It’s a long story, but I hope to be back to normal posting soon. Maybe even later today. I’ve got one of my really long, rambling posts in the works, but it could take some time.
If I don’t post again between now and Monday, however, I wish you all happy holidays.
Apparently, lots of famous musicians have died at the age of 27. From this fact resulted a legend that this is an “unlucky” age, and that musicians are more likely to die at this age.
However, this has now been proven untrue by scientists. According to the Washington Post:
“The researchers — three statisticians and one health economist — devised a study to determine whether musicians who had achieved success (as defined by their having had a number-one album on the British charts between 1956 and 2007) were more likely than the average person in that country to die at that particular age. Their sample included 1,046 musicians of all ilks and genres (among them, the authors note, several Muppets), 522 of whom were designated as being “at risk” for having achieved their success before turning 27.”
Okay, as you may have guessed, this is a joke. For some reason, this particular journal, the BMJ, always does some sort of joke issue in December.
On the other hand, they actually did write a whole article about it. I mean, they did it in jest, but apparently someone actually did spend time putting it together. And, as you may see by the Washington Post article and this CNN article, the press seems to treat it almost like an actual science story.
Seems to me like a waste of time, but whatever.
Christopher Hitchens, Kim Jong-il and Tom Lehrer. What more could we want in a video? (Via Reason)
I gather from that video that the late, lamented Hitchens didn’t much like Christmas time. I suppose most atheists don’t.
It seems to me that most people either love Christmas time or hate it. Some people get so much into the celebration of it that their merriment can be a bit grating. I can see what Hitchens was talking about in that respect.
But I don’t really have a curmudgeonly dislike for Christmas, either. I am not a religious person, but I have not in my personal experience ever felt as if the religiousness of the holiday was being imposed upon me by a Believer. In my life, I have never found either the religious trappings or the exhortations to joy particularly offensive. That is not to say that it doesn’t happen, only that it has never happened to me.
“Exhortations to joy” reminds me of the line in the Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Grand Duke, when the title character says “the entire population will be commanded to enjoy themselves”. I think this is the sort of feeling Hitchens got from the holiday. And I understand entirely the instinctive desire to rebel against such a thing.
But I don’t. For me, Christmas is neither a particularly happy occasion nor a very unpleasant one. It’s not my favorite holiday. (That would be Halloween.) But I do get a certain pleasant, yet almost melancholy feeling from looking at Christmas lights and decorations. Not sad, not joyous, but rather contemplative.
As I write this, I realize that my Grand Duke reference above is quite appropriate, in that the feeling I get from listening to it and from watching Christmas festivities is strangely similar. I have no idea why this could possibly be, but there it is. Perhaps it is the vaguely Germanic atmosphere of both the music in the Grand Duke and many traditional Christmas customs that causes it. But who knows.
It leaves me in a peculiar state of ambivalence towards the holiday, when I find that most other people hold strong opinions for or against it.
P.S. You may have noticed that throughout this post I addressed “Christmas” and not just “the Holidays”, even thought there are other holidays which take place at this time of year. I do not wish to give offense by doing this, or to seem as if I am diminishing the importance of these other holidays. The issue is rather that the feelings I am alluding to are related to the imagery and rituals associated with Christmas in particular and not any other holiday. So, I am saying “Christmas” so as to be precise about what I mean.
Nathaniel Chapman, a video game designer at my favorite game studio, Obsidian Entertainment, had a good post on his blog about “A Theory of Fun”. He makes a great point that “fun” doesn’t describe a game, it describes the experience you have while playing it.
His post also made me wonder: do I play video games for fun? Do I, for that matter, read books or watch movies or otherwise indulge in such pursuits for “fun”?
I mean, I obviously do it for pleasure. But what is this sensation “fun”? For instance, are my two favorite games Knights of the Old Republic II and Planescape: Torment “fun”? I don’t know if I would actually say they are. The feeling I get from them is altogether a more powerful one. It is much more like “awe” or “wonder” than “fun”.
There are some games, obviously, which I play purely for fun. Sports simulation games, especially, come under this label. But I do not think of these games as being in any way “better” than those above, though they may technically be more “fun”.
