My Theory of the Brontosaurus

Behind doing is choosing. Cant eliminate that without eliminating free will, making every decision a function of desire. Therefore no law, no other.

The choice not to help is immoral but not proveable.

Capitalism makes everything seem voluntary, whether it is or not is empirical question, and question of degrees. You do not want to foreclose the agency of the poor, make their choices unnecessary. But you do not want to pretend that burdens are "natural" or inevitable.

We can probably agree that the 20th C was horrific.
Let's bracket the question of technology, that our reach exceeded our grasp.
We can imagine a critique of utopianism, of the plasticity of humanity to humanity.
But can this critique stop short of democracy, or is that itself the beginning of the slippery slope?
What could prevent democracy from sliding down further?
Property. We can't re-distribute it, qua property, to anonymous.
We can't suspend it, which is the state as totality.
We can note that fascism and communism sought to overcome the state, but begin with it.
The question of the state is the question of religion, at least in the west (and not for Islam or China, eg?).
Non-slavery is the opening of the emptiness of man. The church made this admission at V2, and has been trying to swallow it ever since: unable to digest it, unwilling to spit it out. Orthodoxy, no freedom in error, doesn't mix with "man."
The prohibition of slavery is the (first) interference of the political in property. The bar to slavery is the political in the heart of capitalism.
So recall the question bracketed at the beginning.

Is American political freedom the economic promise of infinite land?
Capitalism is the artificial world in lieu of this infinity.

Property = society? Pre-political, before the human, before humanity becomes a question, before the world exceeds us, rather than viceversa.

A revolution every generation.
Vs. reinheriting the continent, Thoreau: the whole continent is west of Europe, thus westward. NB Cavell on Walden, the rooster call, to awake. The call from the margin.

An alternative to infinite property, via frontier or capital.

No one is due anything, in the abstract. Therefore no redistribution: there is no one to receive it.

Every-one has usufruct of the Earth.

Property is immunity from the state (king).
Universal suffrage ignores property.
Rights become the immunity to the state.
Rights are the law of the law that universal suffrage assumes but that is not forthcoming, the question legitimacy.

A false narrative:
When the state loses content, is religious uniformity, the law becomes the claim of the other, the harm principle, dire rather than dit.
Human persons become visible, individuals. Separate from property.
Property becomes subject to the state, not immune.

But property was always subject to the state. In so far as the state is not a person (tyrant) it is the negotiation for property. The king calls a parliament because he needs to draw on property.
This happens aside from religion and law.
The king as monopoly on death is always separate from the king as demand for property.

malaise

1. narcissism (spiritualism?) and/or submission to authority (conservative religion, messianism, cults)
2. middle class thinning, capital globalizing
3. resistance to feminism and environmentalism, limits to technology, masculinist control of nature, capitalism (see 1 and 2 above)
4. a republic lost to international power (binary world, national security state, unaccountable to democracy, international by deceit)

Note that the split between the republic and the national security state, revealed in Vietnam (note for example Kennedy's thrilling to foreign policy as described in Halberstam, not to mention his vetting by the wise men) really vitiates democracy, which the right, hostile to democracy anyway, can exploit in the name of patriotism. The patriotic American misrecognizes his loss of control as the fault of government, which is his empowerment, when it is the work of the executive as the agency of the national security state.

How much of our financial market mania is also a misrecognition, a false distribution of ownership in lieu of wage growth? The financial markets grow to make capital flexible by complicating and off setting risk. Inequality creates concentrated wealth, which needs the services of the financial services industry. But this has nothing to do with the health of the economy as the availability of jobs and wage growth. As in the former opposition between property fearful of inflation and labor seeking economic growth the interests of wealth and labor diverge. There is an article in the Times today about an argument among our central bankers over the threat of wage pressure despite the lack of leverage for the American worker (with unemployment high and no union structure, and stagnant wage growth for about 30 years). Thus interests must be raised to counter inflationary pressures, or lowered because the economy, ie investment, is fragile and needs the encouragement of easy money. If we are dependent on the economy, ie and not on our crops or hunting, we are dependent on economic growth.

my mother says you're a selfish lover

Derrida argued that Heidegger should not have framed the problem as a question, since a question presumes a subject, and an unacknowledged subject is a spirit, which is the most inauthentic relation to death imaginable. So let's return to Parmenides. We can't say nothing is not; that is unsayable. Does philosophy have to say it? Hegel: being itself is nothing.

