Private Goods and Love, Human and Divine

I was thinking today about the fact that it's precisely the lesser nature of private goods as opposed to common goods that makes them uniquely precious and meaningful expressions of love.

For the unaware, the distinction between common and private goods has nothing to do with private property or communism or anything like that, but is a central categorization in ancient and Medieval philosophy of the good things that can be given and received and enjoyed. A private good is any good that is diminished in being shared with another. The classic examples are material goods like food, resources, etc. If I bake a pie, my giving you pie means there is less pie for me to enjoy. If my people gives food or water or money or oil or gold to yours, there is less for us to use. Common goods, in contrast, are goods that are not diminished in being shared. This category is typically understood with reference to intellectual goods, political and social goods, and spiritual goods. If I know something, the fact that you also know it in no possible sense diminishes my knowledge. In a truer sense, there are common goods that can *only* be enjoyed in common with another person or persons. I cannot enjoy the good of marriage alone, nor the good of political community. St. Augustine argues that God is a good that can only be had in common with others, that must be shared with others if we are to possess it--and, going even farther, that our possession and enjoyment of God, the Trinitarian God who is love, is not only not diminished, but actually increased the more we give him away, and the more we share him in common with others.

In a straightforward sense, then, common goods are simply superior to private goods, and superior precisely in their connection to relation and therefore to love, human and divine. Love is a common good, and in a sense the exemplar for all other common goods.

Still, it occurred to me today that it is also precisely the lesser nature of private goods that allows them, in actual human life, to often express and create love in a uniquely powerful way. The very fact that there is a limited amount of them, that they are diminished when they are shared, makes it all the more precious when they *are* shared, when they are given. Giving knowledge, etc, doesn't diminish my enjoyment of it, but increases it--but then, so often "giving knowledge" can be just a way to make myself feel important for having knowledge, or for giving it, knowing full well that I lose nothing in so doing.

Giving food, or money, when there is only so much of it, when the fact that I give it to you means there is less of it for me--it is this which, in human life, both expresses and ensures the reality of love, its truthfulness, even its proper commonality. Merely giving common goods does not necessarily mean that I am not treating love itself as a private good, enjoyed alone and diminished by giving. To give another something of which there is a limited amount is to express, more than anything else, the reality, essential to love, that my good, the good of love, is found precisely in our relation, that their good is in fact, to this extent, simply my good. It expresses something of love, human and divine, that would remain unexpressed if we only had common goods to share with one another. As the Gospel would have it, to give only out of and in abundance does not express love so much, or in the same way, as to give out of poverty.

And then I was thinking about the various private goods we can give or receive, and it occurred to me that in this life, perhaps the most limited good of all is time itself. In a limited life, bounded by birth and death, devoting a moment of time to a particular person, as opposed to any other purpose at all, is probably the most meaningful thing that can be given, precisely because it is so limited, because we are so limited within it. Life is very short, and human capacities are very small. I can only do so much in a moment, or an hour, or a lifetime--in a larger sense, not very much at all. To give *that* to another is to express, more than almost anything else, the reality of love as a good of relation, as a good found simply in willing the good of the other.

And then I began to think about how when God wanted to express the infinity of his love, the perfect love of the Holy Trinity, he did it by becoming man, by becoming a limited creature, with a limited human reason and will, and a lifetime of moments. Catholic tradition is replete with reflections on the life and the Cross of Christ, on each day and hour and moment spent with Mary and Joseph and his disciples and others, on each wound and each drop of blood, given by him to each and every one of us, individually and together. When he gave these things to us, limited goods exhausted in the giving, it cost him everything, including his life. When he gives himself to us in the Eucharist, it is precisely as food, broken and shared and diminished and consumed. This is how God chooses to express his own infinite and eternal love.

Anyway, it's worth a thought.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Or, There Are Weasels Under the Coffee Table: Or, Is 19th Century Liberal Imperialistic Utopianism Not All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Before I get finally and totally buried in the depths of the Dissertating Lifestyle, I present to you, my dear, long-suffering readers, the long-promised, oft-longed-for Deep Space Nine Mega-Post. This is my favorite of the Star Trek series, and so I have, as you might imagine, a fair bit to say.

