#well its the culture of empire and its pernicious programming

[expfcultragreen]

[suburbanidiocies]

A Brief Note on the Sarah Jeong Affair

Brownshirts delight in finding real or perceived double standards in others that rationalize their own fundamentally inconsistent political-ethical projects. Liberal hypocrisy (“Why a British empire and not an Italian Mediterranean Lake?”) justifies their own callousness and lust for blood. That is why it is not suprise at all that the usual far right suspects have come out of the wood work in response to the Sarah Jeong controversy. An Asian American’s ability to mock white people is being challenged by those who have no problem with their own “ironic”/unapologetic bigotry. The threadbare bugbear of “reverse racism” is being raised to rally those whose own program against people of color is not just a matter of mean words

At the same time, one can remain unsatisfied with certain defenders of Jeong which presume that everything is justified as long as one is punching up. The figure of the Asian Klansman is an oyxmoran. Anti-white sentiments do no carry the same institutional weight and consequences as, say, anti-black ideas. One should expect people to feel hurt and vindictive in a society that was not founded with them in mind, and those of Europeon background should accompany others through these emotiona instead of demonizing them as monsterous threats to the social order. But that still does not mean that there is nothing pathological in fantasizing about “canceling” an entire people, in stereotyping others as being without culture, in constantly coming again and again back to the same ethnic group as a rhetorical punching bag. Things do not need to be just as pernicious as the alt-right in order to be stumbling blocks to human solidarity. In a colonized world, subaltern hatred for what is alien to oneself may often be the beginning of freedom, but it certainly is not its end. A serene cosmopolitanism should be the aim of all human nations and cultures, not a white man’s burden.

A thousand Sarah Jeongs is preferable to one Nazi. It is better that there be people who admit that prejudice in general is wrong than that there be open and unabashed racial chauvinists that will tolerate no rivals. But one should not give one’s blessing to a “progressive” wokeness which normalizes irrational vitriol and treats itself as the vanguard of political discourse by flattering the bourgeois pretensions to worthiness of a rising generation of ideologues and entrepreneurs.

Part of the problem in discussing these matters is that there is a verbal ambiguity when it comes to discussing whiteness. According to critical theory, whitenesss is the name of a social technology that is used to elevate a herrenvolk over others, not the name of an essence that any human being actually has. No one is ontologically white (or black for that matter). At the same, being white is commonly treated as an objective state that one can inhabit and which pervades one’s life. And according to the not entirely unreasonable. doxa of the day, an attack on an identity is the same as an attack on the person bearing it. Hence the endless cycles of rage and chest thumping on the part of Europeans and white settler population when anti-racism is put on the table. In order to break this chain of reaction, attacks on Caucasian privilege need to be careful to focus on the institutions of white supremacy (chauvenistic educational systems, unjust property relationships, etc). Our war is, primarily, against the unclean spirits in the high places, not flesh and blood persons who can be disentangled from their social position. “Whiteness” is demonic, but “white” people are themselves not devils. A similar approach can be used to deal with the much talked debates over “Western Civilization.” The achievements of Goethe, Galileo, and Rembrandt belong to global humanity, not an exclusionary European Geist. One can break the white mythology that surrounds these figures without excising them from the historic patrimony that all are rightful heirs to.

There are precedents for such an attitude towards whiteness. The antifascist fight of the 30s and 40s was against Nazism and Fascism, not "the Germans" or "the Italians." And in contemporary times, the more reflective, and politically astute, wing of the anti-Zionist movement has been careful to distinguish between Zionism and the Jewish people. What is being proposed is certainly tricker because the population in question uses the same term as the ideology in the need of deconstruction. But holding these distinctions simutenously in mind is certainly not impossible.

Another problem is that racism in the living language of daily life has become more narrowly defined to cover the realities of life under white supremacy. This meets a real need. The 500 year old planetary regime that has placed Western Europeans on a pedestal is unique in its global swag and the depth of its reach. But we need language that can describe other form of hatreds, some of which are older than white supremacy and many of which will undoubtably survive the death of the current world system. Hence why it may be useful to treat xenophobia (“the fear and distrust of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange”) as a distinct evil from racism in need of being named and combatted. Such a category will cover the feelings of ethnic/communal/cultural animus that those on top of the ladder, those in the middle, and those at the bottom can feel. It would include the mutual games of stereotyping that unequal societies generate as human beings find themselves confronting each other not as persons but as memebers of rival castes. Finially, it would cover the sorts of prejudice that exist in non-whites cultures against other non-whites which will only become more and more relevant as the United States and Europe decline in global importance. The result of such a change in focus could be a changing of discussion from an often Pharisaical debate about how to avoid being a racist while still on the lookout for acceptable targets of aggression towards a inquiry on how to lead a well-rounded human life that is capable of finding a home in the alien gaze of the other.

