Column 05/17/2023: Varieties of Leftism

Varieties of Leftism

I recently finished a book on the French Syndicalist movement; around the same time, I have been reading "Distributist" columns from G.K. Chesterton as well as newspaper columns from the founder of so-called "Guild Socialism," A.J. Penty. All of this reflects a longstanding interest in what I would call the "non-Marxist Left"--or rather more precisely the "non-Marxist-Leninist Left," or even more precisely the history of various labor and anti-capitalist movements in the 19th and early 20th century, especially those that either preceded or avoided the final reduction of Leftism into Fabian-style democratic socialism and Soviet state socialism.

There are a lot of reasons I find these movements interesting: but the main one is that I think that there are many useful things to be learned from them about modernity, modern economics and society, and where to go from here. If the tendency of the Cold War was to reduce political and economic issues into an ideological, militarist, institutional binary, the tendency of the contemporary Internet age is to reduce those same issues to an ever-proliferating array of binary, absolute symbolic conflicts. As Chesterton argued, this is the real danger of competition, war, and conflict in human life: that they tend to make human life far more uniform than its need to be. After all, as Rene Girard pointed out, most conflicts are created precisely because two people are aiming at the same end, seeking the same desirable object. Fundamentally, conflict or competition is always and inevitably destructive of alternatives and diversity and complexity and fundamentally difference itself.

There is hardly a better example of this than Soviet Communism and American Capitalism. Before the Cold War, before the World Wars, the Left or labor and anti-capitalist movement was a vast, complex, feuding array of different fundamental beliefs and tactics: anarchists and syndicalists and distributists and "non-political" unionists and positivists and guild socialists and Fabians arguing against each other and against capitalists alike. Likewise, the European radical Right was a large and feuding array of Catholics and Calvinists and aristocrats and anti-aristocrat populists and monarchists and radical democrats and Nietzscheans and localists and agrarians and anarchists that overlapped significantly with the Left. Thanks to the Cold War, however, practically all these groups were suppressed, not by force, but simply by pressure, subsumed into the single ideological alternatives of "Communism" and "Capitalism." 

When the Cold War ended, alas, and that simple binary itself faded into the mist, Western political life was left as a very limited and very shallow debate among a few different interest groups that agreed with each on other on more or less 99% of political and economic questions, at least 50% of which would been absolutely astounding and shocking to any other society in history. And then that consensus itself fell to pieces, and we find ourselves in our current uncertain times.

Here, though, is the fundamental lesson that historical conflicts about the shape and tenor society have to teach us. As Chesterton argued, human social, political, and economic arrangements are first and foremost a matter of collective human intellect and will and effort: works of ingenuity and craft and creativity that we shape to serve certain purposes and embody certain values. And the truth that human history demonstrates beyond all doubt is that a vast number of possible arrangements are possible and have been considered desirable by different groups of people throughout time--and many, many more are possible in theory, and could be enacted in practice given sufficient will and desire. We are not trapped into a tiny range of political or economic alternatives by "natural" "scientific" forces; we simply find ourselves, for a variety of reasons, in one highly particular social or economic arrangement among many; and if we wished, we could change it. If we have made our bed badly, we can make it over again. 

All of this is another unnecessarily long intro. What I really wanted to do in this post was to offer a sort of syllabus or personality test of Leftism, presenting the main divisions within the tradition over which anti-capitalists once feuded. As I said earlier, "Leftism" is here a terribly imprecise term: the original Left-Right binary was a division created by and centered on the French Revolution and defined with reference to a few particular French institutions. It has since given way to an American political spectrum that is largely a matter of memes on the Internet. As will become clear, many of the fundamental questions involved in historical "Leftism" are as related if not more to questions on the political "Right," and indeed it is extremely difficult to clearly rule out historical "Right-wing" groups from this discourse. I myself prefer the term "anti-capitalist" and/or "radical" for my own beliefs; I have used "Leftism" here simply because it is a more commonly-used and so straightforward term for most people today.

Fundamentally, all the social and intellectual movements of the historical Left were united by some sort of unhappiness with 19th-20th century Western society, and a desire to alter it "radically," that is, in its roots and foundations. They were also united by a discomfort with "capitalism," or that legal and social order in which absolute private ownership over the means of production--land and factories and machines and workers--is allotted largely or entirely on the basis of the possession and use of liquid capital, in such a manner that society is clearly divided between a tiny minority of "owners" and a large mass of "proletariat," workers who sell their labor in exchange for a wage and who labor with the capital-owner's tools and means of production for the profit of the capital-owner. Historically, the emergence of this social order, in tandem with rapid technological change and industrialization, caused over the 19th and 20th centuries without a doubt the largest series of social and communal disruptions in the history of the human race. As the result of these disruptions, numerous groups were brought to fundamentally question their society, its powers, rulers, and underlying principles. 

