The LS Schmittfest bonfire’s settled down into orange and black embers. In his raking of the coals Craig suggests people reflect on nationalism and proposes privilege as a further conversation topic. Here are my scattered thoughts on a few things loosely connected with each other and these themes.
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My wife works as a nanny. She was telling me the other day about an article she read. The article was by a woman in an interracial couple, she’s black and her kid looks white. Frequently when she’s out people ask if she is the kid’s nanny. My reaction was “ouch” or something to that effect. The article is about the woman interrogating her own response along the same lines. My wife thinks there is an element of “I’m not just the nanny!” in the offense taken to being mistaken for the nanny rather than the mother. I think that’s right. She cares very much for the kids she has taken care of. She does get paid and wouldn’t put in the time she did if she didn’t, but what’s wrong with that? The wage isn’t the problem (I’m all for wages for housework). I think it’s just a lingering bad set of ideas or prejudices.
On the other hand, there’s a racial element here. One of my brothers is visibly Latino. If he and I were standing on the lawn at my Dad’s house or somewhere else and someone were to come up and ask if he was the landscaper, I’d be pissed. This does not mean that I think there’s anything wrong about being a landscaper. (That is, my response would not be “he’s not a mere landscaper!”) I would assume a racist assumption on the part of the speaker, equating Latino with landscaper. The offensive part is not that the ascription is to a category which is beneath my brother so much as the implied limitation and stereotype (not the same as but not totally unlike people who want to say that Asians are good at math or Black people are musically inclined and don’t understand when others have reservations to the use of those categories). So that was my “ouch” sentiment, at least some of it. I may well also have some lingering bad ideas about (paid) caring work.
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I recently read Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. I like Kant quite a bit. His moral philosophy was actually a big bonding experience for my wife and I. We read a bit in a class together at 18 or 19 and decided/realized capitalism is immoral (since people should be treated as ends and capitalism is a society of treating people as means). We hijacked discussion for about a week, and found it all quite heady.
On the other hand, Kant’s a dirty fucking racist and sexist. The Observations are ridiculous! Women are of the beautiful (be pretty, be passive, be a moderating influence on your man, don’t think too much as that’s mannish), men are of the sublime (profound, savage, in charge, noble). And the typology of national characters … ! One excerpt:
Father Labat reports that a Negro carpenter, whom he reproached for haughty treatment of his wives, answered: “You whites are indeed fools, for first you make great concessions to your wives, and afterward you complain when they drive you mad.” And it might be that there were something in this which perhaps deserved to be considered; but in short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid. (113.)
This provides a good curveball to (uses of) Kant’s moral philosophy. “Treat all human beings as ends.” Absolutely, sure, who could disagree. But the primary work is interpretive and in the background. What is meant by human, and by end? Clearly Kant’s typology involves evaluation and an implied rank order. Those at the bottom, those with darkest skin tones, shade off the map in terms of being human, ranging instead more toward the unclear bits where the cartographer wrote “here be monsters”. This is really a fairly simple point: look to contexts, meanings or functions in situation. The universalism of Kant’s moral philosophy with an implicit sorting criteria as to who gets counted into what set of bodies.
One could cash out a disagreement with someone who holds as Kant does in the Observations and someone with beliefs like mine in at least two ways. One could hold that one of us is right about the human and the other is wrong - a matter of the range to which the universal moral system correctly applies to (maps onto the world). That’s rhetorically powerful and I’m deeply sympathetic. On the other hand, there’s no neutral position from which to assess positions as right and wrong. We’d each say the other is wrong and we’re right. The actual range of application of the term human which one could be said get right and the other wrong doesn’t exist except in these disagreements, as a sort of moral/rhetorical weight. This is not to say that convictions as to the range of application of the term are a priori wrong, I’m not sure about that. The more expansive the better, of course. The point is that these convictions may at least in some cases relate to others as simply incommensurable. Conversations can be had, arguments made, stories told. Minds do change. Some. And some don’t. The ideal speech condition within which the right outcome would eventually out is a fiction, like monkeys banging on typewriters and producing Shakespeare. And even if this condition would guarantee agreement, and even if it’s possible to attain, given it’s general lack of instantiation and the costs of disagreements over (or, pernicious deployments of) the range of application of the term human, there’s not time to wait. Certainly waiting is no better (I think it’s worse but I don’t have and am not particularly interested in making an argument for that) than acting … other than communicatively-rationally in order to change or to neutralize the implied backdrop by which the sorting of the application of the term occurs. (Hermeneutics by force? Another argument to be made but which will have to wait is that the operations of communicative rationality is itself predicated on or is a type of force itself. Not that all force is equal, of course.)
