. No GOP leader would wish to create these groups himself—it would mean siphoning away his power. As long as power flows downwards in Republican politics there will be little incentive for Republican leaders to change the system.
It is not clear the party as a whole would benefit from doing so. The Biden succession drama points to the weaknesses of a bottom-up party structure. Unity is much more difficult to achieve in the Democratic Party. The structure and culture of the party encourages small disputes to metastasize. Democratic Party leaders do not want to abandon Biden for the same reasons no one wanted to run against him in the primaries: when fissures in the Democratic Party open, they are difficult to close again. After fighting, the Republicans get back in line; those who will not do so are sidelined. They lack an external base of power to keep up the fight. For Democrats things are different—only the threat of electoral defeat keeps them cohesive. “Ridin’ with Biden” is an easy Schelling point. Remove that point and the knives will come out. Few Democratic politicians imagine they will fare well in a late season knife fight. With a party structure this fissiparous, they are probably right…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones,” from @Scholars_Stage.
Apposite (albeit from an orthogonal point of view): “Vance, Trump and the shifting coalitions behind Republican economic policy” from @adam_tooze.
* Will Rogers
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As we muse on mechanisms, we might send harmonic birthday greetings to John Hall; he was born on this date in 1948. After serving in the legislature of Ulster County, New York and on the Saugerties, New York Board of Education, he was the (Democratic) U.S. representative for New York’s 19th congressional district from 2007 to 2011.
Earlier in his varied career he co-founded and led the pop rock group Orleans (“Dance With Me,” “Still the One”), with whom he performed until his retirement in 2019.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”*…
… But then, as Terry Pratchett observed, “It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done.” In any case, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler have mapped its development and impact since roughly 1500. Via Matt Muir, who observes…
I have to be honest, I remain uncertain whether what you will see when you click this link is the product of genius or madness. On the one hand, it might be an incredibly sophisticated piece of visual communications depicting the evolution of thinking across 30 disparate areas (think ‘the biosphere’, ‘time’, ‘biometrics’, ‘communications infrastructure’, that sort of thing) and offering a sort of maximalist overview of the evolution of modern thinking and understanding from approximately 1500 to the near-future; on the other, it might make as much ACTUAL sense when you dig into it as intricate scrawls of mid-episode schizophrenics – I simply cannot tell, it is TOO MUCH. What I can tell you, though, is that it is DIZZYING – you can’t quite get a sense for the full scale of it unless you zoom right out and then see how deep it goes when you zoom in again. Anyway, here’s the blurb – I would really, really like to see this printed BIG somewhere, just to see if it coheres, as I don’t personally think a screen does it justice at all:
“Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound. By tracking these imperial pathways, Calculating Empires offers a means of seeing our technological present in a deeper historical context. And by investigating how past empires have calculated, we can see how they created the conditions of empire today. Calculating Empires centers on four themes: communication, computation, classification and control. Across the centuries, the work illustrates the shifts in communication devices, infrastructures, and computational architectures, and how they are entwined with the histories of social control and classification. The vertical axis represents time, beginning with the 16th century at the base. The horizontal axis features a collection of systems: from algorithms to architecture, bodies to borders. Navigation is flexible: you can follow a theme, a time period, or set of ideas.”
Have a look, it’s quite insane…
A long view of tech, society, and their inter-relationships: “Calculating Empires- A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500,” from @katecrawford and @TheCreaturesLab via @Matt_Muir.
* Arthur C. Clarke
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As we muse on maps, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that the game that launched two of the most famous characters in video game history was released for sale:
Donkey Kong was created by Nintendo, a Japanese playing card and toy company turned fledgling video game developer, who was trying to create a hit game for the North American market. Unable at the time to acquire a license to create a video game based on the Popeye character, Nintendo decided to create a game mirroring the characteristics and rivalry of Popeye and Bluto. Donkey Kong was named after the game’s villain, a pet gorilla gone rogue. The game’s hero was originally called Jumpman, but is retroactively renamed Mario once the game became popular and Nintendo decided to use the character in future games… Donkey Kong’s success helped Nintendo become one of the dominate players in the video game market.
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