The fall of goodness

My regular references to self-knowledge should make it pretty clear that I owe a heavy intellectual debt to Socrates. There are worlds to be found within the dialogues and the manner in which they were written lend themselves to infinite re-readability. When it comes to the Platonic corpus, it is those earliest works, the ones which portray the trial and death of Socrates, that perhaps reach a characterization of the man which is closer to authentic than not. But this acknowledgement that some portrayals are more sincere than others gets to the heart of the issue. How much is the Socrates of Plato his own man, and how much is a puppet of penmanship? And what of that other disciple of his? Xenophon, whose works present the only other surviving primary source documentation of what it must have been like to consort with Socrates, to engage him in the streets and the agora, to lay in languor and luxury at a nobleman's symposium, presents a portrait of a man who is much less cerebral, much more particularist and even parochial in his concerns. Xenophon's Socrates is closer to the agrarian wisdom and moralizing of someone like Hesiod than the stratospheric intellectual concerns of Plato's characterization. Which, then, is right?

Robin Waterfield, translator of Penguin's edition of Xenophon's Socratic dialogues, believes that the only proper way to get at the "true" character of Socrates by way of his followers is to compare the broad principles that underlay the portrayals of him. Since he was notorious for leaving behind no written word (and at least the Platonic Socrates being philosophically hostile to the written word - hence his style might best be characterized as "esoteric" - in that the words written on the page are not reflective of his true thinking), his thought must be deduced via comparison of the accounts left behind by his disciples. While Plato and Xenophon's Socrates may differ in what they emphasize, they agree on the broad idea that the virtuous, wise and moral life is one that is self-reflective, one that is capable of discovering and maintaining knowledge about the individual's own self, his capabilities and the limits of his understanding. For Plato, this becomes an almost ascetic commitment to the reality behind appearances, to the cultivation of wisdom via learning (or remembering), and to the transformation of citizen and state through the inculcation of celestial (read: intellectual) contemplation and moral education at the expense of pleasure and unconstrained passion (hence the (in)famous hostility to certain types of art and poetry on the part of the philosopher-king - in the Platonic utopia only those artistic representations that reflect the virtues of the upstanding moral citizen ought to be publicly displayed). For Xenophon, his understanding of Socratic wisdom entails a more practical understanding of virtue; virtue as friendship, virtue as efficient management of the individual and his affairs, virtue as the ideal regulation of wants and desires in favor of equanimity, of facilitating concord and lawfulness in the state. Plato diverges into matters of metaphysics and epistemology later in his life, and his Socrates goes with him. Xenophon doesn't bother to put on airs, he simply has Socrates dance to the notes of his tune.

All this aside, it isn't hard to see the broad agreements here. It is a problem encountered when it comes to distinguishing all strains of Hellenic ethics from each other. What is the functional difference between Socratic asceticism and Epictetus's stoicism? Or cynicism and stoicism? Even epicureanism becomes difficult to untangle from the rest when you recognize that Epicurus's "hedonism" is merely the elimination of unpleasurable sensation and not an endorsement of unabashed indulgence. Of them all, it seems only Aristotle was successful in differentiating and specializing his ethical system to the extent where clear lines of division can be drawn - but ultimately it remains a matter of virtue ethics. It seems that most schools of Hellenic thought see virtue as the goal towards which to strive and the differences, as between Plato and Xenophon, lay merely in matters of emphases. Though I suppose (and perhaps this crucial point will undercut my entire thesis), those matters of emphases may lead to wildly different conclusions. Is Crates of Thebes' state the same as Plato's? Hardly. Though both would claim it to be the virtuous one. The ends are ostensibly the same, the means are different, but in practice each consummation of the end leads to a different place. Means and ends matter more than we think (or than I thought) at least when it comes to issues as sticky as virtue.