Shakespeare: Forcing humanity into an object position cracks it, it bifurcates into real and fictive, outside and inside. But that mapping to out/in requires gender? Cf. Eve on the sonnets; if outside = visible and inside = not, then we are still within the domain of the image, contra Feinman. Fiction = self ignorance, being turned from oneself?

No one looks at a painting for information anymore. Maybe not even a photo: it is the info? Repetition = rote learning?

Michelangelo puts the male body smack in the middle of the narrative and dares you to decorporealize it. Are is undisciplined. What did Northerners think of the robust naked Christ flying off of the wall above them?

The Pope is in an impossible position. As Catholicism ceases to be a way of lifehe becomes symbolic. The church is symbolic, unity not of doctrine but body of believers, ie Kaspar? Ex cathedra was an admission of weakness. He is the possibility of clemency. There is no "hierarchy" outside the curia, thus Law retreated there when Boston wanted to lynch him (that's a pun). Parliaments are indifferent to the church, there are no conflicts between king and bishop. Political power, the state, is created as the unity of law under the church. The process by which it supersedes the church is much debated. Marsilius identified the necessarily foreign church as a block to effective sovereignty. The nation is first inter-nation, then, if not universal (catholic) it must be national? Latin is supplanted by vernaculars as European kings become the kings of whatever nation they control. How does an international ruling class become the embodiment of a national state?

Under the golden rule or harm principle, the other is my loss of self, identity becomes anonymity. Think of the Catholic thought of anonymous charity to preclude pride, or the revolutionary effect of Jesus (know not father or mother). If we know the law only negatively, ie by and as murder, there is no ground for law, no necessity; the other is thus non-murder. Recognition of the other is my murder? The diremption is the missing middle (Rose says this, but I havent read it)? We pass each other only in murder. Is this just Levinas? But Levinas thought we could build on this, we could not murder and still know. I can't hold on to both the other and knowing. If the other must be other then philosophy is doomed. There will be no meeting of the minds.  Note what I'm saying: that we don't touch the sides as it were, we don't understand ourselves, the law.  We can will it, but we can't know it.

When a conservative looks back at the last 30 to 40 years and asks if it was worth it, if they accomplished anything, I think there is one thing that must be acknowledged, at least from my personal perspective. And that is the recovery of the liberal distinction between politics and economics, the discovery of economics, as a distinct field and function. When Reagan spoke about trickle down he should have made clear that he was expanding the old saw that to teach a man to fish is to feed him for life. Charity is temporary, but economic growth means creation of jobs. Granted people may have to move to wherever the jobs are.

This is in contrast to my own youthful suspicion that capitalism is rigged, that the poor are doomed to stay poor, their labor exploited to produce profit for the owner class. Capitalism is the production of wealth. That is not, hopefully, the be all and end all of any society, but it is not bad in itself. With union bargaining power and a sufficient safety net and provision for children (education, nutrition, healthcare) capitalism may be fair enough. A note on unions: there is a logic to the argument that labor should be paid a subsistence wage; when labor is in short supply the wage goes up, and people move in to take advantage of the higher wage and the wage can go down again. What the union does is create a monopoly in labor which can drive up the wage/price. But that increase comes out of capital's profit.

But that is not of course the argument conservatives make. Rather, they hold that I cannot consent to injustice, and surrendering my property is injustice. That you consented to the governmental decision making process is not enough. You can't consent to enslavement (which assumes the government is just another person, not representative and not the agency of law, vs. (someone's) power) (and there is the question of whether democracy understood as the political negation of slavery can lead to enslavement, and if equal protection can allow universal enslavement; I'm still thinking bout this). What I might consent to then is what I would have paid for anyway, ie a private police force (albeit a police force withtou law to enforce). (As evidence that they really do think this way, MY posted about this in re an argument by a conservative blogger with David Brooks comments on anti-tax ideology.) If I say that taking, by government, not for anyone else in particular--kleptocracy--but for whomever might be in need is not stealing; that this articulation would be the flip side of my claim that what you don't need but someone else does is not yours to begin with--this puts my on the far left of American discourse these days, with the more inspired moments of Jefferson.

