Must We Think Like a State?

Reality checks help. It is almost always a useful exercise to step back from and examine our largely unquestioned assumptions about how the world is and how it works. And it is in this spirit that David C. Scott casts a critical eye on the emergence of our global system of nation states over the past half millennium.

Today we take for granted that the world is divided, or should be, into contiguous nation states with well defined borders that have, or should have, a monopoly on the tools of the political craft, especially on the means of violence. This, we think, is not only how the world is but how it ought to be.

Obviously, though, this is not how things have always been. Nor, many increasingly suggest, is this how it should or must be. This is not a fate and we do have degrees of freedom that are real though far from evident. In our own time we see a good deal of supercession of national powers, particularly those of weaker, mostly southern nation states, by international (though more often than not hegemonic northern) institutions. The IMF and World Bank are of course paradigm exemplars of this. But so too are those that impose hegemony within groupings of wealthier nation states, such as the European Union and NAFTA.

Of course this hardly represents the raising of the black flag. In three works published over the last quarter century, The Art of Not Being Governed, Seeing Like a State and Two Cheers for Anarchy, Scott examines historical spaces of a much more levelling resistance to state formation and hegemony. He suggests that the synoptic view from the “commanding heights,” to use Lenin's term, is one of a need to impose an institutionally self-interested order on locally evolved folkways which do not lend themselves to the ordering, control and extraction on which the institutional apparatus of the state, of whatever political stripe, depends. And he demonstrates how we might today begin to think about and to carve out spaces for the local, non-state and even anarchistic that while understandably threatening to those viewing from the heights, far better serve those on the ground, who are much more subject to the tender mercies of the apparatus of the state, no matter how seemingly benign.

The particular value of this work is that Scott, a political scientist and anthropologist, is able to connect state theory, particularly ideas in ascendency since Hobbes,  that is in fact far from as self-evident as we might imagine with solid ethnographic evidence of alternatives both past and present. And in doing so, he shows us that there are real alternatives to engaging with and living our lives entirely within the confines of the institutionalized norms and structures maintained and reinforced by the sovereign. Indeed, the view from the bottom toward the commanding heights suggests that governments, whatever their claims or seeming inclinations, inevitably serve and reinforce the interests of the already powerful. They are not the 99%. As none other than Conrad Black has argued so convincingly in his biography of Roosevelt, progressive efforts by government are almost inevitably undertaken in the long-term interests of preserving the status-quo and not because of an abiding love of the powerless, a lesson often bitterly learned.

As such, Scott's work serves as a powerful reminder that working within accepted channels inevitably co-opts far more than it changes. The famous and well intentioned long march through the institutions begun by privileged progressives in the 1960s always seemed to end in a suburban enclave or gentrified urban setting where those they claimed to serve were seldom welcome to visit. More than half a century ago, well before the disappointments of Clinton and Obama, Philip Selznik, in his history of the Tennessee Valley Authority, insisted that “power co-opts and absolute power co-opts absolutly.”

Scott's work serves to remind us that there is another way.

The Problem is the Fanatics

My friend Roy recently sent along a note on fanaticism, making the argument that the "silent majority" is almost always irrelevant, as it is the fanatical minority who are responsible for most of history's atrocities and genocides.

This is a difficult argument to refute and in many if not most cases should not be refuted. But I think it needs to be approached with caution. And I think the caution arises from the need to recognize that the line between good and evil runs through each human heart. Perhaps a few examples might help.

The Rwandan genocide was led by evil men. They incited and encouraged. But they were few in number and were clearly incapable of doing the work themselves. That work was done by friends and neighbors of the victims who allowed their hearts to be infused with that hatred. They had a choice. It was often a brutally difficult choice. Yet it was a choice nonetheless.

Timothy Snynder's epic work Bloodlands tells the story of the the decade and a half in which Central Europe erupted in a paroxysm of slaughter unequalled in history. And while much of the killing was carried out in the camps and by Eisnsatzgrupen, much was also simply done directly or abetted by civilian populations in the occupied territories, and in fact continued after formal hostilities had ceased. I.F. Stone has written of the heartbreaking but little known fact. And as the epic film documentary Shoa shows, the holocaust simply could not have occurred on the scale that it did without the willing cooperation of the civilian population of the occupied territories.