Lucky them, to be so close to general concord, separated by mere superficiality and not in the fundamentals. For us, it is a much different story. Plato and Xenophon both internalize Socrates's central point: that self-knowledge is wisdom and leads to virtue and an upstanding moral character, provided one heeds its lessons. We can't quite get that far. Somewhere along the way, the message was lost. That individual man, whose life to Xenophon seemed the perfect picture of goodness and happiness, was not so much erased by History as disregarded by it. We pay lip service to his name, just as we do to that of Jesus Christ, but we are not devout in following His message. And along the way that message has been twisted and distorted, reflected and contorted, bent and broken, regurgitated and turned inside out and sideways. How many times have we heard those platitudes to just "do better", to disregard negative energies, to "vibe", and my personal favorite, to "focus on yourself". Focusing on yourself entails something much different than Socrates's cultivation of self-knowledge. Amazingly, the ends typically lead to exact opposites, which indicates that what the inward-directed men and women of today, young and old alike, have in mind is something rather different from what the Delphic maxim intended. Because the same people that are spouting and sharing their nonsense platitudes on their social media feeds have an idea of self-improvement dedicated only to exoteric improvement. What is the purpose of an exercise regimen today? Not to enhance one's capacity to fulfill noble acts in service of the state or fellow citizens, but to maximize physical beauty, to score as many conquests at the bar as is conceivable. Look at any college campus today, the tacit endorsement of flagrant moral outrage on the part of the youth, a concession to the overriding desire on their part to acquire access to money, sex, alcohol and drugs - whatever the cost. Now compare that to Socratic moral education found in the Apology or Memoirs and tell me where the difference lies, besides the mere superficial similarity in their words. Socratic-ism today would be labeled "authoritarian" at best.

This is not really a problem exclusive to our own time, I will concede. It must come as quite the shock to the self-proclaimed traditionalist to discover that Ancient Athens, for instance, was rife with homosexual indulgence among its upper classes. Its people were known for their excessive hedonism, particularly at symposiums, as Plato and Xenophon make clear. Indeed, the entire purpose of Socrates's dialectics on Love are to disabuse us of the notion that indulgence and physical desire might be equated with the true educational power imbued in erotics. For Plato, Love is a stepping stone towards conceptualization of Beauty-in-itself. For Xenophon, Love is something of a leveling force between a mentor and his protege, it is directed towards the mutual improvement of the participants' characters by means of each other. Both were writing in reaction to what must surely have been a vexing and dominant impulse rampant among their fellow citizens. Little more needs to be said beyond the fact that adultery was punished more harshly than rape, for a willing consummation of carnal desire between two individuals was more destructive of their individual characters and the ties that bound them to others than the unwilling defiling of one pure soul for the gratification of a wicked one. Force is more moral than persuasion, even when it is used to achieve identical immoral ends. What does that say about force utilized in service of moral ends?

Today there is nothing but persuasion. Nothing but gratification. Nothing but "self-improvement" aimed not towards contemplation of self (and thus a deeper understanding of how to conduct oneself in righteous fashion) but toward self-gratification. In a world of autonomous individuals left to bump and grind upon one another, sinking further and further into an abyss of intellectual incontinence and ostentatious self-regard, we are cut adrift from any understanding of ourselves and thus what makes for a good society. In such a world we have forgotten what it means to be good. If knowledge is recollection, why leave us to remember the bad and not the good? If persuasion has lost all force to achieve good ends, why not utilize force in order to eliminate knowledge of what is bad? Goodness was sacrificed on the altar for a false vision of liberty and much of what had been known to the past has now been lost to us. The people know little else. This is a positional problem. It is merely a matter of memory. All it requires is a bit of tinkering with time, and some time for tinkering.

Some remarks on American isolationism

While the United States' meltdown continues apace, it has become something of a challenge to maintain focus on affairs going on outside of the immediate national context. But rest assured the globe continues to revolve, upwards of twenty Indian soldiers killed in clashes with the Chinese military, the legal philosophy formerly known as "originalism" committed suicide in a dramatic (if not totally unexpected) display of self-debasement when a Trump appointed justice sided with progressive sentiment in advancing LGBTQ "rights" and defending sanctuary cities, oh, and America is withdrawing half of its German garrison.