This applies to many other things, as well. The basic romance or murder-mystery novel, is, or at least used to be, regarded by many as a “fun”, cheaply thrilling reading experience, whereas reading Great Literature (or in some circles, Holy Books) is not actually a “fun” experience but definitely a better one. The same goes for films: Star Wars and Jurassic Park are “fun” films. Are films like Citizen Kane “fun”, or is the feeling they evoke different?
People often do draw a distinction between “High Art” and “Low Art” to describe this kind of thing, but the trouble with that is that it can quickly devolve into labeling things you personally dislike “Low Art”, and then it becomes simply an issue of taste.
Nameless Cynic made a very good point in his comment on this post. He questioned whether Rush Limbaugh believes the stuff he says. It may be that saying controversial things is the best way for Limbaugh to generate interest, he will say them even if he doesn’t believe them. It is, as Paul Simon might say, “the principal source of his revenue”.
This is a worthwhile observation, and I have to say it seems quite possible. If you could get paid millions of dollars to say stuff you didn’t believe, would you do it? I suspect lots of people could find some way to justify it. (The phrase “sheep are meant to be sheared” springs to mind.)
If Limbaugh is a charlatan, where does that leave us? Is there anything to be gained by analyzing his statements, or is he simply not worth even thinking about?
Well, that depends. The reason Limbaugh’s pronouncements are controversial is that lots of people believe them and lots of other people don’t. Thus, it is important to recall that even if Limbaugh knows everything he says is a contemptible lie, many other people apparently do not. His claims sound right to them.
It’s important to draw a line between the radio persona Rush Limbaugh and the actual man Rush Limbaugh. If the latter really doesn’t believe what he says, the former is evidently an avatar for the beliefs of many other people. He speaks not his own mind, but the minds of his listeners. He allows people to hear their own subconscious, but with a better speaking voice.
If this hypothesis is correct, then it might still matter what Limbaugh says, because he is still articulating the thoughts of conservatives throughout the country. Or, one might even say, he is telling them what to think. It can be hard to tell which is which.
Edward Bernays, who is often credited with making huge strides in the field of propaganda, once wrote:
“In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”
(Bernays is sometimes compared, rightly, to Machiavelli. When reading either, it is impossible to tell whether or not they knew how creepy their ideas sounded. Both are almost outrageous enough to be in the Modest Proposal genre, but not quite.)
So, maybe Limbaugh is one of the “small number of people”–or else an agent of theirs–and they are simply telling the “ditto-heads” what to do. The fact that they have been persuaded to call themselves “ditto-heads” is itself a bit of evidence in favor of this idea.
And so we come back to how this post got started: Limbaugh’s comments on the 1950s. He may or may not believe the 1950s were better. If he does, he has enough money to create for himself a virtual 1950s lifestyle, and indeed, this he may be well on his way to accomplishing. But if he does not, and is only a charlatan, then why did he bring it up?
It must have been because he calculated that lots of other people believe it. His listeners are largely white men, and as Thingy pointed out in her comment, these are the people who have by far the most to gain from a return to the 1950s social climate. (However, it is hard to imagine that Limbaugh personally could do any better for himself in the ’50s than he has done in the present. And taxes were higher in the 1950s…)
I don’t think Limbaugh could come and out and say just anything and make his loyal fans believe it. Maybe some of them, but not anything like most of them. I mean, if he told them to go out and kick puppies, I think they’d balk at it.
Personally, my feeling is that people are more resistant to propaganda than they are given credit for. They can usually tell when they are being manipulated to think something, unless the propagandist is very good at his job. Limbaugh is pretty good at his job. And the reason for this is that he tells them what they want to hear.
In Paul Graham’s essay “The Submarine”, about Public Relations firms, he noted:
“A good flatterer doesn’t lie, but tells his victim selective truths… Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.”
If you read the links about Bernays above, you may have observed that the word “propaganda” and the phrase “public relations” to him meant basically the same thing. “Propaganda” came to be a pejorative term, and so “Public Relations” or “PR” was substituted. This is known as a… PR move.
Back to Limbaugh: he is indeed “favoring his clients”, only they are called “listeners”. If this idea is correct, then Limbaugh’s claims might still be important to understanding politics, because they tell us what the conservatives want to hear.
After the Industrial Revolution, people began to wonder if there wasn’t something that could be done about all the poor working people around. Some people thought it was cruel that humans should suffer so; other people thought it ruined the look of things for all the non-poor people. But the point is that people decided that perhaps something ought to be done about all this poverty–usually something in the way of redistributing wealth somehow. Most of these people ended up being called “Socialists”. These Socialists then organized to try to take political power.