Again and again we must come to the need for cultivating a type of humanity that is not reducible to any ethnic fate as an oppressor or a victim and which can nevertheless contain multitudes. There is nothing better than to become like the sky which remain unchanged while clouds, winds, and rains pass through it, while the life of the earth springs forth and dies beneath the gaze of heaven. It is easy, when taking such a state as one’s end goal, to be dismissive towards the games people play about race, sex, gender, and nationality. But one must remember that while there is one Way there are many roads that enter into it. That the sky creates a wide space for a plurality of living things to work themselves out. That there is a sense that an emancipated spirit can return from universality to the particular in such a manner that you can wear your haecceity lightly like a festive garment, in a spirt of serious play.

We can not leap into a “post-racial” future with mere good intentions. Nor would we want, in any case, to have our various individual destines abolished in the name of a sanitized utopia. Rather, we must work concretely in our words and praxis to center the array of human differences around activities which belong to everyone and no one: Labor, Thought, and Love

[geopolicraticus]

The Red Pill for Philosophers and Scientists

On the Possibility of Living in Truth for Those Who Hold Truth as an Ideal 

“The Red Pill” has become a pervasive metaphor since the 1999 film The Matrix, in which the protagonist is offered a choice between taking a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill has come to signify difficult and unpleasant truths, while the blue pill has come to signify the comfortable and comforting lies with which most people are pacified. 

There is a relationship between the idea of the red pill and Vaclav Havel’s conception of “living in truth.” An individual may not be able to change a dishonest society, but one can still choose to live in truth in the midst of a dishonest society simply by refusing to go along with the lies that others are willing to tolerate. There is a cost—often a high cost—to living in truth, but it is always an option for us, even if it is a difficult path to walk. “Taking the red pill” is in many contexts essentially the idea that one is living in truth, that is say, that one has recognized and acknowledged the unpleasant truths that others try not to see, and one thus lives in the full consciousness of that knowledge. 

Havel’s conception of living in truth had a further implication, and that is the idea of a parallel polis: that the extant social order is so corrupt that it is beyond reform, so that the only option left for those who have chosen to live in truth is to opt out of the extant social order and create a parallel social order, a parallel polis, in which the false and failed social order is simply ignored, and one lives and acts as though living in a parallel society in which one is not forced to assent to lies—the parallel polis is a society in which all live in truth.  

While Havel’s concept of living in truth remains an inspiration, the parallel polis never grew to a scope at which it had to be reckoned with (i.e., it never became a power in its own right), and, after the Iron Curtain fell, the institutions of civil society in regions where the parallel polis seemed to be the only option for those living in truth mostly retained their legitimacy and transitioned to remain viable under a new political dispensation. In many nation-states formerly behind the Iron Curtain, the only institutions that were permanently and irretrievably forsaken were the ruling communist parties in these states and the secret police apparatus of each.   

In other words, the compromised institutions of state, education, industry, and so on, were reformed and are now largely considered to be institutions in good standing, their past collusion with communist dictatorship notwithstanding. This is an important and a sobering lesson for us today. We can live in truth at our own expense, but the initiative to create a parallel society is not likely to be successful, because institutions have an enormous weight of social inertia behind them—so much that even profoundly corrupt institutions are more likely to be salvaged than to be junked.

This, then, is one “red pill” for scientists and philosophers who wish to live in truth (and, hopefully, the majority of scientists and philosophers do want to live in truth) but who also wish to be in the good graces of institutions that are in a position to grant status, opportunities, career advancement, and remuneration. Moreover, when it comes to the lifework of scientists and philosophers, institutions not only confer benefits upon the individual, but also confer benefits upon the ideas of individuals, so that a well-placed individual is in a position for their ideas to be transformed into a scientific research program with institutional backing, meaning that these ideas will transcend the life of the individual and will become a social and cultural legacy. That is a powerful inducement to cooperate with institutions, no matter how corrupt they are.

There are, however, many red pills, including many red pills for philosophers and scientists contemplating life-altering choices. There are many red pills, recognized in different communities, as each community has its own bête noir and its forbidden fruit and its unspeakable realities that inevitably attract the curious no less than the malevolent. And because the red pill has become such a pervasive metaphor, there is predictably a reaction against it, as in any social milieu there will be decent people and jackasses alike on both sides of every issue. Thus there are decent people who refuse whatever red pill is offered, and bad actors who see the same red pill as an opportunity, which they eagerly embrace. Thus it has been quite easy to tar with the same brush all those who have taken the red pill as being deluded opportunists who believe themselves to have grasped a Truth that others have not the courage to see.