The move was something of a shock to those paying attention (though it really shouldn't be). It probably helps that not many people are paying attention at the moment, given the multiplicity of concurrent global crises, but it is a profoundly significant decision, not simply because it tells us something of this administration's true intentions nor because of the acceleration of weakening transatlantic ties, but also because it is a present day instantiation of historical forces that still act upon the psyche of this country, because it is an action born of pure emotion, carried out emotionally towards ends that are at once substantive while also doubling as a vindictive display of will. It is, in short, the starkest demonstration of irrationalism's capacity to satiate itself while also producing results conducive to the common good.

I should preface all of this by asserting that isolationism is not, in itself, irrational. Many states practiced isolationism and its attraction was once such that it would not be a total exaggeration to call it the default foreign policy for those states which could afford to maintain it. Europe, with its hodgepodge of competing and fragmented polities, as well as perennial concerns over such nebulous notions as the "balance of power", was not able to avail itself of the same luxuries available to China, Japan, and the United States in its infancy. It was a perfectly rational disposition born of immense wealth, security, and geographical unassailability. This attitude is perfectly summed up by the Qing emperor's response to Her Majesty's ambassador when said ambassador arrived bearing gifts: We possess all things. A state that possesses all things has little positive interest in games played outside of its borders. The difference between then and now is that the interdependency of the world in the 18th century was far less than that of the world today. Today, the United States has inexplicably decided that it does have positive interests outside of its borders. In fact, it has decided that it has positive interests everywhere. Even more inexplicably, it has decided to hitch its economic fortunes to other countries (even adversaries!) in the hopes of actively facilitating this interdependency. In the minds of those conspirators who have formulated this policy, the net result is an increase in influence over events in the world outside of its borders. Even events that are as far removed from the immediate national context as a border clash between India and China, or an autocrat rattling his saber in the Levant.

You see where I'm going with this? Such a policy may have its benefits when a country must grapple with insuperable military, political, or geographical necessities, such as the kind that necessitated the Pax Britannica, Pax Mongolica and so on, but for a country separated from the world by two oceans, from a country founded on ideas of self-sufficiency and autarky, this seems self-defeating. One would also be remiss to avoid acknowledging that even in Europe increasing insecurity has often powered a drive towards autarky. Both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia found itself beset by enemies, real and imagined, and such internal instability energized broad-based national economic programs to lessen reliance on outside economic and political factors. Interdependency, quite apart from reducing power disparities, exacerbates them, and such disparities drive states to lash out in unpredictable ways if conditions do not exist to enable the kind of self-sufficiency enjoyed by those lucky states which inherit them. In layman's terms: you stick with your own people, and this is how most units of analysis, whether it is the individual or the state, seem to prefer it.

So to isolate is perhaps a completely rational desire, and to pursue a foreign policy with this ultimate aim in mind is evidently reasonable. For a country that has already gone so far down the path towards encouraging interdependency to suddenly get cold feet may appear to be capricious and imprudent when in reality it is a perfectly natural course correction. There may be painful, even wrenching consequences to such a correction, but the blame should lie at the feet of those "liberal hegemonists" who thought they were building a better world (and they certainly did not), and not with the status quo they smashed. But the deceptively simple act of moving to overturn one status quo in favor of another should not escape our notice, for oftentimes it is the means by which such overturning occurs that matters.

The liberal hegemonists did believe they were building a better world. They were moved to act in service of lofty ideals, pacifistic universality combined with enough firepower to enforce it. Those old wry refrains - peace and democracy at the point of a gun - ring true. They were guided by the light of reason, by the dream of a shining city on a hill, by the promise of internationalism and globalism. They have failed because they weren't strong enough to push against the tide of American history, founded on those aforementioned ideals of self-sufficiency, which has so often ruled against interest in overseas affairs. When their efforts floundered, they did not course correct, but stayed the course. It is hard to deprogram people who believe themselves to have thought up one good idea, particularly if they don't have many to begin with. Their procedure is eminently rational, but they have inculcated an irrational mindset, a "fanatical center", a "paranoid establishment".