Take the case of Germany. In the late 1800s, Otto von Bismarck was facing a political threat from the socialists. So, what did he do? According to Wikipedia—which is, of course, not a valid source, but I shall use it anyway—he “introduced old age pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance.”
He did this to thwart the Socialists, and it seems he succeeded. Nevertheless, if the point of socialism really is to improve life for the poor workers, it would appear that this was actually a victory for socialism. Maybe it wasn’t everything they had hoped for, but it was better than what they had had before.
Does this make Bismarck a socialist? Before answering, notice the similarity to the case of Theodore Roosevelt recently under discussion on this blog. In broad strokes, it seems to me that both the circumstances and the policies of Roosevelt and Bismarck are practically identical.
The Socialists were against Bismarck the whole time, and this is certainly a major piece of evidence against his Socialism. Indeed, the fact that the Socialists and T.R. disliked one another was how the John Nichols Nation article exonerated him of Socialism.
Bismarck and Roosevelt both professed to be totally against the Socialists. But of course, they could have been lying. Politicians often say things like “I am not a crook!” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” when these things are not true.
And unlike those lies, where some actual objective evidence can prove them to be lying, in this case the question is purely a matter of what is in their minds. No one but Bismarck and Roosevelt can tell for sure what they really thought of socialism.
Of course, even if they both secretly thought that socialism was the best thing that could happen to the world, they probably didn’t secretly belong to a Socialist party. Thus, there can be no smoking gun to prove that they were Socialists.
All that they can be judged on are their actions. In both cases, their actions served to weaken the political faction called “Socialists”. However, they might also be said to have advanced the political philosophy called “socialism”. The only way to prevent the Socialists from getting power was to give them some of what they wanted. Bismarck himself is supposed to have said “Politics is the art of the possible.”
Actually, that isn’t the only way to prevent socialists getting power. There is also the General Pinochet way, which is to kill them. Pinochet may have been the most anti-socialist politician in the history of the world, because he took his economic policy from the Libertarians and his police policy from the Fascists.
Pinochet is useful because he is the very model of an anti-Socialist. Bismarck and Roosevelt clearly both fall short of the Pinochet standard. True, they frowned upon–even regarded as illegal–the actions of August Bebel and Eugene Debs, respectively, but unlike Pinochet did with his Socialists, they did not actively work to eradicate their policies. They did not implement them either, but rather they compromised with them.
If you deal in absolutes, like American Icons Darth Vader and Ayn Rand did, then Bismarck and Roosevelt are both socialists, because they compromised with socialism and thus must be forever designated “Socialists”. Any compromise is evil, in this view.
On the other hand, if you don’t do that, you’d have to conclude that they were at most moderate socialists, and maybe that they weren’t socialists at all, but were just put in a difficult position. And you’d probably say they handled it fairly well, all things considered.
The conclusion I reach is that they both were moderately friendly towards the socialist philosophy, but not the Socialist party. What does this ultimately mean? Well, to begin with, it suggests the possibility, horrifying to some, that there may have been something in that socialism stuff.
Socialists would say that this is so, and that things would have turned out even better for Bismarck and Roosevelt if they had only had the guts to go “Full Socialist”, instead of these puny half-measures. Others would say instead that this proves the triumph of “centrism” and compromise.
In the end it’s difficult to really people under terms like “socialist” or “capitalist”. As the character Kreia says in the game Knights of the Old Republic II, when asked if she is a Jedi or a Sith: “such titles allow you to break the galaxy into light and dark. Categorize it. Perhaps I am neither, and I hold both as what they are: pieces of a whole.”
Much of the information in this post concerning Pinochet and Bismarck is based on my reading of Niall Ferguson’s book The Ascent of Money.
Apologies for the fonts being messed up on this post. I’m not sure what happened there.
I can’t help thinking I ought to quote George Orwell. Christopher Hitchens quoted Orwell so much in his writing, it seems a shame not to. But I suppose it’s also a fitting tribute to him to not follow the trend.
I wish I could write well enough to do justice to the work of Mr. Hitchens. I cannot, alas, and so this post will be brief. I wish only to lament his death, and to praise his work.