American National Politics and the Justice Casino

American national politics makes more sense when you realize that, while shouting about urgent justice issues is an important element in how American national politicians get people to vote for them, American politics are in no way actually about justice.

As matters stand now, giving out "Justice party-favors" is an essential element in the tit-for-tat of economic-managerial, interest-based coalition politics, but these party-favors bear little or no relationship with any consistent theory of justice, or even the most gradualist, incrementalist idea of how to achieve it. They correspond, rather, to a predominant theory and practice of politics as a system of managing clashing group self-interests through an a-moral exchange of favors and patronage mediated by electoral machinery. Some of these favors are purely self-interested, i.e. they represent direct benefits for the group itself; some represent concessions to that group's purported theory of justice or at least their commitment to a particular justice-issue. From the standpoint of the larger political system, though, there is little fundamental difference between the two.

When you vote for a political party based on a justice-issue, you're essentially gambling that your interest-group will receive, in exchange for its support, political favors that will in some indirect way translate into a tangible but incremental movement towards justice as you see it. This isn't necessarily irrational, since there's always the chance in our political system that your interest-group really will win big (the Supreme Court being the big unpredictable slot machine that occasionally gives crazy Jackpots in the larger Casino of American political life)--but what you're doing when you direct your pursuit of justice towards national politics is still essentially gambling, not working toward justice in any clear, rational manner.

The real issue with this system, though, is not that such gambling occurs, but rather how much sheer energy is directed towards converting every single justice-issue, however urgent or life-and-death, into a ready-made political interest group ready to play long games of cards with the big boys, and what effects this has in the long run on those causes and the societal conceptualization of justice in general. A people trained to see justice, in the end, as a set of interchangeable tokens in a game of Blackjack is going to find itself relating to justice in a manner fundamentally incompatible with any philosophical or moral theory of justice since Plato, and therefore with a fundamentally incompatible idea of politics as well.

Whether this justice and this politics is remotely coherent in itself, or remotely able to *actually* manage the clashing interests of different interest groups and thereby prevent political division and violence, is another question entirely, though one our political system seems to be working very hard to put to the test at the moment. We shall see.

In Defense of the Awful, Terrible, No-Good Terrifying Alienated Surrealism of the First Two Seasons of Star Trek the Next Generation

Alright, stop the presses: I want to write something in defense of the first two seasons of TNG.

Now, before everyone stones me through the Internet (hundreds upon hundreds of virtual packets of communal sacred violence winging their way through the ether(net) to end the Contagion and reestablish order in society), allow me to explain exactly what I mean, and also what I don't mean.

Most notably, I do not mean that the first two season's of TNG (with the exception of a few episodes) are actually good seasons of television, let alone (Waru avertat) well-written seasons of television. For the most part, the dialogue is stilted, the characters unlikeable, the plots bizarre and frequently incoherent, and the overall setting stultifying to most ordinary forms of drama. On all these fronts, the later seasons of TNG are undoubtedly better.

Nevertheless, I have come to think that, when all is said and done, there is something to be said for the prevailing vibe, the portrait of a people and a universe, the cinematic and fictional and science-fictional qualities of Star Trek the Next Generation Seasons 1 and 2. Some of this even emerges out of the otherwise negative qualities of the show--and if I had to use a single word to name the elusive yet omnipresent value offered by these seasons, it would undoubtedly be "surrealism."

Star Trek the Next Generation Seasons 1 and (especially) 2 is, frequently, a glorious tour de force of surrealist entertainment, bordering frequently on horror.

Almost everything about the show, the characters, the plots, serves to reinforce this overriding sense of alienated surrealism 

Imagine: the human race, centuries in the future. A vast, powerful starship travelling through the blackness of space, crewed entirely by men and women in spandex jumpsuits and skirts who talk slowly and blankly and seem to be constantly concealing high levels of tension and mutual hostility. The society they live in, everything we see of it, is stamped with the same strange, sterile vacuousness that they themselves display, buttressed by a fanatical, ideological belief in its own absolute moral perfection.