If rational means can be deployed to irrational ends. Might the inverse be true? And if such a thing is possible, might it produce better results? Believe it or not, there is a literature on this topic as it pertains to this specific national context. We will have to trace the linkages of meaning in order to answer our question.

My interest in this subject was first roused by a curious little footnote buried deep in Richard Hofstadter's essay on what he called the "pseudo-conservative revolt". Writing in the time of Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Robert Welch Jr., Hofstadter had much to be paranoid about. He saw the rising of what would become movement conservatism as inherently unconservative in its disposition towards the world (he was right, but not for the reasons he thinks). He saw it as  fundamentally characteristic of that paranoid style for which he has become so well known, and as representative of the triumph of status politics over interest politics (as a self-proclaimed chronicler of historico-political "moods" and "culture", he displayed much interest in psychologizing his subjects). It is also lesser remarked upon that the paranoid "style" of which he spoke could be used, in his words, to convey ideas that are eminently rational. There were plenty of intelligent men, in his estimation, who could fall victim, or use deliberately, the thrilling power of paranoia and deploy it in service of ends quite distinct from the mood of its adherents. Hence, Goldwater, who in reality was a quite conventional laissez-faire acolyte and prone to frequent flip flops, cobbled together a movement of millions in service of ideas that I think many today would see as "rational" (constitutionalism, rule of law, etc.) conveyed in an "irrational" or "paranoid" style by framing the political conflict (in Hofstadter's words) as a simple Manichean struggle between good and evil, against forces wishing to smother the American experiment, against the power of those above to squash the ordinary man.

But the distinction between intent and outcome is a glaring disparity that must be addressed. Goldwater, you see, was a liar, and while his failure to understand his voters was not what cost him the election, it is an embarrassment that should sweep from history any claim on his part to that of "standard bearer". The fact that the states that voted for Barry went for George Wallace four years later should clue us in to the fact that certain core aspects of Goldwater's platform was, at best, a nonissue for his voters. Hofstadter gets it right when he says that those voting for the new conservative movement were doing so in part because they had become aware that they were shouldering the burden of global responsibility and found it not to their liking. For them, Goldwater was a useful vessel, or idiot, that could project their frustration and anger. He was able to channel vague intent and assemble it into a coherent message and policy program that promised certain outcomes (with the aid of some fiery if impotent rhetoric), but only because there was no one else playing even close to the same ballpark. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

This leads me to the footnote. In his discussion of this new unconservative sentiment, he endorses a political tract by one Sam Lubell and gestures vaguely at the structure of isolationism as Sam sees it - as "a vengeful memory". This is a profound assertion. Mr. Lubell is apparently not content to have isolationism be the mere product of "a vengeful memory". Isolationism is a vengeful memory. What ever could this mean? Indeed, further inquiry into Mr. Lubell's work finds an interesting thesis spread out over a number of books and papers. It is his contention that isolationism is the product of ethnic attitudes derived from historical experience. Analysis of voting patterns in the 1940 election, which pitted the interventionist FDR against Wendell Wilkie, exposed an interesting shift: Democratic vote shares declined considerably in areas populated by German and Irish-Americans. In his telling, what pushed these groups against FDR was "First, the existence of pro-German and anti-British ethnic prejudices. Second, the exploiting of these prejudices by an opposition party" and that the genesis of isolationist sentiment in the United States was ultimately "ethnic and emotional".

It is not hard to see why this might be. Germany and the United Kingdom had spent the previous three decades at bitter odds, while the Irish had an even lengthier catalogue of grievances against the British. It is important to note that the ultimate question of the wisdom of intervention was set aside by these groups. If these groups did not have the historical encounters with Britain that they did, perhaps their response to the question would be different, or perhaps there would be other reasons to feel the same. Rational consideration of the issue was hardly at play. This was a simple matter of revenge, and it overrode all else. The geographical relationship to isolationist sentiment is merely incidental. The American interior, particularly the Middle West, is where most German-Americans ended up settling. It is hardly a coincidence that La Follette's third-party insurgency in the election of 1924 was built on similar isolationist sentiment, that a large share of his vote came from this region (he was a veteran of Wisconsin machine politics), and that many of them were temporary defectors from the Republican Party.

