March 30, 2006
Factory Floor
Factory floor. Glory and fall of humanity.
Embodiment of all the ambiguities we carry with us. These noisy machines and complex systems provide us with the convenience of civilised life, supply our lifelines, cram shelves with produce none of us thought we could possibly ever need. This busy traffic mysteriously transforms itself into figures of economic growth and personal achievement.
Digging ever deeper into resources which in a finite world cannot be limitless, it yet has all the boastful self-confidence of a process meant to continue eternally. Sheets and bars of metal, tons of plastic, the miraculous transformation of black mud of oil into sleek shapes of fancy, all pouring into and through the nozzles of destiny.
And while to a stranger all the noisy and hurried motion looks like so much unintelligible confusion, a hostile jungle of incomprehensible shapes and purposes, in the eye of an insider initiate there is a magic purpose at work which ties up all the floor together in a single-minded drive for output efficiency. To such an eye, there is a strict logic in every object having precisely the place it has, there is a musical harmony in the muddled confusion of thuds and whistles, an ultimate revelation of order in the layout of the floor and the movements of the workers on it. Upon closer look, there is an eerie beauty in this, a beauty which would not elevate spirits and evoke feelings of inspiring unity, but still beauty one might be tempted to turn into poetry.
And yet the forces of unpredictability in all this stubbornly refuse to be subjected to the workings of the rational order. The ultimate rationality of the process ever so desperately tries to force everything into the predictable uniformity and sameness of shapes, sizes, actions, yet ever those precise things leak out of the prescribed forms, events evade the set boundaries and people stray into irrational courses of action. This is a everlasting struggle into which philosophy and morality and psychology, beside economy or technology, are brought as weapons of persuading and justification.
An embodiment, so it would seem, of all our predicaments.
[thoughts late at night upon suburbs of Nagoya which ceased to be countryside, yet never became anything else]
Posted by david at 09:04 AM | Comments (0)
The Public Talk
"… we think in terms of stories."
Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature
Human communities live by telling stories of themselves; we seek to understand ourselves, our institutions, our problems, and our goals by relating them causally to one another; and we organise the self-understanding by relating perceptions and facts together in narratives. And it is an important insight that in human world how things are perceived and described determines to a crucial extent what they are and what they can become. Phenomena of moral, political, social life do not present themselves as unquestionable objective facts with clear significance. In order to determine whether unrestricted economic competition is a desirable framework of society or a lamentable moral vice, we normally need to be reasonably clear about the story such principle holds a place in. In other words we need to make clear whether we are telling, for example, a story of market economics or a story of man's path to salvation.
The unfolding of these stories is a most fascinating subject of inquiry. Not because it would provide the inquirer with a privileged vantage point from which to disinterestedly observe a parade of self-deceptive narratives, ideologies and false consciousnesses which past and present political societies have invented. For it does not appear likely that we could, or indeed desirable that we should, tell no rather than some stories of our collective self-understanding. The great metaphors (of, say, democracy, right, market, independence, salvation, nation, justice, purity &c.) we use to speak about ourselves and our societies are importantly what keeps us alive and peacefully together, by enabling us, for instance, to cope, through sets of shared perspectives and terms, with problems of political decision and collective order in face of the ultimate diversity and unpredictability of men and things. It is precisely for this reason that most fundamental political disputes and dichotomies revolve around placing facts into competing interpretative frameworks (like "social justice" vs. "free enterprising individual").
