Jan
31
I Don’t Know About You…
Filed Under Uncategorized | 3 Comments
Am I just imagining this?
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Jan
29
"Stupendous Fabrics:" Notes on Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 9
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Outline
Federalist 9 begins by stating “a firm Union will be of the utmost moment to the peace and liberty of the States, as a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection.” After that opening, and an initial barrage against the “petty republics of Greece and Italy” which never had a stable peace, there are 10 more paragraphs:
Paragraph 2. “Advocates of despotism” use the “petty republics” to decry not merely “republican government,” but “the very principles of civil liberty.” However, “stupendous fabrics reared on the basis of liberty” have “refuted their gloomy sophisms.”
Paragraph 3. There truly are problems with petty republics, and the “advocates of despotism,” um, have a point. But “the science of politics… has received great improvement [!]” Thing was, the poor ancients, they understood politics “imperfectly” or didn’t know the principles that made politics work at all. So what are the improvements in the “science of politics?”
- “The regular distribution of power into distinct departments”
- “the introduction of legislative balances and checks”
- “the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior”
- “the representation of people in the legislature by deputies of their own election”
Hamilton says these are “wholly new discoveries,” or “have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times,” because clearly no one could ever figure out before that voting for a representative was a good thing, and no one cared if judges were corrupt before. To his “wholly new discoveries,” he adds a fifth “discovery,” one that sounds suspiciously like something the United States is stuck with more than dependent on: “the enlargement of the orbit” (# 5), i.e. the Union is going to comprised of States (a “confederated republic”) and will be massive.
Paragraph 4. Confederacy of this sort - for the sake of “tranquility” internal and “external force and security” - isn’t new. Some people say the republic should be “contracted,” and cite Montesquieu to make this argument. But Montesquieu is not of so firm a belief as them.
Paragraph 5. If you want the republics to be as small as what Montesquieu “recommends,” you’d have to break up the States into smaller pieces.
Paragraph 6. You could reduce the states in size, but the possibility of confederate government would not be disallowed still.
Paragraph 7. Montesquieu is quoted with an eye to “reconciling the advantages of monarchy [!] with those of republicanism.”
Paragraph 8. See? The “tendency of the Union [is] to repress domestic faction and insurrection.” The quotes by Montesquieu above, of course, talk about states ganging up on one state they don’t like in the Confederated Republic (either it is an “usurper,” or it might experience “popular insurrection”), and crushing it for the sake of “internal happiness.”
Paragraph 9. Confederacy vs. consolidation of the States. People argue that a confederacy shouldn’t care for any aspect of “internal administration,” and there should be “an exact equality of suffrage between the members.” Hamilton dismisses these notions, symbolic but not necessarily constitutive of liberty and equality generally, as “the cause of incurable disorder and imbecility in the government.”
Paragraph 10. Hamilton says that “the proposed Constitution, so far from implying an abolition of the State governments, makes them constituent parts of the national sovereignty, by allowing them a direct representation in the Senate, and leaves in their possession certain exclusive and very important portions of sovereign power,” thus completely attempting to refute the argument in the paragraph above.
Paragraph 11. An ancient example of a Confederate Republic is given, one that seems to correspond to how representatives in the House are now delegated. Popular representation is the order of the day, as the “largest” cities got the most votes.
Comments (to be changed/expanded upon later):
The center of the list - the middle paragraph - is the key. It is there the issue of Union becomes that of “confederate government” (cf. Machiavelli, Discoursi Bk. 3).
What happens is that “size” no longer is a concern for Hamilton in that paragraph. “Size” is metaphorical - in ancient discussions of politics, cf. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero - size stands for whether a city will be moderate or not, whether it will educate in virtue or not. A small city is not imperial. Empire is more than conquest: it is a rejection of the idea that there are limits in life. The city that expands is implicitly telling its citizens that the world is their playground.
So when “size” is dismissed, what is really being dismissed is any concern for the formation of moderate citizens. We are not going to teach a sense of value to our citizens; that’s the province of “freedom of conscience.” Even knowledge in this political order will be a form of acquisition - i.e. the emphasis on technology, on practical schooling.