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Infinite Thought suggested in discussion at Long Sunday that folk read a section of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class around the theme of privilege. That sounded to me like a good time. I eventually plan to do some more reading around the category of the petit (or petty) bourgeios in Marx. Veblen might make a nice point of comparison.
Right off the bat I disagree with Veblen’s claims about progress and fittest habits. Survivability of traits is hard to deduce. Really all we have is a record of traits having survived. Do say survival is a result of survivability is tautological and unproblematic. That is to say, we can take “did survive” and “has or had the trait of survivability” as synonyms. It makes no sense, though, to take possession of the trait of survivability to be the cause of having survived. The synonym for a term is not the cause of a term. (I’ve talked about this same kind of move in relation to reading Ranciere on the term intelligence.)
To say survival is a result of superior survivability is to imply that there were survival outcomes determined in advance, just not yet enacted. That’s a mistake and serves simply as a sort of weak theodicy.
Veblen disagrees. He doesn’t see his perspective as one in which “whatever is, is right.” Rather:
the law of natural selection, as applied to human institutions, gives the axiom: “Whatever is, is wrong.” Not that the institutions of today are wholly wrong for the purposes of the life of today, but they are, always and in the nature of things, wrong to some extent. They are the result of a more or less inadequate adjustment of the methods of living to a situation which prevailed at some point in the past development; and they are therefore wrong by something more than the interval which separates the present situation from that of the past. “Right” and “wrong” are of course here used without conveying any rejection as to what ought or ought not to be. They are applied simply from the (morally colorless) evolutionary standpoint, and are intended to designate compatibility or incompatibility with the effective evolutionary process.
But it also implies that “whatever is, is more right than what was.” Veblen’s natural selection is the supercession of the less right by the more right. I also don’t think his morally colorless standpoint, which apparently wants to take itself as a non-standpoint, is so colorless. It underpins his argument against the leisure class, as counter to evolution and progress. (It’s a depoliticalization.)
I’m also not sure about the role given to institutions:
The progress which has been and is being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down, broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an environment which has progressively changed with the growth of the community and with the changing institutions under which men have lived. Institutions are not only themselves the result of a selective and adaptive process which shapes the prevailing or dominant types of spiritual attitude and aptitudes; they are at the same time special methods of life and of human relations, and are therefore in their turn efficient factors of selection. So that the changing institutions in their turn make for a further selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament, and a further adaptation of individual temperament and habits to the changing environment through the formation of new institutions.
Why not take individuals as the point of departure? Or temperaments? This is not to say that starting from institutions can’t be fruitful. It’s a useful register in which to make descriptions. On the other hand, other registers are as well, in which causal priority will be placed elsewhere. If the causal claims aren’t taken overly seriously then it doesn’t really matter. I generally fail to see much use for insistence upon this or that (final) causal priority, beyond being a sort of weak anchor for a given idiom or descriptive register.
Another way to frame my objections is to ask what point of view Veblen is describing from. Institutions evolve over time. Are there idioms or epistemological positions linked to institutions? Is sociology an institution, such that Veblen occupies an intra-institutional position? If so, how do we sort Veblen’s claims in terms of being part of the process selecting for new and better institutions, being part of an old/dying institution that seeks to survive or an emergent institution whose survivability is yet to be determined, or being part of a general backdrop state of affairs within which all this institutional change etc occurs? Which is to say, is Veblen speaking as a specific character type and temperament, or as typeless - the voice of history or evolution itself, what the historical process would tell us in its own words? (The question is close to that to Nietzsche in his “Truth and Lie” - is this the nonmetaphorical truth about all other truth being metaphorical? Or is this is a metaphorical account within which truth is taken to be metaphorical?)