His writings influenced me quite a bit, and I always admired his willingness to challenge popular beliefs. I thought he was wrong about a lot of things, as did almost everyone who read him, but his writing was so brilliant you couldn’t help being moved to thought by it.
Rush Limbaugh believes that “the Left” will attempt to ban the sport of football. This strikes me as unlikely, although it is possible that the game will decrease in popularity in a few more decades, for that is the way with all such pastimes. And if that should come to pass, Limbaugh has left himself with a convenient scapegoat: the nebulous “Left”.
While making this prediction, Limbaugh mused:
“You know, nothing in the fifties, Leave It To Beaver was never as great and peaceful, painless, and idyllic as people’s memories make it. But there were things about the past that were worth preserving that aren’t being preserved. We have a genuine cultural rot taking place and an overtaking of our culture — the chickification and the New Castrati and so forth. I’m just telling you, it’s gonna happen. Somebody is going to propose banning football as it’s played, whether that thing the league fears or not happens — and it may even be a member of the media that suggests it.”
The first three sentences of that excerpt are fascinating. The first and second are so because Limbaugh immediately and instinctively thinks of the 1950s as a “good time”. He is careful to qualify it, of course, but it’s still the first thing that sprang to his mind as an example of things “worth preserving”. It’s not even relevant to his football point, because football didn’t really catch on until the 1960s. It’s a gut reaction.
(It also ought to be noted that, in a convenient coincidence given the topic of my last post, that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was talk of banning football, but it was nixed by Theodore Roosevelt, who simply called for changes to the rules of the game, rather than its abolition. The parallels with his approach to socialism previously discussed may be of interest.)
The third sentence of Limbaugh’s is really quite something. He, like most nationalists, is quite keen on preserving traditional gender roles. However, it seems to me that one could oppose football even from a nationalist perspective, by arguing that harming oneself in a meaningless game is simply not a productive way of serving the nation. Not that I am interested in making such an argument. I like watching football, after all.
I may be wrong, but I believe Limbaugh has articulated an entire worldview in these three sentences. The 1950s are supposed to have been the zenith of “traditional values”. (Here’s what I have to say about that story.)
The 1950s are really quite important, I think. I have never tested this, but I suspect it may be possible to know a person’s politics quite completely by listening to the tone with which they say “the 1950s”. For the cosmopolitans, it is a time of repression and discrimination and ridiculousness; for the nationalists… well, you have just seen for yourself.
A final note: I wonder if the Limbaughs of the world ever stop to think that the groundwork for the prosperity in the 1950s was laid by FDR. Probably not.
John Nichols at The Nation writes of how Fox News dealt with Obama echoing Theodore Roosevelt in a speech. In brief, some Fox pundits asserted that Roosevelt was a socialist. Nichols writes in rebuttal:
“Roosevelt, in his ‘New Nationalism’ speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, did outline an agenda that supported the establishment of programs like Social Security and Medicare, protections against discrimination, union rights and expanded democracy. In effect, he was arguing for what, under his fifth cousin, Franklin, would come to be known as “the New Deal.”
Some of those proposals were promoted by the Socialist Party in the early years of the twentieth century, which certainly made arguments in its platforms for safety-net programs. But so, too, did moderate Republicans and Democrats. After the ‘Gilded Age’ of robber barons and corporate monopolies, there was mainstream support for tempering the excesses of laissez faire capitalism.”
The people who have been called “socialists” have many different ideas, and the major commonality I can see is a belief that something ought to be done to alleviate poverty. If this is the definition, then Roosevelt was a socialist. If, on the other hand, socialism means wanting the workers to seize the factors of production then Roosevelt was not a socialist. And if socialism is believing that the government should reallocate resources–as many Conservatives seem to think it is these days–then Roosevelt, along with virtually every other person in history who ever ran a country, was definitely a socialist.
Still, it is significant that Roosevelt’s policies were similar to those of socialists at the time. Maybe he was merely a pragmatist, and found that the easiest way to thwart radical socialism was to allow for moderate socialism. Does that make him a socialist? I don’t know; I think it makes him a practical politician.
To my mind, T.R. was something of a market socialist, though I think before anything else he just wanted a powerful United States, and was just willing to do what it took to make that happen. I don’t think he was really invested in socialism. But I will admit that, on the face of it, the “New Nationalism” agenda seems like it have made the country closer to being Socialist than it had been previously.