We allow ourselves to see others as "less than." The path from here to malignant hatred is short and straight. And we almost inevitably see others as lesser so that we can see ourselves as more. Carry this process far enough, and Jim Crow laws, residential schools for natives, the sexual exploitation of young women and a host of other evils become every more likely.

So the minority incites. And these are truly evil people. But the great majority either actively participates or perhaps even worse is complicit in their silence, thus wrapping themselves in a cloak of righteousness. I know. I have done this. And quite likely, so have you.

In the epic Lord of the Rings (the book), Tolkien, use of the ring shows the extent we are susceptible to evil, all of us, though admittedly some less than others. Sam Gamgee comes to mind.  It is a work of profound theological truth. The movie on the other hand misses this point almost entirely. We are good. They are evil. In so doing, it embraces the narcissistic impulse of our age. The holy we are above reproach and represent all that is true and good. The evil they are worthy only of destruction. We are saved and they are damned.

Jean Vanier tells a story of a German soldier who was assigned to a firing squad that was to execute innocent Italian villagers in retaliation for a partisan attack in the area who refused. As a consequence, the soldier too was shot. Vanier's argument is that in that moment that soldier was truly free. Many would see this as pointless. I would insist that it changes everything. And it changes everything because, without our complicity, evil is powerless.

A (Very) Small Glimmer of Hope

Via Peter Beinart, an alternative to the Shas/Haredi tail that is wagging the Israeli dog:

Maverick Shas MK Haim Amsalem formally announced on Tuesday that he would be running for the Knesset as head of his recently formed Am Shalem party.
Amsalem was expelled from Shas in 2010 due to his public criticism of the party for discouraging military service and integration into the work force among the haredi public, but remained an MK.
“The Am Shalem party is setting out on the electoral path in order to bring back moderate and beautiful Judaism to the Jewish people,” Amsalem said at a press conference in Tel Aviv.
“When I speak of moderate Judaism, I’m talking about a Judaism which is Zionist and nationalist, a Judaism of Torah and [earning] a livelihood, of service in the army and which is close to the heart, of accepting those who are different, of live and let live, and of mutual respect,” he said.
Amsalem, who is also an ordained rabbi, also said that his party would seek to redress social problems that have been neglected, and to listen to and help those living in the periphery of the country who he said have been ignored and left to their fate.
He also attacked the existing haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, for having “brought the haredi public into a pit,” claiming that the ultra-Orthodox community is fed up with poverty and wants to integrate into society.
The Am Shalem party would fight for the Jewish people and the haredi public to repair these issues, Amsalem said. During the event, Amsalem also announced the names of other party members who would be appearing on his party list as candidates for election to the Knesset.
Included on the Am Shalem list are Moshe Zarfati, a former colonel in the air force and a hi-tech entrepreneur; businesswoman Tamar Abuhatzeira; Rabbi Ariel Konstantyn, founder of the Tel Aviv International Synagogue and a member of Tzohar, a national-religious rabbinical association; and Maxim Oknin, Deputy Mayor of Arad.
A poll for Channel 10 conducted in September showed that a party led by Amsalem would win two seats in the Knesset.
“We don’t have tens of millions [of shekels] to pour thousands of activists onto the street, but the public knows who will fight for the good of the Jewish people,” he said.
Back in November 2010, Amsalem issued a broadside attack against the Shas party condemning full-time yeshiva students who are married yet prefer to study and live on government subsidies instead of finding work. He also railed against other aspects of haredi life and Shas policies, including the failure to teach core curriculum subjects in haredi schools.
Shas and its spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ostracized Amsalem for his comments at the time, but he refused to give up his Knesset seat despite the demands of the party.

A Richard Nixon for our Time?