Nevertheless, all is not well in paradise. All the sexuality displayed by the characters is marked by a bizarre combination of the weirdest kind of 1960s/70s liberationism combined with the weirdest kind of 1960s/70s sexism. Most of the character's backstories seem to feature some kind of tragic violence, especially death or estrangement from parents, as well as romantic relationship dysfunction. A number of the crew members seem to obviously dislike one another, but it can be difficult to pin down, because these dislikes are never expressed aloud, since all the characters interact, even when off-duty, with an odd sort of tense formality, like actors in a highschool production of Shakespeare. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact all of their emotions are being constantly monitored by the alien female psychiatrist in the skin-tight jumpsuit seated next to the Captain on the bridge. Her job, besides monitoring the psychological health of the crew, is to emote in an exaggeration fashion on behalf of the unfathomable the alien entities they encounter, breaking out into uncontrollable expressions of others' terror or horror, sadness or joy, as everyone else stands around and impassively watches her. For leisure, our heroes can make use of the perfect AI-created virtual-reality machine helpfully provided for their amusement, a machine that can display a perfect facsimile of any person or scenario and also has the power to create sentient life. They can also sit around their quarters alone and listen to classical music.

These bizarre people, in this bizarre society, are travelling through space into the unknown. This unknown, it seems, largely consists of unfathomably-powerful superbeings bent on judging or controlling or testing the human race, or at least our heroes. Each one of these superbeings, who have no obvious relationship with one another or any larger cosmic order, has the power to bend the very fabric of reality and accomplish incredible feats--and their own nature, purposes, etc, are rarely if ever clear. One of these intelligences puts the human species on trial to prove its worth, one just experiments on them like rats in a maze, one underwrites the arbitrary laws of a hedonistic society, one constructs a perfect artificial environment based on terrible 20th century pulp novel. Their power and purposes are, for the most part, equally unfathomable.

What the hell even is this? Well, for the most part, it's the result of the combination of a number of behind-the-scenes things that didn't work out very well. For Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was an aspirational fable about a perfect evolved human race proving itself worthy at last, reaching ever-higher levels of existence through technology and scientific exploration, while giving a middle-finger to God and all other judgmental superbeings along the way. This didn't work out very well, though, and no one in particular could make sense of it or turn it into drama, so over time a succession of writers did their best to work with this idea, coming up with any number of one-shot high-concept science fiction storylines. The most competent of these by far was Maurice Hurley, whose fingerprints are all over the second season in particular. What he realized more than just about anyone else was that the Enterprise characters, as mostly blank ciphers of power and knowledge and perfection, really worked best (or at least most dramatically) when their power was challenged by superior power, their knowledge was stretched past its limits, their perfection revealed as a sham. So he wrote a number of stories where just this happens; a superior power acts, and our heroes do not understand how or why, nor can they do anything to overcome it: all they can do is escape or submit, and so survive, for a while. 

"Time Squared," perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is essentially a horror story. There is a power, an intelligence, that appears out of nowhere to threaten the Enterprise with destruction: but our heroes never make any sense out of it, what it is, why it's doing what it's doing, or how they can relate to it. Captain Picard, our arbiter of normal reality, is confronted with another version of himself, seemingly thrown six hours back in time, where he lies on his back, unable to focus on the world around him, but screaming in helpless terror, sure only of the need to repeat the cyclical events that brought him here. Picard, our Picard, is terrified: and in a key scene, he admits that despite all evidence, he recognizes nothing of himself in the person he sees. As if to underscore this, in the plot's pivotal moment, he shoots and kills his future self, then pushes the Enterprise to take a seemingly senseless action--and it works. They are all alive, free: for now, until the another inscrutable higher power makes them the object of its attention. 

"Where Silence Has Lease" is perhaps the most outwardly nasty of the episodes in the first two seasons: a horror story where our heroes are trapped in a starless void by a sinister intelligence who experiments on them like lab rats. In one such "experiment," an illusionary version of the Enterprise appears, that when beamed over to is all fun-house mirrors and illusions: our heroes exit one bridge directly onto another, looking through a door and seeing themselves from behind. Then an Enterprise crewmember dies in screaming agony, curled in a fetal position with his eyes wide and staring. Finally, the intelligence listens to Picard explain the mystery of death to two blank, illusionary versions of Data and Troi (the two strange, alien characters of the crew), and releases them again. Victory--of a sort.