Americans have a bug up their ass about responsibility, which is why we love addiction. We're afraid of sex so we love porn. Etc. Perhaps this sense of responsibility, ie self creation, is what leads to a technological approach to nature; stewardship is a problematic environmental ethic.

I worry sometimes that my only defense of freedom from want is the harm principle. Sometimes I don't.

Rawls would have us believe that voting is sort of justified after the fact; that if we voted in the spirit that we are (all) allowed to vote, disinterestedly, we would produce laws of justice. We don't actually vote for laws directly, usually, which I think, following Kateb, is a good thing. It eliminates the illusion of direct democracy, of the elision of state and mediation, of the unity of consent and law, of the lack of difference between the individual and society, the lack of tension between self and other, etc.

I want to believe that I can block out all my particulars and remain "human," and know what that is, what it entails, what is due to it. But I fear that the principle of the human just collapses into the harm principle; it has no positive content; there is only the negative principle of do no harm. Bernard Williams's critique of human equality--and what is the definition of the human?--merges into the Hegelian critique of Kant and the diremption. The human is the formal principle of the categorical imperative: make no law unless everyone can agree to it in their (disinterested) humanity: this becomes a circle, and there ends up being no law. Can there be a law of no law? No, that's the point of the diremption critique. That's the there are absolutely no absolutes trap.

The night-watchman state presumes that all of its citizens are self sustaining, or are so in concert with others in what we call capitalism. But universal suffrage means the inclusion even of those who are not self sustaining, and though they do not vote, this includes children: their demand is upon all of us.

The alternative is the conservatism that holds each family responsible for itself, and thus stresses sexual morality, as well as nonuniversal authorities such as religion and tribal traditions.

The liberal state thus tempts the employed into poverty, from the bosom of family into unwed motherhood and the orphanage. For conservatives there is no law, just incentive.

On the one hand, American evangelicalism seems based in authoritarianism, the Lord as lord. It is eschatological. The American democratic faith in the future, the end of history as the entrapment of the past  and freedom from the old world/identity, becomes faith in the end of history as final judgment (completing the loss of law in democracy).

On the other hand, economics is not complete, in the sense that there are exogamous variables, like technological advances; not to mention the possible manipulations of central banks.

I do acknowledge that liberals did once assume that government could be not just supplemental to economy but direct economy, ie push it to full employment. Friedman's opposition of full employment and accelerating inflation is now orthodoxy, so liberal technocratism is dead. But there is a difference between government not absorbing the economy and the economy absorbing government. 

Also, the right has only patriotism, because it cannot change facts on the ground, ie cannot turn back feminism. So it has only the empty, self-justifying promise of patriotism, which is indistinguishable from paranoia. People want their guns because of criminals, immigrants, foreign invaders. Ie Patriotism has no real enemies, and thus entails no policy, no government. It is the face of anti-government politics.

I'm bored with politics.

An honest conservative will not be shy about religion. One could imagine a party concerned about the threats to religion, both personal and impersonal forces. Its agenda would focus on eliminating policies hostile to religion, supporting religion where allowable, and, always, being informed by religion. Aside from trimming  the aggressive separationism from con-law I'm not sure what is entailed here. My own politics contains nothing that is not found in the Sermon on the Mount.

Then there is the every man for himself conservatism, the welfare creates dependency, disincentive to work conservatism. It got a boost with the supply side idea that the hidden hand will ensure that greed is good, ie productive of wealth and hence jobs. But this is a bait and switch routine, for the question is not jobs, good as they are, but moral obligations to those in need. Every man might have a fair chance at becoming rich in America, though I'd take the claim more seriously if we have a 100% inheritance tax. But the issue is every man having not a chance but a guarantee of food, shelter, and medical care. If in the long term the unfettered economy will provide these things in the short term people will be sacrifced to that long term goal, and we don't allow that the end justifies the means.