One of the real difficulties this election season is trying to figure out why I am just so weirded out by Mitt Romeny. This Stepford candidate cloned in the bowels of Republican Party seems to be a 21st century, information age take on Richard Nixon.

Less a pathological liar than entirely unmoored from any but a utilitarian concept of truth, his ethical bobbing and weaving remind one as nothing so much as Nixon press secretary's Ron Zeigler. This walking moral vaccum, when Nixon shifted course in increasingly desperate and pathetic attempts to stay afloat, would simply assert that previous statements were "no longer operative." Whether the previous or current version was true was not at issue; it was utterly irrelevant.

Similarly, there just seems to be no moral centre to Romney. There is no there there. This creepy Frankensteinian amalgam of right wing republican greed and Reader's Digest hardhat populism is deeply Nixonian. Yet at least Nixon was identifiably nasty. He was bigoted and venal. He drank too much, was deeply paranoid and vindictive. He was very much a crook. He was all too human.

This Nixon 2.0 is just creepy. It is as if an alien race, having studied earth for a few decades, has made a slightly skewed attempt to produce a robotic version of the leader of the free world. It looks real enough, if far too perfect. As Andy Borowitz notes, it can even fake human warmth and empathy, sometimes for an hour or more. But during the debate, I was worried that perhaps the batteries would run down and robocandidate would have to be recharged before the debate could continue.

Creepy.

Give Me a Lever Long Enough . . .

So you think markets are not manipulated? From CNBC . . .

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear. The program placed orders in 25-millisecond bursts involving about 500 stocks, according to Nanex, a market data firm. The algorithm never executed a single trade, and it abruptly ended at about 10:30 a.m. ET Friday “Just goes to show you how just one person can have such an outsized impact on the market,” said Eric Hunsader, head of Nanex and the No. 1 detector of trading anomalies watching Wall Street today. “Exchanges are just not monitoring it.” Hunsader’s sonar picked up that this was a single high-frequency trader after seeing the program’s pattern (200 fake quotes, then 400, then 1,000) repeated over and over. Also, it was being routed from the same place, the Nasdaq 

Helping Professions, Countertransference and the Mask of Love

More than a generation ago, community activist and educator John McKnight described professional helpers as typically wearing a "mask of love," one that hid or obscured a countenance of hate. Anyone who has existed in a state of clienthood has quickly come to realize that more often than not the most caring of professional helpers will turn quite vicious when faced with "non-compliance" on the part of those they would claim to assist.

Of course the reason given, and there is almost always some validity to this, is that those helped are very difficult individuals to deal with. But most observers of this scene will at least recognize and acknowledge the all too common presence of narcissistic helpers for whom clients are a source of ego gratifying supply and often little else.

Yet even beyond this, I would suggest that our reaction as helpers and our experience as clients (and I have been both) is rooted in Freudian concepts of transference and counter transference. Of course, as helpers, we are all too ready to blame clients or others we would help, for projecting or transferring their  issues onto us, the sainted helpers. But are we ever ready to entertain the idea that our negative projections onto those we help arise from our own fears and in particular our overwhelming fear that from the seeming safety of "us" we might somehow become "them" or the other? Better to reject or even destroy than to risk solidarity or identification.

And surely this is the heart of the Christian gospel. This is so much more than noblesse oblige. We are called to step out of us and to become them. I am convinced that this is discipleship and that everything else is self-justifying bullshit. But hey, I'm just a client.

Just saying.

So What's Plan "B", Boss?

In the often reality challenged world of economic public policy,  the ideas of Lord Keynes continued to define reality, whether you were for or against. And yet, at present, with the U.S. committed to trillion dollar deficit as far as the eye can see and hence committed to fiscal expansion and with the print key permanently stuck (see graphic of Ben's keyboard)

the world economy continues to sputter and wheeze. And the chattering classes continue to gather in conclaves of the like minded to reassure us, but mostly themselves, that their models, whether of the left or of the right, continue to work, if only the idiots on the other side would listen. Stephen Stills said it so well more than forty years ago

There's battle lines being drawn 

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

If expansionary policies still worked, we would surely be pushing production boundaries, there would be emerging labour and material scarcities, interest rates would be rising and that fourth horseman of the rich people apocalypse, inflation, would be galloping forward to slay the truly righteous -- those with lots of stuff. But that is on planet "policy." 

