My Theory of the Brontosaurus

...I keep worrying it like a loose tooth...

Think about the conservative argument, that if people were in families these families would provide for their members. The govt provides because families fail to do so, or because it forces families out of the picture. This isnt as clear as I thought it was when I was thinking it. I think my point was that an individual may be in need, but a family, as a social unit, comprising individuals, is the appropriate limit of concern, is the vehicle for the failure of the individual.

When I think that universal suffrage doesnt entail power over property, I'm thinking that suffrage doesnt give the property-less the right to take from the propertied. We are equally immune to one another. What's missing is the mediation, the public. If the state is subject to each of us as individuals, it doesnt have an identity of its own. The state doesnt own. Therefore there is no mechanism for what is his becoming what is mine (or vice versa). But, as noted, from the democratic perspective, no one owns (anything). (Practically, this would mean that everyone pledges everything he has when he votes--as an equal to the property-less) and the govt decides how much to take.)

Democracy is starting over, from scratch. As if nothing has been inherited. As if the world were new (to us). Populism targets not wages but inheritance; which persists even if not a matter of land.

In America there is a strong prejudice in favor of self creation which entails that one keeps what one makes (in money): capitalism seems to attribute wealth to individual action. Capitalism blurs the line between worker and owner. Yet we also distrust inheritance. So the conflict, not to be resolved--as each side gains and loses majorities--is between commitment to the self made man and populist resort to political power. The shock was that Reagan seemed to combine the two, which he was able to do via the fiction of a position external to govt, while campaigning for political power.The paradox is the lie. The claim to represent the unrepresented, the silent majority--in the name of democracy reject democracy. (Liberalism, universalist, doesnt seek to represent the particular: the name of the public good is without religion or ethnicity or gender or color. It could not be prepared for the resurgence of particularism.)

If govt is the question of what shall we do, what shall we do together, (not at all the same, but related) it must be universal (my consent is meaningful if I am expected to do something). But must it therefore have power of taxation, and even if it must, can the proceeds be transferred to others? But break it down further: the question of legitimacy is the claim there is no 'we'. There is necessary conflict between persons, between law and force, there is necessarily an executive function to govt. So the universal isnt grounded in the necessity of my consent; it isnt grounded in anything, and it is ungrounding (of law). The boundary of the universal is humanity, which doesnt exist (for us). (There is no universal govt, comprising all citizens of all states and outlawing war.) To truly accept the universal is to admit the other; if there is no we there is no 'I' either. The moment of the vote is a radical anonymity and generosity: we all have given at the office.

(What if humanity is our ground and our end? If it's one it must be the other; there are no particular ends, no service to any one person and his goals. So humanity is the goal which, bait and switch, becomes the positive obligation to provide. Is this continuous with what I've said, or does it allow humanity a substance I've denied it has? I'm saying it's a mechanism for making good samaritanism the only possible goal of a we--that it is the only we there is?)

The new Rome, inheritor of old Rome, and its prerogatives, thought it had created a christian empire: where Constantine started over was the unification of Rome and christianity. Old Rome had to invent a new story to save it self; enter Augustine, pushing the unification into the future of the second coming, and relegating emperors to pirates. Like Jesus, Rome's prerogative would be its lack of prerogative. Not doctrine but judgment of doctrine. As an apostolic church controlled by one apostle. It is Rome's paradoxical self definition that would keep it in conflict with the princes of the west, and produce the reformation.

I keep framing the question as universal suffrage then ask why the none propertied voters should have a say over the propertied, so I keep winding myself in that contradiction and imagining (repeating, asking if) the separation of suffrage from property is the separation of property from suffrage. The point is that there is no point to universal suffrage unless property is at stake. If the crux is property then property is the crux. If eligibility is not restricted by property then property is not restricted. The point is that everyone is no one.

So, interestingly, it is not a problem to worship images of the holy, but it would be to worship an image that you thought was of the holy but is really of the pagan? NB the argument that you need images to recognize the people who come to you in dreams.

Herrin: the Franks develop their culture and church, and presume, at synod of Frankfurt, to review and challenge the papal response to the eastern anti iconoclast council. The weakness of Rome that was its strength in pitting Frank against Greek is now again its weakness. Its dependency on the Franks strengthens them. There is no resolution to the opposition of secular and church powers.