The most painful red pill that philosophers and scientists have to swallow is this: no one is on your side. You have no side, other than other scholars, and many of those other scholars will be your rivals who are invested in scientific research programs you may consider pointless or harmless at best, or pernicious and malign at worst. It’s like the old Quaker saying: everyone is queer except me and thee, and sometimes I think thee is queer.

The rivalry for funding alternative scientific research programs means that scholars who might agree in principle that science should be funded, cannot agree on who exactly should receive this funding. If it were my call to make (and it’s not; I am utterly powerless), I would require that ten percent of every large grant for research (everything over some given dollar amount—say, a million dollars) go to adversarial research. Someone would have to be put in charge of funneling money to the scientific rivals of grantees, including those (especially those) whom the grantees sincerely believe to be mistaken, if not mentally defective.

If it is mostly true that scientists have no allies and are well and truly alone, it is indubitably true for philosophers. If you think that someone is on your side, you are deluded, plain and simple. No one is. You have no tribe; you have no people. As a philosopher you are a wanderer in the wilderness, and you cannot return to society from the wilderness without compromising yourself. Philosophy’s entanglements with power have not been to its credit. Plato’s mission to Dionysius of Syracuse, Aristotle’s education of Alexander the Great, and Seneca’s tutelage of Nero all speak to an admirable desire to have a beneficent influence, but it could be argued that the least effective of these and such efforts were also the least harmful.

Since the nineteenth century philosophers have been transforming themselves into academics, and have gained a measure of bourgeois respectability by this path. Many philosophers today get married, have families, and own a comfortable house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a reasonably new car in the driveway. This is all well and good for personal fulfillment, but philosophy is not about personal fulfillment.

Perhaps the historical dialectic between being an isolated eccentric and being a respectable bourgeois citizen is the philosopher’s version of departure and return, for we have been here before. Once universities began to be founded in western Europe, at a time when no distinction was made between philosophers and scientists, philosophers were at the center of this development, and philosophy was ensconced within university institutions for hundreds of years, until the scientific revolution and modernization so transformed the landscape of thought that the whole tradition of professional medieval philosophy—Scholasticism, as it is usually called—was largely abandoned. Much of the logical work of late medieval philosophy only came into wide recognition again in the twentieth century, so completely was it disregarded after Descartes.

This same early modern period dominated by Descartes and the epistemic turn in philosophy was a time of great social turmoil in which philosopher’s lives were on the line with each pronouncement. A book or a pamphlet could result in a literal death sentence. During the sixteenth century, pretty much every western European philosopher spent some part of their life in Holland, because the Netherlands at this time was wealthy from their seaborne trading empire and they were tolerant, meaning that they allowed philosophers to live mostly unmolested, even if they wrote unorthodox books—a rare thing in early modern Europe. Spinoza is perhaps the most obvious example of this, although Descartes, Locke, and Hobbes were also part of this philosophical diaspora. 

Spinoza, enjoying the quiet life in Holland, received a letter from I. Lewis Fabritius, Professor of the Academy of Heidelberg, and Councillor of the Elector Palatine, offering him a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, saying: “You will have the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching, which the prince is confident you will not misuse, to disturb the religion publicly established.” Spinoza replied with a letter that is a classic, hopefully known to all philosophers: “…I do not know the limits, within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be confined, if I am to avoid all appearance of disturbing the publicly established religion. Religious quarrels do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men’s various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them to habitually distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said.” This was true in Spinoza’s time, and it remains true in our time.

Spinoza knew he had to be cautious. Even sheltering in the Netherlands, he was several times under threat. He wrote that he long deliberated over the offer, and we have no reason to doubt the sincerity of this claim. We know that Spinoza was a thoughtful man, and he probably thought through all the advantages and disadvantages of accepting the position, ultimately deciding against it. Others might have decided differently; there are no right or wrong answers to questions like this. One chooses a path, and makes the best of it that one can.

There may well be further departures and future returns for philosophers and scientists as historical circumstances temporarily push them toward the center of events, and then the shifting currents of history push them away from the center to the outer periphery again. Whatever the currents portend, whichever way the wind may blow, for scientists and philosophers, life must be a cautious and continuous negotiation with the powers that be, and by “the powers that be” I do not mean only political regimes, their enforcers and their office holders, but also custom, tradition, social mores, and the tendency of the mob to riot when they are exposed to anything that lies outside their competence. Taking some public stance on a controversial issue is mostly foolhardy, especially if it gets one killed and therefore marks a sudden end to one’s research. Philosophers and scientists need to keep themselves alive, but they also need to avoid needless entanglement with institutions that can only compromise them. This is not an easy balancing act, but it is the highwire act demanded by those who would hold truth as their ideal.