That being said, this system and society can and could be opposed from any number of angles. And that is what I would like to chronicle here.

In doing so, I have attempted to lay out these divisions deliberately in terms of conflicts between paired positions. It should be noted, however, that these represent not so much binaries as polarities, and do not involve absolute logical contradiction: in most cases, then, there are not simply two binary extremes, but a great deal of potential positions in the middle.

Column 05/10/2023: Why Star Trek Generations is the Best Next Generation Movie: Or, Against the Art of Simulation

Why Star Trek Generations is the Best Next Generation Movie: Or, Against the Art of Simulation

Before I begin this week's post, I would like to offer a formal apology to my Dear Reader for the fact that, of late, this blog has been decidedly academicish in character, featuring posts on such topics as academic theology, theoretical physics, and even (alas alas) identity. To reclaim my status as a Man of the People, therefore, I have decided to return to the thing that this is blog is actually about: Star Trek.

(I have written about Star Trek a lot before, including a whole long series of posts. To find them all, click here.) 

However unfortunately I have to then immediately destroy all my cred as both a populist and a critic by engaging in a spirited praise of the most generally disliked of the Star Trek The Next Generation films: Star Trek Generations.

I will confess: I have always liked this movie, despite or because of its critical and fan shellacking. When I watched it as a kid, I liked it without any particular critical discomfort. As a Youth, beginning to be educated in the narratives and techniques of filmmaking, I came to recognize both the many technical flaws with the film, and the fact that in the Grand Myth of Star Trek it was seen as a Lesser Film, a disappointing murder of the great Kirk leading into the actually Great Film Star Trek First Contact. Now, as a man, I have come full circle to the deep, profound truth underlying my original uncritical liking of the film, and now see it, with deepened sight and far more wisdom, as the best of the TNG films. 

I was confirmed in this belief by a recent visit to my brother and sister-in-law, both of whom are visual artists who have made short films and who together run a glossy art magazine. Neither, it should be said, are Star Trek fans in any conventional sense. My brother grew up with it, but generally views most of the Canon with disdain; my sister-in-law has seen relatively little of it. They are also people who value very much the weird, the bizarre, and the original in art. And they both absolutely loved Star Trek Generations.

I was also spurred to write this by my recent experience watching the modern generations of Star Trek, and in particular Strange New Worlds S1 and Star Trek Picard S3, both of which could be quite fairly characterized as "nostalgia" or "fanservice art" and both of which have been highly praised by both fans and critics--certainly more than poor Star Trek Generations. And in comparing my reactions and thoughts in watching all of these examples in short succession, I began to come to some more general theses on contemporary popular entertainment and why it often leaves me cold.

After all, popular American art has by general agreement reached something of a nadir. The latest Marvel movies have been badly reviewed and disliked by fans; even the Mandalorian S3 has met with a similar reception; Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was a grave disappointment; and so on and so forth. And Star Trek Generations is, truly, a major turning point in the history of franchise filmmaking. The lessons allegedly learned from the critical and fan dislike of this film fundamentally defined all later Star Trek films, and through them franchise filmmaking at large. And those lessons, I firmly believe, were all wrong.

To anyone interested in any of the above, then, I present a series of theses on Why Star Trek Generations is the Best TNG Movie and What We Can Learn From It About How to do Popular Franchise Entertainment and Why A Lot of Recent Stuff Sucks.

Column 05/03/2023: Birthday Reflections on Identity, Time, and God

Birthday Reflections on Identity, Time, and God

[My birthday was this past weekend. This got me thinking about life, time, God, identity, and other such things, which I have often thought about in the past. Here is a crystallization of those thoughts.] 

We live in an age when "identity" has become a sort of universal watchword. It has become so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible. 

As with all terms that define an era, everyone uses it, and what is more, everyone uses it in the same way. It would be tempting to see the term as essentially defining a polarity or difference or societal conflict based on whether it is used positively or negatively. This is incorrect, however. Both the American Left and the American Right attack their enemies as promoting illegitimate "identity politics" or "identitarianism"; both the American Left and the American Right then turn on a dime to asserting the sacred nature of their own and their allies' "identity." For every left-wing institution emphasizing racial or sexual identity, there is a right-wing institution promoting cultural or national or religious identity. There are even entire media operations dedicated to promoting something called (shudder) "Catholic identity." 

Identity is certainly a fascinating and fundamental concept, and one I've spent a lot of my life grappling with. Yet it strikes me that contemporary rarely touch on the questions of identity that are to me most interesting, or even really most challenging in themselves. 