Interesting thing about torture is the expectation that it will work: that there is no inside, discontinuous from the outside; there is only what you havent said yet.

Back to Reagan. The idea that we can eliminate govt entirely. What would that leave? The law and property. What we eliminate is the executive--the guardian--via democracy we disperse it. So there is no possibility of tyranny. This is an explanation of universal suffrage that doesnt subject property to govt.  If everybody rules nobody rules (anybody else). The govt withers away. Liberal attempts to politicize social difference in the name of equality, to protect democracy, are unnecessary, since democracy has no purpose of its own. But again, there is a presumption that there is nothing political in society, no exercise of power. Again, everyone is free within a world of voluntarity, with the exception of his circumstance: that is not voluntary. The radicalism of the political is the claim that I might have control over even my circumstance: this is the open ended change that horrified Burke when he thought of rescuing the laborer. So under Reagan democracy has the sole purpose of preventing the emergence of govt as counter to uncontrolled executive, ie democracy. Democracy is prophylatic to the tyranny that democracy makes possible. Thus the irony that he strengthens the executive and weakens the legislative: though that was the intent. Once the executive is itself purified by democracy, there is no danger of its exceeding the law, and therefore no need for more govt. One could make the liberal fascism, ie Burkean, argument that tyranny always begins in the question of legitimacy. The tyrant is the one who promises to solve the problem of the one--our failure to be one--in his person? This argument for limited democracy works only in so far as there is no residual political in society, but property is political. It cannot be voluntary (then there was no gift in inheritance).  So there is a deeper truth to the govt is not the solution govt is the problem, even if we substitute democracy for govt. Or we could say that Goldberg need not sacrifice democracy to keep his anti liberalism. Assuming that the question of legitimacy can be resolved or contained: that it is not the question of the relationship of force and law and the problem of conscience. NB that anti slavery is not about redistribution of property but about an exception to property. The question of legitimacy ripples through society. Our economy is based on this problem of the irreducible political that denies slavery. Democracy, as a means of preventing tyranny, repeats the question of legitimacy that invites tyranny. It cannot therefore silence that question, which redounds upon the society and its legitimated govt. The govt in question is not the govt created to answer the question and then disappear; it is any govt, the possibility of govt. Perhaps the states rights rhetoric allows American conservatives to believe there is a govt within the govt, and delegate to the federal level the question of legitimacy.  That was Goldwater's legacy?

Is the conventional wisdom a Kuhnian paradigm? It is mistaken for reality as long as the anomalies are manageable? So O will believe that taking care of the banks is taking care of the economy, and that we have to fight a war in Afghanistan?

To oppose representation is to presume reality, that some representation really is reality. Ie it simplifies all the philosophical problems (how do I know that I know etc.). And the assumption that thought is representation assumes the philosophical assumption of presence, of what is. Ie it ignores/evades time. Iconoclasm shifts the problem to the supposed transparency of language, and solves it with fundamentalist privilege of the biblical text?

Property: inheritance, whatever its source, belies the libertarian claim to voluntarity. It's not that the choices available to me are not the same as those available to him, nor that my choices have been determined by human action, if I lack property, rather than by genetic lottery; its that "he" doesnt have to make choices? Ie he can have everything? More basically, as beneficiary he is more than one person.

Is labor always and only inflation? Is any domestic market inflationary? Is an international market necessary, ie the separation of markets, another market, vs. one big market, in order to avoid overpaying labor at home so it can afford etc...?

What is the relation of iconophilia and miracle working? And between miracle working and the 'mysticism' of the eastern church? What is the relation between orthodoxy and rationality, anti mysticism? What is the relation of mysticism and expectation of suffering, vs. political will (rule of law?)? Herrin: the unrelenting pressure of the Arabs on Constantinople required faith in the icons to protect and rage when they did not. The problems of Constantinople were unknown to Rome, who saw an emperor presuming religious prerogative: indeed, in this issue, it could only be a political interference with the religious? Anyway, in opposing Leo Gregory assumes the role of defender of the faith from political interference (though political here meant as much or more taxation, and Gregory was Roman himself). Iconoclasm must always be a movement toward private piety and away from the church? Herrin points out that icons frequently were private and used in lieu of church attendance. But as the controversy breaks down into the church qua church in the west and the emperor in the east, iconoclasm looks like a way to bypass the church, as if orthodoxy were obvious. NB Herrin's point about concern with ambiguity and the presence of pagan art in the city.

