Political failure (conversation in Paris)

[I'm writing this on December 20 and 21, but back-dating it to shortly after my and Marie's return from Paris. I hope this won't be too confusing. But I assume that in reality nobody is reading this blog anyway, so why not?]

Here was another of our rare discussions of politics. Like this one back in January (which might have been the most recent one before this), it was fueled by alcohol. After exploring the heart of Paris during Day 3, Marie and I had dinner in an Italian restaurant near our hotel and split a bottle of wine. Actually we split a bottle of wine most evenings, but somehow this time I let it get the better of me.

[I should add that my notes for the day were jotted down briefly just before we went to bed, so they are rather scattered. I will do my best to draw them into a coherent narrative, but please be charitable.]

Left and right

Jean IV, Count of Paris

Apparently the first hint of political content in the discussion—at any rate the first note that I wrote down later—had to do with the definitions of the familiar political labels "Left" and "Right." I'm pretty sure that the occasion of this discussion was our visit to the Conciergerie, where nearly the whole display was about the French Revolution (where the terms "Left" and "Right" originated.). Of course in the United States these are routinely used as epithets for the major political parties, meaning "Democratic" and "Republican" respectively. But I remarked that in France the political spectrum is a lot wider than it is in America. On the Left, there are Frenchmen who still honestly call themselves Communists; that puts them farther Left than any American in public life. On the Right, there are Frenchmen who unironically identify as Monarchists; that puts them farther Right than any American except the late Florence King.

So far, so good. This was purely objective exposition. Then I went on. 

The traditional definitions of Left and Right have to do with attitudes towards social privilege or equality. But I mentioned someone I had seen recently (probably on Twitter!) who proposed an entirely different definition, whereby the Left was identified as the Party of Ideas, and the Right as the Party of Experience. Right away, Marie picked up on the obvious implication of this definition for American politics: she said, "Well if that's true then the Democrats must belong to the Right and the Republicans to the Left. Because the Democrats are trying to preserve what has been proven to work ever since the New Deal, while the Republicans are trying to replace it with a bunch of unproven ideology."

Fair enough. And of course this redefinition applies as well even if you look at the old class-based definitions of Left and Right. It is by now a commonplace in Internet discussions that the Democrats now represent the interests of the urban Professional Managerial Class, while the Republicans have become the party of rural interests. (The urban underclass, which used to vote Democratic with absolute reliability, seems at the moment to be in play between the two parties … and drifting Republican.)

I don't remember whether I explained this class-based point to Marie, nor what her reaction was if I did. I think she may have replied with fears based on her perceiving a threat of authoritarianism from the American Right, and particularly from Donald Trump.* If so, I probably replied that I didn't expect a right-wing coup in America; and that in any event, even if there were one, most people would be unmolested simply because nobody but Mao Zedong and Pol Pot has ever tried to purge his country's entire population. (In saying this, I would have been channeling Manoel Duarte de Aguiar, from the last section of this post last January.) We probably talked about the comparative virtues of public protest—"speaking truth to power"—or private accommodation. And the next step that I captured in my notes was that I told her about a conversation I had had many years before about Augusto Pinochet.

Augusto Pinochet and Milton Friedman

Speaking truth to power

Back in the early 2000's—fifteen or even twenty years ago—I was part of an Internet discussion group that argued philosophical topics. One day, someone brought up the question whether it was ethical for Milton Friedman to visit Pinochet (as he did in 1975) and give him economic advice. One list member argued that "he [Friedman] damn well should have [spent the meeting chastising the General].  He had the undivided attention of a brutal and ruthless dictator for 45 minutes.  Why not use it?  He could have said something like:  I am delighted you are putting my theories into practice....  But I wish that you would stop torturing, murdering and disappearing your opponents; it gives me and my theories a bad name.  [And why not speak out?  After all, …]  Milton was in no danger of being 'disappeared'.  But Milton said no such thing. Speaking truth to power was not what he was about."