[lopezdorothy70-blog]

US Diplomats Attacked in Cuba… by Crickets

They were sure that the Cubans, aided by the Russians, used sophisticated technology to attack the brains and nervous systems of US diplomats… until it turned out to be crickets.

The New York Times now reveals that scientists have solved a two-year-old mystery that provoked a major diplomatic scandal and led to a complete turnaround in US-Cuba relations. The mystery concerned the health of American staff at the US Embassy in Havana. US diplomats and the media called it a “sonic attack.” They were convinced that it was a pernicious example of “sharp power,” a term we covered in yesterday's edition of The Daily Devil's Dictionary. Some suspected the Russians and then the Chinese of providing the Cubans with the technology capable of attacking people's brains while leaving no traces or clues about its origin.

The story broke in November 2016, when American diplomats in Havana “complained of persistent, high-pitched sounds followed by a range of symptoms, including headaches, nausea and hearing loss.” After two years of expensive investigation by both American and Cuban teams seeking what everyone was certain to be a technological cause, scientists have now identified the true source of the sound, audible on the recordings: a Caribbean cricket.

Here is today's 3D definition:

Cricket:

1. An insect

2. A team sport invented in England, played with a ball, a bat and a wicket, which is still popular in its former colonies but considered a British eccentricity in the rest of the world

3. Another way of describing something that reflects fair play, as in the expression: “That isn't cricket”

4. An instrument of torture imagined by American diplomats in Cuba

Contextual note

The media wasted no time amplifying the story of a deliberate sonic assault. “Amid an international uproar, a recording of the sinister droning was widely circulated in the news media,” The New York Times reports. Recently, when speculation about criminal intent was still rife, The New Yorker came back to the story, reminding readers that: “All the victims described being bombarded by waves of pressure in their heads.”

The choice of the word “bombarded” may not be innocent. Though the medical experts who investigated the symptoms found no evidence of physical effects, the media were eager to develop the story as a modern version of Cold War lore, where the fear of bombardment was permanent. Senator Marco Rubio, who had opposed Barack Obama's policy of reopening relations with Cuba, was certain the Cubans were to blame.

In September 2018, NBC News announced that US intelligence agencies had strong evidence leading them to “suspect Russia.” MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, affirming “this was an intentional attack,” accused the Russians of using “some kind of microwave that is so sophisticated the Americans don't fully understand it.” One former Trump administration official outlined the reasoning: “Who else has secret weapons programs? Who else has the ability to conduct an operation like this? It fits their pattern, their style.” Political scientist Joseph Nye might be tempted to agree that this was an enemy sharp power operation.

Historical note

Even with the knowledge that it wasn't the butler but the crickets who did it, experts are still left wondering about the political dimension of an incident with such serious diplomatic impact. The Obama administration had boldly reengaged with Cuba after decades of an ideologically motivated embargo. But that has ground to a halt under the Trump administration. The New Yorker article mentions that “in Cuba and in the U.S., the advocates of diplomatic opening are no longer in office.”

In June 2018, the “Havana Syndrome” encouraged some to complain of a similar problem at the US Consulate in Guangzhou, China. The New York Times observed that “it remains unclear whether the illnesses are the result of attacks at all. Other theories have included toxins, listening devices that accidentally emitted harmful sounds or even mass hysteria.” Could the whole thing be explained by a return to the McCarthy-era hysteria of an anti-American conspiracy?

The scientists who have identified the crickets do not claim that there could not have been another cause of the physical effects, but considering their findings and the fact that not a whit of evidence has been found for a technological source, the thesis of mass hysteria should not be discounted. The character of this mass hysteria - if that's what it is - is consistent with what we can observe every day in US media, for whom Vladimir Putin's Russia has replaced the Soviet Union. It may also be related to the emerging obsession with sharp power.

When Donald Trump promised to make America great again, everyone assumed that he was referring to the culture, politics and business ambiance of the 1950s, that period of an expanding Cold War economy under a Republican president, sandwiched between World War II and the humiliation of the Vietnam War. Subversive evil always originated in communist Russian, the communist empire adept at infecting the minds and brains of otherwise well-meaning Americans, waiting to be smoked out by Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Once Trump was elected in 2016, the Democrats themselves and their media have been striving to bring back the “greatness” of the 1950s by reestablishing Russia as the villain who had stolen an election that was rightfully theirs. And, of course, the Russia-Cuba connection was the major theme of the period, culminating in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

With the Havana Syndrome, we had all the elements that could contribute to a Cold War style hysteria… until now, when the narrative has been rudely interrupted by the chirping of crickets.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil's Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

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