Obviously I have problems. Obsessive problems. But let's say that the libertarian mistake is the assumption that there could be a law of no coercion. And I keep making this mistake myself, because it is a convenient shorthand. In lieu of law there is only  the gift of recognizing the other, which means not recognizing yourself. There is no law derived from anti slavery, there is only the gift of anti slavery. This could be represented as not about property, as about humanity, except that we have no definition of humanity except anti slavery. And the blindness of the liberatarian to the problem with his law is his reliance on techne (market) in lieu of law. Really quite simple.

Herrin assumes that Rome grows in importance as the other apostolic sees are overrun by Islam. But where is the evidence for this? It seems too mechanical (I know, people in glass houses...). But there does have to be a church before the Petrine inheritance becomes important. The man had to become an office. (And note that it makes sense that the bishop of Rome should be chosen by Italian churchmen; when did cardinalship become universally available?) The church is built upon the Petrine authority, yet it also authorizes it? As disputes arise, particularly with Constantinople, the only authority to invoke is Peter's. That it is a churchly, and not secular authority, reinforces the dynamic: the more orthodoxy is needed (unity in the church) the stronger the church, qua church, becomes. (Is this Pagels's point?) Herrin also notes that it was via the church established in England (by Gregory I) that the continent was converted. Cf. the story that the Ottomans were convinced someone had let the Russian fleet out of the Black Sea. I havent read the chapter on iconoclasm yet, but there is an apparent case that as Constantinople lacked the institutions of orthodoxy it could easily flip on itself, turn itself inside out. As it approached orthopraxy (like Islam) the issue of iconoclasm could flare. Sharing power alongside the emperor, the eastern church could not establish orthodoxy (unity, against political divisions), and was indeed prone to heresy and imperial attempts to force unity. Once the church defines itself as itself, it does so as against any particular prince. It is both the repository of ultimate law and without law, in an executive sense. It is sovereign over its own people, but does not have its own state (speaking very loosely, until the Vatican councils). Rome is the defender of the faith, but it inherits not from a king but an apostle. And the faith is not a parcel of land. A sort of thought of the political develops. Cf. Augustine? But Rome must also be the end of the apostolic church: replacing the diverse apostolic sees of the various messengers sent out by Jesus, with an institution based on a sort of meta instruction marking one among the apostles as different (and the one who will betray, as any messenger must, vs the original of the message?). Replacing the messengers with the message itself. (The church does and does not change, but that the message could become clearer is not to say that the possession of the message makes the Pope authoritative beyond the message: that is the confusion of infallibility; perhaps the last word on disputes about the message?) Shall we say it was the Petrine authority that enabled Rome to become the church, in the absence of imperial authority and the loss of the other apostolic sees? That's a chicken egg problem.

I'm still bothered by the claim that property is immune, that if not obtained by coercion it is not subject to govt. Thus once property and govt are separated, there is no opportunity for property to coerce. But a regime of coercion against coercion doesnt require universal suffrage: that was Mill's point. If property is immune, universal suffrage is merely prophylactic. I think I'm right that universal suffrage is based on the disruptive possibility of equality. We are all changlings. And that points to the persistence of the pos/neg problem, the immunity of the past. The immunity of property is the immunity of the past. This also links up with the problem of redistribution as not solving the problem of property itself: there is no way to "correct" the past, nor any future without the problem. And with Jesus's, and Thoreau's,  eccentricity to society: inside/outside is past/future. It's not a question of the difference between a society that penalizes coercion and one that doesnt have it: the future is beside the past, not in succession to it. There is no society past coercion. Remember, democracy--universal suffrage--is positive liberty. It is a gift, and the subjection of our property is the form it takes. There is no law that can proscribe coercion, no justification for the claim that govt should be limited to coercing coercion. That lack of ground is in turn the justification for the practice of democracy; the future is the possibility of changing the past. The libertarian believes there is ground for a rule against coercion, so we can come to it, as a contract, with our property intact.