This is the deep reason why the ancients were wrong: they were concerned to have a happy, moderate people. The concern in this paper is security exclusively - take especial note of Paragraph 4. Hence the logic of Constitutionalism does cut against “states rights,” and even against a Bill of Rights to a degree: this isn’t Hamilton being sneaky, or Thomas Paine and other people who insist on “rights” being correct. If there is no security, you can forget about rights of any sort, and do notice that under “states rights” there’s always, no matter how peacefully the argument is put in tone, the threat of secession and insurrection, even now.
The ancient concern for moderation is a stronger ground than “states rights” or “rights” generally, because it can not be refuted by the logic of the Constitution as thoroughly as an insistence on “rights” can. The ancient concern for moderation means there is a distinction between simply living and living well. The latter takes precedence. But “simply living” is all that an insistence on rights adds up to ultimately: Who is anyone to say what is the right way to live? So what ends up happening is that Hamilton’s/Madison’s/Montesquieu’s/Machiavelli’s logic wins out, and it wins out in the most subtle way.
After all, the states are preserved - they’re left intact more than they might be if a national council was formed. The only thing is, they play a new role in Union. They oppose the federal government. The federal government opposes it. The federal government is divided into three branches which oppose each other. Elections in those branches pit people voted directly by all Americans (representatives) against Senators (from state legislatures) against a Judiciary (from the President and the Senate) against the President (the Electoral College, set up so there is not one popular vote or vote by a state legislator directly).
Get the idea? The fundamental difference between ancient and modern politics is that we consign politics to mechanism. No one can truly be trusted to rule. A moderate, virtuous society, on the other hand, can theoretically allow everyone to rule and obey in the highest sense. Here, we just set people up against each other and let the system run.
What makes the mechanism “work” is the same thing that always threatens to tear it apart: factionalism, or unleashed passion. That’s why “states rights” succumbs completely to the Machiavellian logic - if the desire for empire defines every single person, and if the insistence on “right” is merely a claim to dominion by each individual over the other, then the system that works best is the system that allows all to compete against each so no one can ever win.
Of course, there are several deep problems with this logic, which we’re facing now. In short:
- We’re all dumb. There’s no way around this.
- We’re imperial even when we try to be moderate. Where is the money for all those socialist programs Obama wants going to come from? Oh yeah, that depends on us being the most powerful and wealthiest country in the history of the world, I forgot about that.
- How do we know when the system is working, or is threatened? Ultimately, the politics of mechanism exist to instantiate the popular will. So should I look at our cultural decline as not that important, and only focus on how Constitutional form has changed? But if I do that, how do I know exactly when Constitutional form has changed for the worse, given that the Constitution itself was made purposely malleable?
Jan
28
Should Academics Blog?
Filed Under academia, blogging, media | 4 Comments
Lecture to be delivered in 2025 or whenever this blog gets popular, and not by me, but by whatever android holds my brain. I plan to be dead from drug abuse and an incredible amount of dirty sexual activity that is heterosexual in nature. Shut up now, the android’s about to speak.
I have been brought here to lecture not on Yeats or Xenophon or an issue in my field, Political Science, but rather on this phenomenon of New Media and whether or not it changes the nature of scholarship.
As we all know, this “New Media” thing started sometime between 2000-2010 and took off with these things called blogs, which were more or less a print medium. Podcasts and vlogs and user-generated television were there, and people were watching up until editing software became so incredibly easy to use that people were uploading full-length movies.
It is true only a small proportion of people choose to create anything; the rest would rather be passive. But something happens as tech advances, something strange, as we all learned - more and more technology that was alien at one point becomes a fixture. Everyone was using e-mail in 2012, when watches were capable of composing, sending and reading it. One didn’t even need to be online to have an account in 2015, as the nature of servers changed entirely. People started using the creation technology as a matter of course.
And we, of course, experience New Media fully as Virtual Reality. The question that has been raised is whether we should program alterego avatars in various virtual worlds to teach the subjects we specialize in. Several of you have created an alterego personality per subject. The issue you’re bringing up is whether this is necessary for the continuance of academic relevance, or whether the academy should be reactionary, as it was when blogs were first introduced. Only losers blogged then - people who sat around all day on IM, living with their parents, making no money, “writing a dissertation,” and ranting about online events and trends of no consequence to anyone who was in the real world.