My response at the time was an early version of the kind of account that I gave in this post here ("Moral reasoning from nature," 2020-04-11) in the section about Hitler and Stalin and Caligula. Specifically, I said, "if Mr. Friedman had indeed said exactly those things to Gen. Pinochet, what would he have accomplished? …. It is certainly true that Gen. Pinochet already knew that torture and murder and kidnapping are evil, and whatever twisted mental gymnastics he was already using to justify them to his own conscience would certainly have withstood his hearing the same thing from Mr. Friedman. (In other words, while I do not say that Gen. Pinochet was right to do any of the things he did, I am quite certain that he told himself he was right.…) Therefore if Mr. Friedman had taken the 45 minutes to deliver that kind of message, it would have had as much effect as to spend the time explaining the message to a brick wall. And what's the point of that?"

In other words: my justification for pursuing private accommodation over public protest is that public protest fails most of the time, and the protestors are shot. It gives you a warm, interior glow because you feel like you accomplished something important, while at the same time you actually accomplished nothing whatever. Accommodation allows you to achieve the limited good that is in your power, while the grand public gesture forgoes the limited good in reaching for the greatest good … but then mostly fails to achieve the greatest good (and thus achieves no good at all). There are exceptions, of course; but in general I don't expect to be dropped into the middle of world-historical events.  

Victory or death

Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa,
Emir (now King) of Bahrain

Marie was, to put it gently, not well impressed with anything that I said on this point. From her perspective, associating with evildoers is generally indistinguishable from cozying up to them; and cozying up to evildoers is wrong. People who do wrong things are thereby wrongdoers in their own right. It's not rocket science. And therefore it is up to us to back away from evildoers: to denounce and protest when we can, but in all events to disengage from them and refuse to accommodate them.

Then abruptly she brought up a woman for whom I regularly do some professional writing in real life—unpaid, alas, but I guess maybe it gives me exposure. (sigh) Marie explained that after she found out I was writing for this woman, she checked her website and found that the woman has done business consulting for the Emir (now King) of Bahrain. OK, I said. I guess I probably knew that. So what? Marie went on to explain that the King of Bahrain has a dismal record on human rights. So if this woman has consulted with the King to teach him ways to oppress his people more efficiently, or if she has implemented employee-morale programs so that his soldiers get greater job satisfaction out of torturing prisoners, then she herself is complicit in these crimes. And, by implication (though Marie didn't quite spell out the question in words) just why the hell am I writing for her?

As I write this account today (nearly seven weeks after the conversation took place), I can think of several ways I could have started a response. Where, for example, did Marie get the idea that this woman implemented employee-satisfaction programs for torturers? Did it say so on her website? I bet not. Had Marie actually checked the case studies on the website for details about what the work in Bahrain included, or was she just reacting with disgust** that anyone would sully themselves by associating with HM the King?

"Victory or Death": not a slogan
I can ever support

But I didn't think of any of these answers in the moment, or at any rate I couldn't see a way to give them traction. So I took a different approach. First, I identified Marie's perspective as an idealistic one, the kind of perspective that believes in "VICTORY OR DEATH." And then I went on to say that I can't support that perspective. Partly this is because of the argument I made above, that it is better to do the little good which is within your power than to waste yourself in a grand geste that ultimately sputters out in futility. But there is more. When I look at the options that are open to me in particular, I have to recognize that I am no salesman. I am no great orator. I am no inspiring leader. My expectation is that—outside the narrow circles of my technical specialty—I won't be listened to. 

If I pick up a megaphone to excoriate evildoers and to speak Truth to Power … Power will get bored and fall asleep.

What I explained to Marie is that my life and experience are so far outside those of the rest of the world that if I were ever to join a political movement—it would lose!

Maybe that's because my support would hinder it, but I'm probably not that important. More likely is that I see things differently-enough from other people that I'm only going to be attracted by movements that have not a snowball's chance in Hell of succeeding.