Lurking behind most modern uses of the term is a concept of identity that I would call "voluntarist" "atomist" and/or "political-social-conflictual." Identity in this sense is most basically self-chosen or at least self-discovered, an essentially internal relationship with oneself that in some mysterious way constitutes that self. It is for this reason above all else that identity is normatively treated as beyond rational or moral criticism or analysis. 

While in itself unchallengeable, however, identity is seen as something that is necessarily asserted outwards towards others and society and the political realm, coming through will to constitute and determine all external relationships of the individual. In this act of assertion, identity is treated as static, pervasive, and absolute (in the sense of incapable of being resolved or analyzed), and is represented through symbols and images that in some mysterious way express or embody it. Given that such identities must be asserted but cannot be questioned or engaged with, people and society and the state are left with the urgent, binary moral choice of either accepting and affirming a particular identity of a particular person or group in its totality, or rejecting and disaffirming it. 

Despite common notions, this model is not necessarily "identitarian" in a positive sense: because it conceives of identity as individual and internal and beyond rational and moral critique, it can just as easily lead to a logic of rejection and disaffirmation as to one of acceptance and affirmation. Indeed, it is doing so now, as we speak.

In its early stages, there can be no doubt that this concept of identity did arise in large part out of a desire for social acceptance, peace, and harmony, and did lead in practice to growth in attitudes of acceptance and affirmation--at least among the relatively comfortable Americans and similar people at whom it was aimed. As always with aristocratic systems, the existentially and materially comfortable correctly perceived the practical impositions of reason and morality, and in particular the moral and practical demands and challenges of other people and other groups, as the main potential threat to their status and way of life. By entirely removing all moral and rational logics of all identity groups "off-stage" into a hermetically sealed internal-individual space, however, the new identitarian system was able to defuse all such challenges in utero. 

In this, it was very much an offspring of the liberal-secular treatments of religion and economics, two areas of apparent conflict similarly "defused" by shoving all related topics helpfully off-stage into the merely "private" or "individual" realm. And once again, in the short term, it appears to have worked: unable to perceive the moral and rational or even historical or cultural challenges of other identity groups, comfortable Americans relapsed to their natural state of ease, in the process accepting these groups in at least a minimum, largely indifferentist way.

However, for non-aristocratic groups more threatened or more needy, this system presaged, as it usually does, not peace, but conflict. If the highest goal is merely indifferent affirmation, all is well and good; but if you require or desire more than that, competition and conflict sets in quite quickly, and in a manner even more difficult to deal with or defuse than before. Identity groups, after all, as Marx would have it, simply possess different interests. They also possess different desires and goals in the external world, and operate according to extremely different internal moral and rational logics. This naturally leads to conflicts of varying degrees of intrinsic or extrinsic irreconcilability, which have to be resolved or at least dealt with according to some logic or diplomacy or strategy or social or political structure. Identitarianism, however, by its very nature entirely forbids all such attempts to deal with difference and conflict.

While for comfortable Americans pushing identity into a purely internal realm free from reason and calculation served to defuse conflict, for virtually everyone else it has served rather to increase conflict: since by this logic there is little or no common ground of justice or reason or morality by which groups can be reconciled with each other or even practically ally with each other or even practically co-exist. Indeed, even to negotiate over matters of external desires and interests virtually always in practice involves intruding on the sacred internal realm of the identity itself--and hence provoking violent conflict. 

And then, of course, the oasis of ordinary, comfortable middle- and upper-class Americans has itself been nearly entirely transformed by the events of the past ten years, and in particular by the pandemic, into a world not of material and existential comfort, but of existential and moral panic.

Hence, in the last few years one might argue that we have reached a new stage in the identitarian system, or at least added a new dogma to it. This dictum is that certain identities are by their very nature opposed to each other, not only in practical interests or external relations, but in fundamental, internal essence. Hence, each act of affirmation of a particular identity becomes at the same time and necessarily also a rejection and disaffirmation of all opposed identities. 

Indeed, in the last few years, and especially in the context of the Internet and social media, it is quite clear that a societal ethos and logic of affirmation and acceptance has been largely replaced by one of disaffirmation and rejection--not only for the reasons discussed above, but also because of the basic nature of the Internet as a chaotic homogenized realm of symbols where in practice nearly everything is defined through symbolic opposition or negation. In such a realm affirmation of or membership in a particular identity category is practically expressed largely through acts of rejection or disaffirmation of that group's enemies.

As I said, though, this is not really what I wanted to talk about in this post--because it does not really, for me at least, have very much to do with the problem of human and personal identity. I want to talk about it in more fundamental terms.