If the regime against coercion is the result of the gift of democracy, then it doesnt matter if property were originally coerced or not? I'm still thinking that property, in its essence, is slavery: not property in land but in the persons who otherwise could own the land. So if democracy begins in anti slavery...

re the fact that they lie and we tell the truth

Via Brad Delong

October 28, 2009

Walter Williams: "The Fact That I Am Completely Wrong Is Just More Proof How Right I Am"

John Cole: The Fact That I Am Completely Wrong Is Just More Proof How Right I Am: This little anecdote, included in a list of “outrageous lawsuits,” just came to one of my email lists:

This year’s runaway First Place Stella Award winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma who purchased a new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home from an OU football game, she, having driven onto the freeway, set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver’s seat to go to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the motor home left the freeway, crashed and overturned.

Also not surprisingly, Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the owner’s manual that she couldn’t actually leave the driver’s seat while the cruise control was set. The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down, $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Mrs. Grazinski has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.

I thought the “PLUS a new motor home” was such a nice wingnutty touch to a long debunked tale, one that I even talked about in 2005, that I decided to check the intertrons to see if it was still flying around the tubes and found this old Walter Williams post that made me laugh out loud:

Literally hundreds of readers informed me that in last week’s column, “Some Things I Wonder About,” my reference to a Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City—who set his 32-foot Winnebago on cruise control, left the driver’s seat to brew a cup of coffee, crashed, then sued Winnebago for not having a warning against the dangers of doing so and received a jury award of $1,750,000 plus a new motor home—was an urban legend and as such totally false.

My having fallen for this “urban legend” points to more due diligence to fact-checking. Without making any excuses whatsoever for my lapse in due diligence, let’s look at it.

Thirty, 40 or 50 years ago, no one in their right mind would have believed the Merv Grazinski urban legend possible, but not so today. Personal responsibility has taken a back seat in our increasingly immoral and litigious society. Consider some actual lawsuits researched at (www.overlawyered.com).

This is a particular example of wingnut argumentation that I find rather amusing, and it always takes the following form:

Sure, I’ve now learned that X is not actually happening, but the fact that I believed that X could be happening is not, as one would think, a commentary on my foolishness and gullibility, but rather it is a scathing indictment of our societal decline.

We need to come up with a fashionable name for this, and I’m sure you all have your own examples.

October 28, 2009 at 07:36 AM in Utter Stupidity | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

John Cole: The Fact That I Am Completely Wrong Is Just More Proof How Right I Am: This little anecdote, included in a list of “outrageous lawsuits,” just came to one of my email lists:

This year’s runaway First Place Stella Award winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma who purchased a new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home from an OU football game, she, having driven onto the freeway, set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver’s seat to go to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the motor home left the freeway, crashed and overturned.

Also not surprisingly, Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the owner’s manual that she couldn’t actually leave the driver’s seat while the cruise control was set. The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down, $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Mrs. Grazinski has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.

I thought the “PLUS a new motor home” was such a nice wingnutty touch to a long debunked tale, one that I even talked about in 2005, that I decided to check the intertrons to see if it was still flying around the tubes and found this old Walter Williams post that made me laugh out loud:

Literally hundreds of readers informed me that in last week’s column, “Some Things I Wonder About,” my reference to a Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City—who set his 32-foot Winnebago on cruise control, left the driver’s seat to brew a cup of coffee, crashed, then sued Winnebago for not having a warning against the dangers of doing so and received a jury award of $1,750,000 plus a new motor home—was an urban legend and as such totally false.

My having fallen for this “urban legend” points to more due diligence to fact-checking. Without making any excuses whatsoever for my lapse in due diligence, let’s look at it.

Thirty, 40 or 50 years ago, no one in their right mind would have believed the Merv Grazinski urban legend possible, but not so today. Personal responsibility has taken a back seat in our increasingly immoral and litigious society. Consider some actual lawsuits researched at (www.overlawyered.com).

This is a particular example of wingnut argumentation that I find rather amusing, and it always takes the following form:

Sure, I’ve now learned that X is not actually happening, but the fact that I believed that X could be happening is not, as one would think, a commentary on my foolishness and gullibility, but rather it is a scathing indictment of our societal decline.

We need to come up with a fashionable name for this, and I’m sure you all have your own examples.