Anyway, the consequence is that the exciting forms of political engagement are simply not available to me. If the only movements that I can join are those destined to lose, then I will do better for myself and others to stay out of political movements altogether, and to try instead to be a good neighbor, a good friend, a good son, a good brother … even a good father, if I ever get the chance again. 

Marie was clearly unnerved by the idea that my support means losing. She smiled thinly and then asked, "So I guess this means that if you agree with me politically, I can be glad you agree; and if you disagree with me, I can be glad that I'm going to win. Is that right?" I said Yes.

Why I'm smarter than Heidegger

As we finished dinner and started walking back to our hotel, I told her one more story about political engagement—and specifically about the political engagement of intellectuals.***

Martin Heidegger wearing Nazi emblems

In the first half of the twentieth century, the greatest philosopher in Europe was unquestionably Martin Heidegger. Even thinkers who deplored or feared his influence agreed that his depth was unmatched.**** And when Adolf Hitler came to power, straightaway Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. When he was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, his inaugural speech ("Rektoratsrede") was an invocation of the students' struggle—arising out of blood and soil—in the national service. He ended the speech with "Heil Hitler!"

Heidegger's engagement with Nazism didn't end well, and not only because Germany lost the War. While the depth of his commitment has been debated ever since, it certainly appears that Heidegger wanted to become the official philosopher of Nazism. He could see with his own eyes that the movement was led by simpletons and idiots—philosophically speaking, at any rate—and he hoped that his own deep metaphysical thought could lift Nazism up so that it would no longer be the merely stupid and brutal ideology that it was at the outset. He was wrong, in at least two ways. First, it is unlikely that anything could have refined or redeemed Nazism without repudiating some of its central tenets. Second, there were other aspirants for the role of Party Philosopher (Alfred Rosenberg, in particular) whom Heidegger was unable to outmaneuver. He resigned his post as Rector a year later, to return to teaching. One of his colleagues quipped, "Back from Syracuse?" 

To my mind, Heidegger's embarrassing and abortive career as Rector sums up exactly what we should expect when intellectuals engage with politics: first, that they will be bad at it; and second, that they will totally misunderstand what is going on. Therefore it is better all around just to stay the Hell away. Leave the job to people whose minds have not been addled by too much deep thinking.

In other words, I'm claiming to be smarter than Heidegger, because I know enough to stay out of politics and he obviously didn't. But we all know that Heidegger was brilliant. He was a very smart man. What allows me to be smarter than he was? Is it just that I was born later, so I have his example to learn from? Am I "standing on the shoulders of giants"?

Maybe, but there is more to it. I can see two distinct but related advantages that I have over Heidegger. Both of them stem from my abandonment of an academic career, or (in other words) from having made a career "in the real world."

1. Organizations    

It so happens that because of the kind of work I do (and never mind the details for now), I have come to a pretty good understanding of how organizations work. This means I am not likely to be misled by Grand Theories. Organizations follow their own rules—I mean "rules" that are inherent in the nature of organizations as such, rules that are programmed at (so to speak) a "biological" level, not rules that are consciously articulated in words. Other people have had this insight before me:

• The German-Italian sociologist Robert Michels identified the fundamentally oligarchical nature of all organizations ("Who says organization, says oligarchy."). He also saw that organizations always operate to preserve and grow themselves, regardless what their stated goals might be (and even in opposition to those stated goals).
• In his philosophical novel Lila, Robert Pirsig identifies social groups (including whole societies) as organic beings composed of humans, in the same way that humans are composed of cells. He points out that you cannot understand a single human by understanding all the cells which make up his body; and in the same way, you cannot penetrate the mind of a society by interrogating the people who live in it. He characterizes New York City, in particular, as "the Giant."
• In a blog post from 2010, Charlie Stross calls corporations "hive organisms"—"non-human entities with non-human goals"—and compares their proliferation to an "alien invasion."

But the result is that I don't expect any organization anywhere to care tuppence about my profound insights into the world. Profound insights plus five dollars will get me a cup of coffee, and that's about it. 