Neither is such inquiry into the nature and genealogy of our stories motivated by an attempt to lay bare, behind a putative facade of deceptive fallacy of public rhetoric—at the level of "real" motivations and causes— some version of stark and disillusioned "truth" of man, society, and history. Although it is indisputable that an attempt to unveil the functional and contextual nature of our stories of public self-understanding always involves a temptation to yield to varying degrees of cynicism regarding any claim of such stories to validity and sincerity. It is admittedly difficult, in other words, to inquire into particular circumstances of the historical origins of a notion, like that of democracy, and still maintain an unshaken commitment to the universal and absolute validity of such notion. How can one assert that something is historically and contextually contingent, arising under particular circumstances from particular social practices, and yet at the same time that it holds a universal value raising a self-evident claim to our loyalties and commitment? Strictly logically speaking, such delineation of the problem probably entails insoluble contradiction. It has been one, however, with which European civilisation has been confronted more or less ever since it started coping with the experience of having encountered, with the dawn of early modernity, on a large scale those often wildly different social practices of cultures of other continents. The modern mind has ever since been at least latently troubled by awareness that its own habits, perspectives it takes for self-evident and granted, its very assumed criteria of validity, may be rendered relative and problematic by an unexpected encounter with an irreconcilable otherness; other habits, other values, other stories.
Described on these terms, the problem appears abstractly philosophical to the point of desperation. However, there are highly practical and topical issues concerned here. (Only thanks to the inordinately overstretched use of the term "terrorist"—implied by the rhetoric of the war on terror frequently bordering on hysteria—is the Russian president Putin able to phrase his war in Chechnya in terms of struggle with international or islamist terrorism and, worse still, only thanks to that can Lukashenko's regime in Minsk intimidate the Belorussian political opposition by threatening to criminally charge dissenters with terrorism.)
If it does matter, indeed, how we describe things; if how we speak about things, in human world, determines to a large extent what the things are, then we had better pay very close attention to how words are being used to invoke images in our public discourse, to what our public speakers "do" with the words.
Posted by david at 08:08 AM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2006
Uses of Terms: the Case of Democracy
It appears that at some point in our history we felt compelled to make a new rhetorical use of the term ‛democracy’. Shifting the meaning of the word from a previous neutral description of one possible version of political order, from a working designation, as it were, of a particular arrangement of the political process, the notion of democracy came to imply something close to an absolute normative standard. In other words, at some point we obviously felt the need to make democracy into something worth fighting and dying for; into an ideal capable of mobilising imaginations and loyalties.
It may be tricky to point out exactly where in history this transformation occurred, but certainly one important moment in the shift must have been the making of defence of democracy into a rallying cry of western allied nations in their struggle of the World War Two. Again, throughout the Cold War years, and especially so among the dissent pro-democratic movements defending civic freedoms under the authoritarian regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, many relied more or less explicitly upon such strong notion of democracy as a normative ideal with a potential of becoming a receptacle of high hopes and providing moral grounds for an often self-sacrificial struggle.
Presumably, nowadays, too, we — meaning at least we in the self-appointed free and developed world — stand in need of such strong notion of democracy serving often as something of a transcendental anchor to many values invoked in our public discourse. We probably need to be able to justify certain political decisions and courses of action by appeal to an ideal of democratic freedom which is assumed to resonate with something essential in the very human nature. However, it remains uncertain that even such prominent theorists of democratic government as a relatively recent Rousseau or even younger Mill would understand what we mean when we resort to justifying in the name of democracy some controversial public decisions. Not to mention those countless classic statements on the nature of polity which, while notably concerned with liberty as a paramount political value, have nevertheless little to say about democracy. Machiavelli or Montesquieu or Hume, just like Tocqueville or Constant, are all arguably — albeit each in a different way — committed to liberty as an utmost goal for a political community, but none of them seems to consider this ideal to be in any way inseparably connected with a democratic form of governance. From the point of view of our current common way of using the terms it somewhat comes as a surprise that it was possible at all to employ the two notions of freedom and democracy separately and in no way as the near-synonyms they have often become in our public parlance.
As nice things tend to flock together in the public arena, as our speakers and other public users of language inevitably invoke all the goodies in a package, democracy becomes all but indistinguishable from other legitimating concepts, like freedom, or that relatively recently established but ideologically potent notion of human rights. As a consequence, however, the reference implied in such public uses of the term tends to solidify into something close to a natural entity, a pre-established destination of development of every society and each political body. The current use of the term of democracy forces public speakers to implicitly assume that every imaginable form of human community must inevitably be on its way toward democracy, which is the true destination of its evolution. However, such assumption may be completely misplaced, at least so to the extent that most current usage of the term democracy vaguely fails to distinguish between its reference to a normative ideal on the one hand and, on the other hand, to the particular form of elective representative constitutional governance which arose from the specific developments in the course of western history.