 It is not just our heroes who are vulnerable to the terrifying powers of the universe, however, but their whole (supposedly superior) society. In "Conspiracy," the whole structure of the utopian Federation is infiltrated and taken over, without a shot being fired, by fathomless alien parasites who cannot be understood, cannot be negotiated with, but can only be defeated with brutal violence. The Federation is saved, for the moment. Still, they (and things much worse) are out there, waiting. 

The best of these episodes, and in a sense the climax of the whole theme,  is "Q Who?," Maurice Hurley's tour de force, which introduces the Borg, and makes the point emphatically that the Enterprise crew's ideological insistence on their own evolved perfection is a hollow sham in the face of a universe full of deadly powers they can neither control nor understand. It is, again, essentially a horror story. Q, the infinitely-powerful, mocking, judgmental superbeing, says the Enterprise crew are weak and arrogant, and cannot understand or control the universe as it is; and then he proves the point. Picard must beg, literally on bended knee for the help of this, mocking and judgmental but at least interested and sympathetic, superbeing against the fathomless, mindless power of the Borg. Their friendly superbeing has saved the day for them--this time. But the Borg are coming. 

These are (most of) the good versions of this story. There are bad versions as well, mostly (but not always) where Gene Roddenberry himself is calling the shots. "Royale," which has an interesting premise (fathomless superbeings kidnap a crew of astronauts, accidentally kill most of them, and then create an entire illusionary world based on a shitty novel for the one survivor to live out his life in misery), but which is otherwise a badly-paced mess; "Justice," where a race of child-like hedonistic sex-fiends turns out to be protected by an unfathomably powerful machine-god that nonetheless responds submissively to a moralistic lecture by Jean-Luc Picard;"Hide and Q," where Q is defeated and humiliated by yet another moralistic lecture on the perfection of humanity by the aforementioned Jean-Luc Picard; "The Last Outpost," where an ancient superbeing judges Riker worthy after he recites a line from Sun Tzu; et cetera. 

The benefit of this when it works, though, and even often when it doesn't, is that the strangeness, the surreality, never quite leaves you--and many aspects that might otherwise be considered straight-up "bad" can and do aid in that effect. The characters are written badly, taking on contradictory traits, likes, and dislikes, episode to episode and scene to scene, speaking and reacting in ways that no recognizable human person would do: but then, that helps with the sense of unreality, the sense that these are not human beings, not as we know them. Obvious conflicts among characters exist, but seem to have been deliberately edited out (as they often literally were by Gene Roddenberry's rewriting), or else resolved in the strangest possible ways: but we can treat this, too, as a sign of the dysfunction and alienation of a future society. Episodes are often heavily padded and paced glacially--there are shots featuring Captain Picard sitting on the bridge staring off into space and doing nothing; when an action is suggested, it is discussed in much more detail than is necessary; we watch in real time as mundane technological tasks are carried out; et cetera. But this, in a sense, is helpful; we can watch the unreality and strangeness of these characters and their world play out, and have time to focus on it, not merely on the shiny colorful plots and their supposed sense of excitement.

Whatever sense of the world, of Star Trek, we get from these seasons is quite far away from the bright, colorful character action-adventure of the contemporaneous original-cast Star Trek film series; and even from the pulpier, weirder world of TOS (which had its own share of superbeings). This is, genetically and dramatically, an idea of Star Trek that sits the closest, perhaps, to that of Star Trek the Motion Picture: an evolved humanity, composed of blank, unpleasant careerists, makes surreal, trippy contact with beings yet farther along the terrifying path of evolution, with vast intelligence and unfathomable power. A step beyond, and this is an idea of science fiction drawn in large part from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's distancing parable about contemptibly small and petty evolved apes forcibly transformed by an unfathomable alien intelligence toward an isolated, distanced transcendence. Beyond that, in turn, this vision of Star Trek stands a lot more closely to the world of '60s and '70s sci-fi, The Twilight Zone, Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke: stories about ideas, about the alienation of man in technological society, very often edging into outright horror.

And isn't there something about all this quite a bit more relevant, in our particular alienated, technological society, than the warm family and political drama of later TNG? The late-TNG and beyond Federation may be less of a utopia, but it is undoubtedly a much nicer place. In DS9, we eventually find, genetic engineering and experimentation is strictly banned--but in TNG Season 2, the Federation itself is carrying on such experiments, and accidentally creating deadly plagues in the bargain; and there is talk of conspiracy at the highest levels of Starfleet...