You may decide for yourself if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
This post is going to be a little different from what I normally do. Usually, when writing about history especially, I try to research things very carefully before I post them. This time, however, I can’t really do that because what I want to talk about is so complex a subject it would take me a whole career’s worth of work to be sure of everything.
Instead, I’m just going to use the facts I already know, and give my opinion on this subject as an amateur student of history. If you find errors, please point them out to me in the comments. I realize I’m risking making an idiot out of myself, but in my (again, amateurish) reading, I’ve come to have one or two ideas. Obviously, if I find any information in the future which contradicts what I say here, I shall correct it ASAP.
Now then, let’s talk about the Soviet Union. Conservatives I know frequently point to it as what happens when “leftism” runs amok. Are they right?
First of all, as some readers may know, I try to ignore the right-left spectrum and examine politics using the framework of Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Materialism. But where does the Soviet Union fit in to this model?
Let me begin by saying that Karl Marx’s theory was anti-nationalistic and, in the sense I mean it, anti-materialistic. While it is true Marx called his philosophy a “materialist conception of history”, what I mean by “anti-materialist” is that he opposed the concentration of material wealth through greedy, capitalistic means. He sought rather to redistribute material wealth to improve people’s lives. As he and Engels wrote in The German Ideology:
“[A]s soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
And as they wrote in The Communist Manifesto:
“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got…
National differences, and antagonisms between peoples, are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.”
This mixture of anti-greed and anti-nationalism immediately put his philosophy at a strategic disadvantage, for it was forced to combat both of these forces at once. However, it was fundamentally a cosmopolitan, universalist endeavor, to improve life for people the world over. This was the motivating idea even after Marxism had taken over Russia and formed the Soviet Union. The anthem “The Internationale” signified this, as did the slogan “Workers of the World, unite!”
But then something very interesting happened. In the 1920s, Mussolini was getting lots of attention for his system of “fascism”. As Jonah Goldberg (among others) pointed out in one of those rare correct observations that make him such a frustrating writer, Mussolini had dreamed up fascism when he noticed that appealing to nationalism made it more popular than adhering to the usual internationalist tendencies.
I don’t think this escaped Stalin for one minute. He noticed what Mussolini was doing and began to imitate him. Fascism swept Europe in the ’30s, and the Soviet Union was not spared, though it tried to seem as if it had been.
It was Stalin, then, who fundamentally destroyed any meaning Communism may have had; by changing it into more of a Russian-nationalist movement. By shifting the nature of the State to what was essentially an ultra-collectivist form of what we might today call “fascism”, Stalin rendered it a mere exercise in the pursuit of Power, without real philosophical significance. It was not quite an ultranationalist movement, given Marx’s foundation, but nor was it an international movement. After Stalin took power, it was similar to many of the other governments in Europe at the time, but unlike Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, its leader was not even “honest” about its true nature.
(It was for these Nationalist reasons, also, that Leon Trotsky was exiled from the party. Trotsky remained a committed Internationalist kind of Marxist, and hence had no place in Stalin’s Government.)
This led to all sorts of confusion, especially in the way of liberal intellectuals feeling a need to defend (or deny) certain actions taken by the Soviet Union despite the fact that it really wasn’t on their side.
Nationalists will claim I am only saying this to excuse the cosmopolitans from responsibility, to claim that they do not deserve blame for the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. They will claim that I am using a tautological reasoning system whereby all people who do bad things are automatically, by the fact itself, nationalists.
Well, I have deliberately tried not to do this. There were genuinely internationalist communists who committed atrocities. And the Communist system seems to lead almost inevitably to authoritarian systems of government, whatever Marx may have intended. And those sorts of systems usually lead to atrocities, no matter who is in charge.
Those who wish to point to the Soviet union as a failure of the “left-wing” may still do so, for it was a cosmopolitan idea that gave it philosophical power. However, in the event, it was a failure largely because of its susceptibility to being taken over by nationalistic forces.
What if there hadn’t been any nationalist shift? What if Trotsky had gotten rid of Stalin? Would it have been a Heaven on Earth, as some people desperately wanted it to be? Very unlikely. It is clear that the allocation of resources under the Communist system was very flawed. This would have been a problem, sooner or later, no matter who was running the show. Might there have been fewer casualties resulting from the Soviet Union’s actions? Possibly so.