2. Being wrong

I've also had a lot of experience with Being Wrong. Practically my entire marriage was one long exercise in the practice of Being Wrong. I looked for a post to link and found plenty that were almost right, but focused on something slightly different instead. But maybe this (from ten years ago) is the cleanest and simplest one to reference.

Of course, my marriage would have taught me a lot of lessons regardless where my career had been. But one of the benefits of a non-academic career is that there were so many times that I was Wrong in the workplace too. If I'd stayed in universities, I actually think this would have happened less often, or less dramatically. Academic politeness and protocol would have blunted the edge of some of the corrections I would have faced. Also, I'm good at learning enough details to become a technical expert about something, so there would have been a lot of times—inside the narrow confines of my field—when I simply wouldn't have been wrong! And while yes, that invulnerability would have been limited to discussions about the factual details of my field, on the other hand as an academic I would have been able to spend an awful lot of my time inside those exact boundaries! 

By contrast, having to start over in … one, … two, … no … at least three different careers before I finally found my niche helped keep me from getting a swelled head about All the Stuff I Know. It was consistently humbling; but in retrospect I also see it as a kind of privilege that Heidegger never enjoyed. And I do believe it taught me a kind of humility and willingness to concede that he seems never to have learned.*****

Those are the things I tried to explain to Marie over dinner on Day 3, and as we walked from the restaurant back to our hotel. She didn't really like any of it. Finally I got her to laugh by making a joke about our plans for the next day.

But I don't really think I'm wrong.   

__________

* Marie—like Debbie—believes that Trump is going to make himself a dictator if he wins the next election. I think this claim is provably false, because an aspiring dictator would have made the move in his first term and not risked another election. But I try to be gentle when I discuss it, and avoid directly contradicting either of them.   

** Jonathan Haidt has proposed, in his book The Righteous Mind, that moral judgments have at least six aspects or dimensions to them: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, purity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. And his initial presentation of the material states clearly that people who are strongly motivated by a desire for purity (which he sometimes calls "sanctity") are politically conservative. So I find it funny that so much moral reasoning from the Left these days focuses on preserving one's purity and moral cleanliness, and on shunning the kind of pollution or miasma that comes when you dine with publicans and sinners. 

*** I have probably mentioned before (but I don't remember where) that I am very suspicious of intellectuals in politics. I know from experience how easy it is to cook up a Grand Theory That Explains Everything, and to persuade other intellectuals that it is the Truth. But of course it is typically no such thing; so if you try to make big plans based on your Grand Theory, everything goes to Hell. The only American President with a Ph.D. and an academic career was Woodrow Wilson, who certainly suffered from Grand-Theory-osis. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama each put in a stint as law professor, but they hardly made academic careers: also they are close enough in recent memory that opinions of them are likely to be colored by party feeling and therefore may differ on how far this criticism applies to them. Henry Kissinger was an academic And of course the following story about Martin Heidegger makes the same point eloquently. 

**** In his 1956 address "Existentialism," Leo Strauss—who understood earlier than most the profound danger in Heidegger's embrace of Nazism—wrote as follows: "The same effect which Heidegger had in the late twenties and early thirties in Germany, he had very soon in continental Europe as a whole. There is no longer in existence a philosophic position apart from neo-Thomism and Marxism crude or refined. All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this but I for one cannot bring myself to cling to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate. I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism. Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the great trouble, the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger." 

***** Wikipedia says: "After 1945, Heidegger never published anything about the Holocaust or the extermination camps, and made one sole verbal mention of them, in 1949, whose meaning is disputed among scholars. Heidegger never apologized for anything and is only known to have expressed regret once, privately, when he described his rectorship and the related political engagement as 'the greatest stupidity of his life' ('die größte Dummheit seines Lebens')."  Wikipedia, "Martin Heidegger and Nazism," copied on 2023-12-21.

I, on the other hand, say: "Don't explain -- just apologize!"

It's unseemly to crow over someone both dead and disgraced, but I think the difference matters.