Later TNG largely replaced all this with stories about recognizably human characters existing in community, and then about politics and drama on a more human scale: cold wars and civil wars and family feuds and coups. This was executed a lot better than anything in the first two seasons of TNG, was a lot more interesting and thought-provoking and even meaningful, most of the time. Because of this it's easy to see the first two seasons as little more than an embryonic version of what was to come, picking out the elements that are the same rather than focusing on the differences--or just dismissing these two seasons altogether. The point of this blog post, though, is that it's worthwhile, also, to acknowledge that if a lot was gained, still something was lost in that transition as well. The first and even more so the second season of TNG were in many ways a recipe for a totally different show, a totally different vision of science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular. A better one? No. But one with an attraction all its own.

So: even if we (reasonably) decide to skip right over the first two seasons of TNG, let's acknowledge, for just a moment, the true surreality, the alienation, the horror, presented all too often in these episodes. Sometimes it is merely laughable, shoddy, obviously fake--but every once in a while, it becomes something more: genuinely disturbing. 

Anxious men in purple spandex sit alone in their padded rooms listening to Mozart, while outside in the darkness and silence limitless intelligences do unimaginable things for reasons no one can fathom--and watch, and judge.

Who can say why anything happens in such a world? Who can say what it means to be a human being in such a society? Causation has broken down, as have ordinary ideas of character and personhood. All there is to do is keep watching the alienated technological patients continuing to travel space, continuing to (hopefully) survive each encounter with their terrifying alienated universe.

Caveat spectator.

Note: if this interests you, I wrote a much longer & more comprehensive piece on TNG a few years ago which can be found here, as well as a shorter piece reviewing a few random episodes here. 

Rights Discourses, Theft, and Violence

The trouble with conceiving of politics as solely or predominantly an arena for the assertion and ratification of rights is that it inevitably favors the powerful over the less powerful.

A "right" in its simplest etymological and legal form (ius) is simply a claim of ownership over something (or someone). If this is my piece of pie, I have the "right" to eat it--or throw it away. But then, of course, the question quickly presents itself of just why I have this right, and how it relates to the rights or potential rights of other people. My friend feels a strong desire to eat this same piece of pie; does he have the right to do this? Do I have to respect his right by giving him my piece of pie? As in this example, the assertion of different rights in the real world quite often involves simply logical contradiction--while in many other cases, it merely involves obvious conflict, as there would be if I asserted my right to eat the pie, and my friend asserted his right to use it (temporarily) as a doorstop. Etymologically and philosophically, the only way to adjudicate these sorts of disputes is by reference to justice, which is simply the abstract universal form (iustitia) governing the concrete particular act of claiming or possessing a right (ius). All politics quickly reduces to ethical claims about justice--that is, who has a right to what according to our overall philosophical system, our understanding of the good, private and common, retribution, distribution, etc. This is not necessarily easy in each practical instance, nor is it intended to be.

Contemporary politics is largely an attempt to have rights without justice--and implicit in this, or often explicit, is the idea that rights ultimately depend, not on a rational, universal form of justice, but simply on law conceived of as a purely positive assertion of the State or some purely formal legal or contractual procedure. Yet if politics is purely about asserting rights and getting those rights ratified by the State or some other procedural machinery, it seems fairly obvious that the rights that will in fact be ratified will be those of the people who in fact possess the political power or expertise in manipulating contractual or other procedural machinery to have their rights ratified and those of others denied. If the definitions so far are correct, this claim is more or less tautological.

More fundamentally, the use of force to assert a right to something (or someone) to which one has no actual right is the most straightforward definition of theft (and violence) there is. Yet if a right is nothing other than a claim on something or someone, and if the validity of each and every right ultimately derives merely from the fiat of the State or another purely formal machinery, it's difficult to see how this does not, in the end, simply reduce right to force, or at least a sublimated or redirected form of force.

Under such a system, I assert "my" rights, and am met in return with my neighbor's assertion of his conflicting or even contradictory rights. What adjudicates between our two claims is not, in fact, any universal rational principle, but merely the relative power or ability of us both in relation to political power and/or the machinery of legal or contractual power and enforcement.