Veblen writes:
An advance in technical methods, in population, or in industrial organization will require at least some of the members of the community to change their habits of life, if they are to enter with facility and effect into the altered industrial methods; and in doing so they will be unable to live up to the received notions as to what are the right and beautiful habits of life.
Indeed. Increase in absolute surplus value production will mean some do not get to be outside of work at times they were once able to. Increase in relative surplus value production will mean some will not get to be as lively outside of work as they were once able to do. It makes sense to say, then, that “Any one who is required to change his habits of life and his habitual relations to his fellow men will feel the discrepancy between the method of life required of him by the newly arisen exigencies, and the traditional scheme of life to which he is accustomed.” I don’t see how it follows, though, that “It is the individuals placed in this position who have the liveliest incentive to reconstruct the received scheme of life and are most readily persuaded to accept new standards;” might there just as much incentive to prevent the change? Or to swap it for another change?
[I]t is through the need of the means of livelihood that men are placed in such a position. The pressure exerted by the environment upon the group, and making for a readjustment of the group’s scheme of life, impinges upon the members of the group in the form of pecuniary exigencies; and it is owing to this fact — that external forces are in great part translated into the form of pecuniary or economic exigencies — it is owing to this fact that we can say that the forces which count toward a readjustment of institutions in any modern industrial community are chiefly economic forces; or more specifically, these forces take the form of pecuniary pressure.
“Environment” here sounds to me like something extra-social. If that’s what’s meant, then it’s not a very useful idea. Pecuniary pressures are precisely social. Economic forces are institutions/institutional. This is part of why placing causal priority on the institution is a mistake. Economic instituions are made up of people and are forms of organization in which conflict between people - and domination of some by others - plays out. Put differently, the condition Veblen refers to as being “an organic part of the industrial community” is not an organic condition.
The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any modem, highly organized industrial community. The exigencies of the struggle for the means of life are less exacting for this class than for any other; and as a consequence of this privileged position we should expect to find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered industrial situation. The leisure class is the conservative class.
I’m not convinced this is so. Why not see them as a group which acts in relation to others, particularly those upon whose backs their position as leisured rests? In that case, there is conservatism in the sense of wanting to keep those backs bearing the weight of the leisured, but there is also progressivism in the sense of wanting innovative techniques for maintaining or improving that condition (judged from the perspective of the leisured - the left wing of capital!).
A consequence of this increased reluctance, due to the solidarity of human institutions, is that any innovation calls for a greater expenditure of nervous energy in making the necessary readjustment than would otherwise be the case. It is not only that a change in established habits of thought is distasteful. The process of readjustment of the accepted theory of life involves a degree of mental effort — a more or less protracted and laborious effort to find and to keep one’s bearings under the altered circumstances. This process requires a certain expenditure of energy, and so presumes, for its successful accomplishment, some surplus of energy beyond that absorbed in the daily struggle for subsistence. Consequently it follows that progress is hindered by underfeeding and excessive physical hardship, no less effectually than by such a luxurious life as will shut out discontent by cutting off the occasion for it. The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.
This last is not entirely true, and dovetails with something Eric and I have been talking about recently re: who gets ascribed the positions of head and hands. Those at the top and bottom, they can’t think. Innovation’s in the middle (the bourgeois/petty bourgeois intellectuals?). What’s more interesting here, though, is the treatment of energy as a quantity (I do the same above re: increased relative surplus value production) and an implied law of or desire for conservation of energy. Reminds me of Freud’s hydraulic account of consciousness. Overly deterministic in terms of outcomes, though:
the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance, and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale. It is a commonplace that, wherever it occurs, a considerable degree of privation among the body of the people is a serious obstacle to any innovation.
Reminds me of something I was just reading about Louis Blanc, in that Sewell book I liked so much. The poor pitiable deprived, they get stripped even of their ability to be a moral agent, being reduced to a condition of conservatism such that others - those in touch with the forces of innovation - have to think and act for them.
It’s interesting that Veblen identifies “coalitions of laborers” with part of the leisure class conservative point of view. Presumably because this is an attempt to tamper with the natural operations of the economic “environment”?