It was clear blogging was going to go nowhere, and indeed, the ease of making one’s own TV shows and podcasts and all sorts of mixed media creations that emphasized audio/visual swept blogging away. Academics came to use blogs more then, when the less serious crowd left for the trendier technologies.
Of course, those academics were formed in my and my friends’ image and likeness, because we had been blogging the whole time in such a way as to teach people even when not working with them directly. We were doing something that others weren’t - not keeping a blog so much for the sake of news, or a running commentary on a topic, but for raising the best questions possible. Eventually people caught onto what we were doing, and things changed from the inside out thanks to those people who were appreciative and tolerant of my arrogance and willing to complement each others’ efforts. Students started taking the liberal arts far more seriously, and demanding their professors not give them the “gist” of a thinker, but pay close attention to the text. People started wondering if the questions they encountered in old books were relevant to how they perceived the world. Candidates for office were being asked what they thought about Lincoln or Jefferson in detail; informal discussions about policy started focusing on specifics and required a good working knowledge of arguments others made in the past, and an ability to assess costs and think through incentives for actors. My specific work focused on the theological-political problem as presented to us by an ancient thinker, and I had no clue how seriously religion was going to be taken by many in a fairly atheistic age just because I brought it up.
The world changed to some degree because we blogged. Then came the money, the band broke up, there was even more sex and drugs, I said I was bigger than John Lennon, and this android really sucks, I can’t get it to run itself into a wall full speed or throw Molotov Cocktails at people.
So anyway. You want to know about New Media, and whether you should participate in it. You want to teach to change the world, yada yada.
Here’s what I would have told academics back in 2008 if I were asked about blogging:
Don’t blog unless you have something to offer besides your opinion. Blog only if you want to teach and be directly useful to others.
You guys are going into these virtual environments with the “change the world” mentality. You want the world to look like you: I think that’s the ambition hiding under the fear of losing relevance. Now that’s not terrible - Aristotle says that when we posit a reason for something, we do so for ourselves and others like ourselves. The best reasons unite us as human beings.
But I can safely tell you that when I blogged, it was dealing with people I disagreed with over and over and over. And I wasn’t trying to convert them - many times, I wanted to make the best argument I could for their position, even if I disagreed.
You have to be directly useful to others, otherwise you’re bullying in the worst way. To some degree, all impersonal interaction where one says “I know better” is bullying. But academics around the time I started blogging were terrible bullies. They openly lied to advance partisan points: whatever good they had in mind was greater than the Truth.
The technology does not matter at all: things that look tacky can never compare to the original academic experience of Socrates bugging people in the agora because he couldn’t find some handsome boy to hang around. Nothing is tackier than that, except one thing: bugging people because you know the truth already.
You don’t, and neither do I. Your job as scholars is to raise the best questions possible, and allow people to think for themselves. You can introduce them to things they’ve never seen before, sure - I was happy to share poems and links to artists I found compelling. But if you go in with “the world’s going to change because of me,” you’ve got it all wrong. That was a very fortunate coincidence, made possible by a lot of people who cared and had plenty to share themselves. We learned from each other, and it is by their grace I did a little something.
Jan
26
Expectant
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The times I read philosophy and poetry on here, or even promote my work - I feel like I’m going through the motions.
Once again the question is salvation. Is our happiness external to us? Nietzsche unloads on Wagner for tying love to a redemption narrative, but the Bible in theism and Emily Dickinson in atheism are agreed: love has something to do with what is beyond us. It wouldn’t make any sense to love if the possibility of love weren’t there (people who say “you must be loved first in order to love” are the worst sort of idiot). We’d be deluded, we would destroy our own ability to give appropriately, we would misunderstand and therefore destroy love.
And, more to the point, even Nietzsche’s ubermensch requires a Zarathustra.
My eyes hurt. Time sometimes wears on one too much, as do bright blue screens. I’m not unhappy - I’m more frustrated that I might be running out of things to give.
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Jan
25
Links, 1/25/08
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- Movies, movies and more movies: The reliably thoughtful Dana Stevens reviews the latest Rambo; Stacey Nosek’s take on Breakfast at Tiffany’s is as good as it gets; Ted Boynton’s thoughts on Lawrence of Arabia are powerful in and of themselves.
- Guitar porn - but it’s seriously good.
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