So it is certainly possible to imagine that what is essentially an irrational sentiment might have led to rational policy outcomes. Was Wendell Wilkie a raging sentimentalist? I can hardly imagine that he would have conceived of himself this way. He simply believed himself to be defending the American traditions of virtuosity, self-sufficiency, and benign neglect. But he did channel similar sentiments to those tapped by Goldwater three decades later, sentiments that ended up bearing little resemblance to those mythic attributes of the American tradition. Rather, it appears that many of these political figures are borne aloft the tide. Sometimes they manage to swim with it, but most of the time they drown, if only because they are incapable of fully committing or because foreign policy issues are just not salient in certain contexts. Whatever the case, it's irrelevant. What matters is that isolationism is a weapon that can be wielded by the discontented and aggrieved, that for many it is not a means to an end, but merely means to hurt. It is historical vengeance personified in a single position, it is grievance emblazoned in a platform. The difference between intent and outcome turns out to be meaningful after all. For quite a few of us isolationism is a cathartic act, consequences be damned.

But the world of objective analysis, separate from emotion, still exists, which is where this recent decision to pull troops from Germany comes in. Ironic that it would be them, isn't it? In contrast to Wendell, Donald Trump is a raging sentimentalist. He sees Germany as derelict and delinquent, and he means to hurt. The intent is perhaps little more than punishment, but that should not stop us from considering the positive outcomes that may be achieved. Whatever the ultimate motive, the outcome seems clear. The burden of military responsibility is being redistributed, the world is doing more, America is doing less, the global policeman is retreating from his domain, hegemony is being surrendered, the state has found it not to its liking, the troops are coming home, the taxpayer is getting his due, outdated modes of thinking are coming under scrutiny, the delusions masquerading as dreams are being revealed for what they always were.

Does any of this matter? Do people think in these terms? Probably not. But it is the practical result of a wrecking ball made to swing freely. For those of us with revenge on our individual mind, this is one way of seeing those dreams realized on an international scale. To paraphrase grossly out of context: Life and world are one.

The real anarchists

America continues to burn. Riots in the street, widespread looting, tear gas and flash-bangs. The Chinese virus continues its methodical creep, continuing to claim over a thousand lives per day in the country alone. Our president rails and rages from the pulpit, threatening to deploy the military to reclaim and dominate the streets. Pundits cry outrage and warn ominously of imminent dictatorship and fascism. Officials at the Pentagon look on nervously as politicians find recourse in the Nixonian refrain of law and order. The United States, it would appear, teeters on the brink of all out chaos.

And yet my mind refuses to wander from an incident that did not garner nearly as much attention as all this. On May 8th an elderly couple, Paul and Lydia Marino, made their ritual visit to a veteran's cemetery in Delaware to pay respects at their son's grave. While there, a 29 year old male shot and killed them both. He died later, though as far as I know it has yet to be ascertained whether the wound was self inflicted or via law enforcement. It doesn't really matter. Though you would think, given the outrage coursing through American cities today, that the details ought to garner some attention among protestors aggrieved at the demographics of death; for the Marinos were white and their executioner was black.

What does that mean, at the end of the day? Not much to the people who have had the doctrine of harmony, grace, universalism and egalitarianism drilled into their heads from an early age. These people already understand the world and what makes it move, they know what needs addressing and what does not. America is a white supremacist state, it is responsible for untold atrocity, the enslavement of an entire people, the delegitimization of their place in society, it turned the cheek to extrajudicial reprisals that took the lives of thousands, its greatest accomplishments were built on the back on slave labor not unlike the most brutal regimes to grace European history (never mind qualitative and quantitative comparison, broad strokes will do). The cause of the day must be directed against the oppressors and the oppressors are white. The Ku Klux Klan looms menacingly behind Donald Trump, always one step away from seizing power and turning the country into a racial dystopia. And coronavirus? The existential threat that threatened grandmas and grandpas everywhere, the plague in the name of whose defeat the experts demanded the closure of small businesses and the suspension of livelihoods? Second fiddle to the demands of the new day. Systemic injustice must be extinguished. 40 million unemployed is an acceptable price. One dead man is not.