One only needs to look as far as the latest State of the Union presidential address — to pick just one conspicuous example without being tendentious in any way — to remark how the term democracy gets loaded with normative meanings in a lot of standard current usage and with what implication.
The imaginative structure behind the speech is roughly as follows: the world is divided into two groups of nations, the already democratic ones and the ones still to become so.
"… more than half the people of our world live in democratic nations. And we do not forget the other half - in places like Syria, Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Iran - because the demands of justice, and the peace of this world, require their freedom as well."
This structure tacitly assumes that there exists a reasonably clear standard which allows for all conceivable cases of arrangements of political communities to be classified under either of the two possible headings: the free and democratic ones and those other. Whatever the merits of such pattern as a descriptive statement, it appears to invite the listener to share the assumption that the sole significant task in the sphere of international relations is that of helping the remaining half of humankind achieve their true purpose by gaining their democratic freedom. This assumption, further, can only hold as long as the audience accept the premise that the cases of all the named countries (and probably the unnamed, too, because easy arithmetic reveals that China alone must account for major proportion of thus identified half) represent at some fundamental level only variations — and insignificant at that — of a single category of unfreedom/ undemocracy. The only thing left to do for countries in this category is to shuffle in the end into the previously known and pre-established forms of social order and political process implied under this extraordinarily fatalistic definition of democracy.
Such strong notion of democracy as a converging point of a unidirectional evolutionary movement of respective histories needs to rest on very firm moral and indeed eschatological grounds. These are commonly provided by the exalted category of "the people", vaguely assumed to be the ultimate locus of good intentions and overwhelming desire for peace and freedom. Thus it is "the great people of Egypt" who have voted in a multi-party presidential election, but it is "the government of Iran" who defy international community in insisting on pursuing the nuclear programme. On this premise it cannot conceivably be a "nation" or a "people" who belong to the wrong camp, only their corrupt governments or regimes. This postulates another crucial dualistic distinction between, on the one hand, the good and innocent "nations/ peoples" of the world—of which some are unfortunate enough to be as yet "held hostage" by totalitarian regimes—and, on the other hand, those "regimes" (vaguely implying isolated handfuls of unscrupulous power-thirsty thugs). Thus "Iran, a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people," is set against that "regime" which harbours illegal nuclear designs and sponsors terrorism, against that "Iranian government" which "defies the world".
While such formulaic scheme may have reasonably good explanatory value for understanding, for example, the experience of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe under regimes sustained by regional Soviet hegemony, it remains less than clear that the rhetoric and descriptive categories adapted to the conditions in those Soviet totalitarian satellite states can be successfully applied to such widely diverging circumstances as those of today's China, Iran or Zimbabwe. It is an established truism today that if the great people of Egypt, or Saudi Arabia for that matter, were entirely free to choose a political representation of their liking, the outcome would very likely be the rule of someone akin to the Muslim Brotherhood, another "regime" less than enthusiastic for the self-appointed western democratic ideal and less than friendly to the "people" of North American states, repeating the pattern of the recent elections in the Palestinian autonomy. The concession the presidential speech makes to that fact—admitting that "democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens"—if carried to its implications, would undermine the dualistic structure on which its logic stands.
This logic is remotely resonant of the Kantian hope that liberal democracies do not wage wars against each other. However, pushed to above described extremes, this logic all but conceptually rules out the possibility of genuine conflicts between autonomous and self-determined ethnic and political communities, which, though, stubbornly refuse to quit the stage of history. Such logic therefore leaves us conceptually with no clue to comprehending violence between Hutu a Tutzi tribes of Rwanda, or between Bosnian nationalities and religions, and helps little with understanding today's Iraq and its "insurgency". Conflicts between freely self-determined communities, between well-meaning peoples are not on these terms meant to occur, but the reality is unlikely to comply.