The nightwatchman claim: that I can be coerced only when I coerce, (which cannot support a law: the law of no law but this law) and that private property is beyond the state because it's activities are by definition voluntary and without coercion. The libertarian thus presupposes the voluntarity of economic activity, ie he begs the question by presuming property. There is no point at which property is in question, and therefore no point at which the other had standing. But property is inherited, and only inherited: ie that which is owned, is ownable, is inherited. It is not created. You can accept that property is immune to the claims of coercion, or not.

No political claim can stand against Islam, and therefore no political claim can stand within Islam. There is no law higher than God, and God's law is Islam. Islam must conquer the world, as that is the limit of disobedience to God. War against apostates within is obviously acceptable. But if the only political activity is war there is no state, except the globe: to accept less would be to accept a state qua state, a source of authority above God. 

To be willing to kill on behalf of one's religion puts one beyond the pale of modern societies: you are assuming a license beyond what we grant to anyone, you are exorbitant and ir-responsible. We have no argument to make against you, or to you. But no one acts on behalf of his religion; he acts in accord with what someone told him to do, for his religion. Can Islam, without a clerisy / church, make that distinction? I seem to be drifting back to Lewis, that expansive Islam understood the world to be at its mercy and its service. Without that, what is left? I dont think Lewis asks this question, or he wouldnt propose an inferiority complex as if some therapy would help.

Back to Christianity, the presumption of our guilt, as evidenced by our mortality, and the identification of this guilt with original sin, and the promise of redemption from this guilt, and hence immortality. If that sin can be washed away, all our sins can be. Returning to God is repentence of sin. That God, law itself, would offer mercy, the mercy of God, of all things, is the strangeness of Christianity. And that mercy is the incarnation. Somehow. I need to learn more about the Christological heresies.

Liberalism keeps trying to get majorities to vote in favor of minorities (the different, the poor). This goes to the rooting of the majority in the individual, or the disestablishment, delegitimation of govt via the individual, which then becomes majority rule. NB that we authorize ourselves, retroactively, to revise the constitution and hence create our govt. This is Derrida's point in Declarations of Independence. Democracy has no authority. You dont consent to your govt: then you would not be governed. If govt is defined as the power of murder (executive, no pun intended?), democracy inverts that. The opposite of the power of murder is the vote. And this vote is universal, like the power of murder. Not limited by property ownership. Conservatism keeps trying to restrain the democratic power over property, and ideally to limit the right to vote. Say that property must have an opposite, and it is democracy. Redistribution understood as reallocating property would be illegitimate. But creating a public, a commonwealth, the principle of usufruct: what is consumed is not property. Property is what survives us. To say I can take from you only what the general public will use defeats the purpose of taking anything, ie of enfranchising those without property and subjecting those who have to the will of the majority, even unto their property; it would be as if only those with property were voting, and it would be as if the property were to stay property: that is the only justification for restricting its use. The temptation is to identify consent with voluntarity, and voluntarity with self interest. Thus property would be off limits. That democracy limits itself by its presumption in favor of the individual, it disallows redistribution. But I think rather that property is the only thing up for grabs, as opposed to revising laws/morality. Consent begins at the limit of self interest, in the for other. The other is not compelled by (the same) law, or he would not be other. Thus is democracy outside the law. In democracy, the issues of the govt are for-self and for-other conflicts. Libertarians try to replace govt with the market, and say that for self will, via the invisible hand, eliminate all for other claims. Even if true, if the machinery of the invisible hand were that trustworthy, this would be an abdication of agency for technology: 'If only for myself, what am I?' The antinomian thrust of individualism is not to say that anything is allowed, ie even property is up for grabs--though indeed democracy is capable of evil. Rather, it is that the other emerges, and rather than the rule of the for self (self interest, vs. slavery or tyranny) we are confronted with the possibility of the for other (even you dont own your self). We are not talking about a generalized personhood, independent of property (place); that is the work for the rationalist liberals, and it works to exempt property from the claims of other, and to see democracy as satisfied by abstract principle (the law of no law but this law). Rather, the freedom of each individual from every other individual is (the suspension of law, and hence the deauthorization of its agents/executors: 'you have no right...') the refusal of the difference between self and other.