One wonders if the response is proportional to the alleged crime. What is the alleged crime, exactly? Was it the death of George Floyd, which most Americans condemned as an egregious use of force and an outrageous display of incompetent maliciousness? Or is it an institutional crime, an expression of asymmetrical power imbalances and ugly sentiments that percolate, invidious and seemingly immovable, in the heart of the country's law enforcement agencies? Both? It doesn't seem to matter that the number of unarmed black men killed by law enforcement in 2019 did not rise above single digits. That's a number I can count on my hands. Never mind context or proportionality. The absolute numbers do not lend themselves to a narrative of systemic injustice. And whose institutions are unjust, exactly? What is the system? The buck neither begins nor ends with the president. America is not a unitary state. Sovereignty is diffused across a dizzying array of power structures: municipal, state, federal, never mind the informal powers of the bureaucracy and media. Federalism makes it difficult to point the finger and levy blame. If this were not the case, Minneapolis itself would not have just filed a civil rights charge against its own police department. But what does that matter when your cause is righteous and just, and when you could not possibly be wrong? 

Or do wrong. Pandemic-era concerns have been swept away in this new outburst of righteous indignation. The looting, robbery and killings have been dismissed as the inevitable consequence of an aggrieved and oppressed minority. Peaceful revolution impossible, violent revolution inevitable, and so on. The activist class finally has something to do, an excuse to go outside, all charges of hypocrisy be damned. Now they can live out their power-fantasies, toss strange liquids at statues of Christopher Columbus and spray-paint expletives on churches and the Lincoln Memorial. This is the intoxicating freedom that comes with revolution, hope and change. Dazed and befuddled public officials can merely stand by in astonishment, survey the wreckage when day breaks, and feebly shift the blame to nebulous fringe groups: white supremacists, anarchists, Russians. When asked to choose between the three, protestors will naturally choose anarchy first, white nationalism second and Russia third, for their enemy is their raison d'etre and it is the fate of all avant-garde leftists to face liquidation at the hands of rectification campaigns and zhdanovshchina.

The activists are happy to enlist the support of any who will bend the knee to their cause, whatever prior heresies they may have once promulgated or entertained. George Bush, Jim Mattis, Susan Rice, Joe Biden. The establishment pays its dues to the anarchy ravaging the streets, because it is their obligation to speak out for the cause of universal rights and dignity. Those were, after all, the causes they pursued whilst in power and to whose fulfillment they employed their own anarchies to great success. The Iraq War? Success. Material support to the Syrian opposition? Success. Ukrainian Euromaiden? Success. Color revolution? Astonishing success. Now, having been displaced by a reality television star, they can only look on at present discontent as just desserts.

Yet it was just that kind of sentiment, angry, indignant, leveling, alienated, that produced the anti-system forces with the creative and destructive energy needed to displace those people in the first place. It was, in essence, an anarchist sentiment that elevated the current president to his position. It was an unbridled desire for chaos, desire for the erosion of institutional norms widely seen as corrupt, stagnant and ossified, and destabilization of an unanswerable regime structure. His inflammatory remarks are a feature, not a bug. The clearing out of Lafayette Square, the denunciation from all quarters of the political spectrum, "when the looting starts the shooting starts", all of it is right on cue, right on message, and absolutely anarchistic in its defiance of traditional practice and in its invitation of chaos. The true anarchist is not smashing windows in the street, he sits in the Oval Office and tweets his unfiltered, honest thoughts to the masses every day. The true wreckers of the system go out to vote. Anarchy at the ballot box is far more effective at lashing the regime than a brick through Target's window ever will be. More importantly, it reveals these protests for the unprincipled facade they truly are. It is a testament to left-liberalism's unthinking reactionary stance that the national security bureaucracy it once derided is its new ally. It is never really about changing the system, but rather making it ever more answerable to them.