Here on planet "where we are fucking stuck," however, the picture is somewhat different. Here, the economy continues to have vast slack capacity as those who might actually buy stuff that producers produce are watching their economic prospects, and their children's, decline by the day. There is an already huge but still growing class of surplus people who no one wants to acknowledge because they scare the shit out of us, particularly those of us who might become them. Interest rates only matter to people who can produce or buy stuff. And inflation? We fucking wish!

You see, we are no longer much interesting in actually producing stuff. That we leave to Chinese slaves and Bangladeshi children. Instead, we modern day alchemists think we have discovered how to spin the boring dross of actually doing shit into financialized gold.  So of course, there is asset inflation. There is lots of asset inflation. Stock prices, defying all that is decent and true, continue to rise, as do real estate and commodity prices. This is because these are things that the people who actually have resources, particularly those alchemists who are finding increasingly creative ways to gut the economy, spend their money on: "investments." 

And this is deemed to be a good thing. This is "wealth creation."  And as that learned organ of middle class values, The Ladies Home Journal, told us on the eve of the last cataclysm, in 1929, "everybody ought to be rich." This power of positive thinking horseshit was then, and is now, the sound of the Titanic's orchestra playing Nearer My God to Thee as the great ship and its remaining mostly steerage passengers slip beneath the waves and the rich row away in the limited lifeboats, the honourable among them shedding a tear for those who remain behind. How gallant.

Perhaps it is the case that Lord Keynes' prescriptions will now only offer better and more secure lifeboats for those fortunate few able to escape the fate of the many who remain behind. And perhaps we need to admit that even if we manage a spot on one of the few remaining lifeboats, we do so collectively by leaving our children behind. Keynes' goal, and that of his disciple, Roosevelt, was to save the good ship capitalism from a crisis of its own making. Perhaps it is time to admit that the hubristic "unsinkable" ship is itself the problem.

The Dead Kennedys?

Watching a Jesse Ventura Google Talk from earlier in the year where ex Navy SEAL and governor Jesse Ventura trots out his new and improved E. Howard Hunt killed Kennedy trope, wherein the CIA bagged a twofer, first in 63 and then in 68.

This raises the intriguing question of whether a former elite special forces operative and state governor is batshit, tinfoil hat crazy or alternatively whether an extraordinarily well connected and informed citizen concludes on the evidence that the course of 20th century history was altered by an overthrow of an administration by senior military and intelligence officials.

I'm going with batshit crazy, but it is interesting.

Bibi and the Bomb

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Yesterday, everyone's favorite scary uncle brought his omigod we're all gonna to die dog and pony show to the UN. Anyone with a pulse and an internet connection knows that this is far more about influencing an election that is otherwise hopelessly lost. Unless. Unless there is an "October surprise" circa. 1980 when the hapless Carter had his fate sealed by misadventure in, wait for it, Iran.

An Israeli attack in the run-up to the election would leave Obama with no good option. Join in and he is a patsy to the bellicose Bibi. Or take a pass and be seen as a stooge of the Muslim lunatic fringe. The thought that this election might turn on this kind of manipulation is sad beyond words.

So cheer up, have a drink or five and enjoy someone who really did have to worry about a bomb.

Night Trading?

Something else you should never, never do while you are drunk because it seems like such a good idea:

Steve Perkins was left with a bigger black hole in his memory than most when his employer rang one morning to ask what he'd done with 520m It was 7.45am on June 30 last year when the senior, longstanding broker for PVM Oil Futures was contacted by an admin clerk querying why he'd bought 7m barrels of crude in the middle of the night The 34-year old broker at first claimed he had spent the night trading alongside a client. But the story began to fall apart when he refused to put the customer in touch with his desk for official approval of the trades. By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a "drunken blackout". Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

So did the earth move for you too?