If I steal my neighbor's farm by force, and then have that theft ratified by a legal authority, have I violated any principle of politics? What if I passed the law first, and then stole the farm? This is not a fanciful example, but is in fact a straightforward description of the English Enclosure Laws. If I kill my neighbor, but then justify it by the claim that he was violating my right to privacy (or property, or autonomy, or security, or subsistence, or self-actualization, or national identity, or), and have that legally ratified, have I committed violence? How would we know?

It should be straightforwardly obvious that the rights in turn asserted by different groups and different "sides" in our current political discourse are in conflict or even contradictory to one another. The question, then, is whether it is possible, absent a robust philosophical idea of the good and justice, for these claims to be adjudicated in any way that does not ultimately reduce to force. Another question is to what degree it is possible for our political system, inasmuch as it is founded on purely formal adjudication of contradictory claims, to continue to successfully sublimate or redirect the direct, private use of force among these different parties.

In any event, though, my objection to modern rights discourse is not just practical, but more basic and philosophical. A political system that consists predominantly of the assertion & counter-assertion of rights & their purely formal ratification by the state or other procedural machinery is inevitably going to be one in which theft and violence (philosophically speaking) are both encouraged and frequently approved, and where the powerful dominate the powerless with little fear of retribution. This is my fundamental objection.

On the Zizek/Peterson Debate

I really think that the analysis of figures like Zizek, Peterson, and other popular contemporary mass-media thinkers and rabble-rousers depends upon seeing them to a large extent as a further evolution of Protestant sectarianism, following very much in the line of people like Emanuel Swedenborg or Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy. Judged by that standard, however, they fall rather far short.

It's incredibly frustrating and almost subliminally annoying to me that both Zizek and Jordan Peterson explicitly see themselves as in some sense Christian, both rely on the content and social prestige and glamour of Christianity for their interest and appeal, and at the heart of both of their proposals for society and what they both openly call "redemption" are two self-constructed, supposedly more universalizing and modern versions of Christianity--and then both of their replacement versions of Christianity, inasmuch as they actually state them, could not be more shallow and boring if they tried. Many Christian heresies are a lot of fun! Many are quite compelling!

Peterson's "Christianity means the individual is sovereign and should try to pursue individual moral excellence in balance with social altruism" is just 19th century Liberal Protestantism without any of the fun parts, and Zizek's "Christ died so we could escape God the tyrannical father figure and pursue our paths in freedom and struggle," while it gets points for zaniness, is pretty standard "freshman philosophy student reading Nietzsche for the first time" stuff, and is rightly of very little interest even to most devoted Zizekians.

However popular Peterson and/or Zizek and their random commentaries on society get, the reality is their versions of Christianity will never gain any kind of social traction, and will never have the tangible social impact even of the most deracinated Liberal Protestant church, which at least manages to still function stably as an institution. The legacy of the 18th to early 20th century explosion of Protestant sectarianism that created such movements as the Shakers, the Swedenborgians, the Mormons, Christian Science, and others (including the distant forebears of modern American Evangelicism) is still very much with us, not only because their "modern, more universal" versions of Christianity were rather more interesting in content, but also because they actually did things and built things, some of which endure to this day.

That neither Peterson or Zizek shows any interest in actually building anything is in large part, I think, the result of the modern mass media landscape, which grants a very illusory form of fame and attention without any need to engage socially or build institutions or even create particularly interesting or novel sets of ideas. Zizek and Peterson, for all their bluster, function as mass media figures, like your average Twitch streamer, and little or nothing else. This is how their power and influence and ideas are effected in the real world. It's thus very hard for me to imagine most people remembering Zizek's or Peterson's systems, no matter how much they talk or how many people watch their Youtube videos. All this gives a tinge of futility and exhaustion and despair to everything I read or hear by them that is really rather depressing.

We either need better Christian heretics, or we need people to admit that Christianity itself, not to say Catholicism, actually still exists and functions just fine in the modern world, and that, while it clearly and manifestly can still function as a basis for personal and social and political life and the building and reforming of communities and institutions, the new updated versions of Christianity proposed by abstracted mass-media stars can't and don't.