The source of current high tensions in the area of Far East lies not in a dichotomy between free and democratic governments of, say, Japan and South Korea, and the non-democratic ones of China and North Korea. Rather, we see a series of controversies between political representations on every side carried by as well as in turn manipulating popular emotions, where the parties to any particular conflict are not necessarily aligned along border lines demarcating free and democratic countries and the un-free and un-democratic ones. A democratic Korea may find common cause with an un-democratic China in a common grudge against a democratic Japan; and everyone in the region, regardless of their form of government, ultimately perceives the eerily incomprehensible North Korean rule as a positive liability. The material feeding the respective tensions consists in unresolved issues of history, problems of energy supplies, of regional hegemony, but hardly at all in presence or absence of democratic governance or in different levels of freedom of political participation. The sharp rhetorical juxtaposition of democratic and un-democratic political arrangements arguably contributes little to understanding the happenings in this area at this point in its history and if insisted upon too rigidly, it probably blurs vision.
The purpose of the above remarks is not to subject to shattering criticism the phrasing of a particular speech of a particular western political representative. After all, as long as a speech of this sort seeks to lay out a persuasive vision, it can only be written and delivered while relying on a number of shared tacit assumptions about the nature of man and our polities which we find natural or at least acceptable enough to understand what the talk is about. On the contrary, it is to render such premises explicit and non-self-evident again what requires the sort of clumsy and contorted verbal effort of the preceding lines. However, the hunch is that we may need finer and non-dualist scales with more precise conceptual distinctions in order to ultimately cope better with the situations arising in contemporary world. Part of such fine-tuning might be relieving the term of democracy of at least part of its awesome normative load. The term might be again applied more usefully and practicably if it were not burdened with excessively high expectations.
[mid-air over Yekaterinburg midway between Seoul and Prague]
Posted by david at 02:40 AM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2006
Preliminary Reflections on a Busy Intersection
‘My talent is scribbling; and I the readier fell into this freedom, as I found delight in writing...’
Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson
Overlooking the Hachiko crossroads at Tokyo's noisy and packed Shibuya. The scramble intersection on an otherwise quiet hazy afternoon of early spring. The light changes and the immense crowds throng the street crossing in all directions.
Each of the pedestrian passers-by is presumed to possess a purpose and life-plan of his or her own as they cross each other's paths. It is mind-boggling enough to try and imagine all the thoughts and emotions going on down there at a single moment. But even harder to grasp intuitively is the notion that all these – all the individual wills, perceptions, and pursuits of respective happiness – are at some level of imagination and practice connected into a whole of a political society, with an ascertainable will of its own; the people with whom – the public story of our self-understanding claims – lies the ultimate sovereignty.
At moments like these it is difficult to conceive how such notion might in any way represent an intuitive empirical description of the arrangement of our public affairs and of the processes of decision-making. How on earth have we come to find it appropriate and acceptable to evoke terms of, say, democracy, representation, equal rights, freedom of the individual, voluntary choice, to describe what we are for?
The sheer curiosity concerning questions like this is what spurs me on to such enquiry as I have made into the problems of through what processes and under what circumstances we came to use the terms and categories of our public self-understanding and justification. What values can we invoke to render our policies, choices, actions plausible and defensible in the eye of the public other? What language do we have at our disposal to name problems and to propose and advocate solutions to those? And if such public languages and values appear to differ widely between respective societies and cultures, if they differ, indeed, between respective periods of history of a single society like our own, how does one cope with such awareness?
It is at this point that history becomes intimately relevant to the present; that the old layout of Edo becomes palpable under the skin of present-day Tokyo; that the writings of a Comenius, a Hobbes, or a Rousseau inform in their ways what can be spoken about and comprehended in classrooms, parliaments, or newspapers of today's Prague, London, or Geneva.
My concern is with that history of that present. The kind reader is welcome to join in.
Posted by david at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)