And in the section titled “Expression of Sentiments”:
8. RESOLVED, That we favor a constitutional provision limiting the office of President and Vice-President to one term, and providing for the election of Senators of the United States by a direct vote of the people.
They would get both the income tax and the direct election of Senators. It has been about a century since both were enacted via the Sixteenth and Seventeenth amendments to the Constitution. This would have been a few years after the Populist party had disbanded–or, perhaps more accurately, consumed by the Democratic party.
Now, granted; they didn’t get everything they wanted. Like:
9. RESOLVED, That we oppose any subsidy or national aid to any private corporation for any purpose.
Good luck getting rid of that.
But the point is, some of the demands of a third party composed largely of impoverished farmers were implemented 20 years later, and not merely as laws, but as Constitutional amendments. Constitutional amendments are not easy to get.
Just as a successful small start-up company gets bought out by a larger corporation, a successful third party gets taken over by one of the major parties. But it’s still a victory for their ideas–so what if there was no Populist party as such, if the Democrats were accomplishing what the Populists wanted? The Populists set the stage for many of the reforms made in the first half of the 20th Century.
I’ve written recently about books by Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck—these books, especially the former, were very much in the school of “populist” socialism. Indeed, the big reason for the existence of socialism was the treatment of impoverished workers after the industrial revolution, It was driven by humanitarian and charitable impulses.
But then, you have the other sort of socialism, the one advocated by people like Oscar Wilde, who saw socialism as a way of establishing an intellectual aristocracy—people would be afforded comfortable livings from redistribution of wealth, and so have time for intellectual pursuits. Now, admittedly Wilde saw this as a universal scheme, with the labor to be done by machines. But then you had people like H.P. Lovecraft, who would probably want the division of labor to be based on racial lines, in keeping with their usual prejudices. And people like George Bernard Shaw, who were a bit of both.
Socialism was very much in vogue among intellectuals in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but there were (at least) two distinct kinds of socialist thought: the populists, “help the workingman” socialism and the “socialism is the new aristocracy”, elitist socialism.
These really are two very different aims, and it’s odd that people with these aims should have found common cause. But one of the things people didn’t realize—at least until the 1930s and ‘40s, at great cost—was that “socialism” was really a very flexible concept; which could be used in service of all sorts of ideologies.
I often have insomnia, and, because I love conspiracy theories even though I don’t believe in them, I used to occasionally listen to the radio show Coast to Coast AM. I always especially enjoyed their Halloween episode, when the show would be retitled Ghost to GhostAM. I remember they talked about “Shadow People” on one such episode that was cool. Everything on the show was so utter madness of course, but I wonder if most of the callers were playing pranks. (The time “Gordon Freeman” called in being a prime example.)
It’s actually a surprisingly common device you’ll see in all forms of marketing. It’s not a good idea. Generally, the best way to market your product, whatever it may be, is to differentiate it, not imitate what everybody else is doing.
My mention of Ayn Rand in my post about The Jungle and Patrick Prescott’s comment about it set me thinking: what if Ayn Rand’s efforts to ridicule socialism went further than anyone realized? What if the style of her books, with their interminable preaching and sprawling, momentum-killing speeches detailing various points of philosophy and economics, were meant as a deliberate counterpoint to socialist novels that did the same thing?
Look at some of the covers of Rand’s books, especially this edition ofAtlas Shrugged, and notice how much it looks like Soviet propaganda art. The structure and marketing of these books was ironically basing itself off of socialism’s propaganda.
Even Rand’s “fan club” called itself “the Collective”–again, a joke, since they were a collective of radical individualists. They were always mocking socialist ideas and terms, so why not in the very style of the books themselves? And, most interesting of all, what if the increasingly totalitarian bent of “The Collective” was just an elaborate satire on how socialism itself went from being a theory-based social movement to a fanatical, quasi-religious cult based on the worship of idols like Marx and Lenin.
Maybe Rand was pretending to be as much of a zealot as the collectivists she hated. Maybe she was the Sacha Baron Cohen of her time, deliberately playing a certain role to reveal something about her audience. Like Orwell’s Animal Farm, she was showing how the principles of an idealistic revolution give way to less rational behavior in the end.
Upton Sinclair did not like the meat-packing industry. And so he wrote this book to explain why it–and ultimately the entire capitalist system–was corrupt and evil. The book tells the story of a Lithuanian family who comes to America and finds work in the Chicago meat-packing industry. Every single horrible thing that you can imagine happening then proceeds to happen, and so, through soul-crushing poverty, crime and death, the family breaks up.
The main character is the family patriarch, Jurgis Rudkus, who goes from being an honest working man beaten down by the cruel meat industry to a cynical and selfish criminal to finding the light of socialism, which he then espouses with religious zeal.
I have to admit, though it is about as heavy-handed as it could have been, it nevertheless succeeds somewhat in making you feel sorry for the characters by sheer force of repetition. Sinclair had this irritating habit of writing something along the lines of: “Jurgis went home that night, little knowing that something unbelievably horrible was about to happen.” This kind of kills the suspense, and is dramatically a dreadful device, but it beats you over the head with it so much it sometimes works anyway.
The irony is that though the book is famous for its depiction of the disgusting practices of the meat-packing industry, that was really just a bit of extra detail Sinclair included. His real point was much broader; it was that the workers were oppressed by the bosses. So, he actually accomplished the extremely rare feat of writing a novel that accomplished social change, but it was not the change he wanted. (It wouldn’t shock me if the reason the book is famous for the parts about the food production processes is because those bits are closer to the beginning, and most people quit reading after that.)
Sinclair wrote this novel for a socialist magazine, and this is where it comes to its central problem: the conflict between being a work of propaganda and a work of art. There can be propaganda that is also art, but when a person is writing to make a political point, there is a dilemma between portraying things as they are versus how the ideology requires them to be. So, almost all of the characters in The Jungle are just puppets with which Sinclair makes his political points.
There are vast swaths of the book that don’t really qualify as being part of the story, they are merely long lists itemizing everything that is wrong with meat-packing, or the city of Chicago, or the factories, or whatever. The last chapter of the book is just a huge lecture on the evils of Capitalism and the virtues of Socialism:
“How is the price of an article determined?”
“The price is the labor it has cost to make and deliver it, and it is determined by the first principles of arithmetic. The million workers in the nation’s wheat fields have worked a hundred days each, and the total product of the labor is a billion bushels, so the value of a bushel of wheat is the tenth part of a farm labor-day. If we employ an arbitrary symbol, and pay, say, five dollars a day for farm work, then the cost of a bushel of wheat is fifty cents.”
“You say ‘for farm work,'” said Mr. Maynard. “Then labor is not to be paid alike?”
“Manifestly not, since some work is easy and some hard, and we should have millions of rural mail carriers, and no coal miners. Of course the wages may be left the same, and the hours varied; one or the other will have to be varied continually, according as a greater or less number of workers is needed in any particular industry. That is precisely what is done at present, except that the transfer of the workers is accomplished blindly and imperfectly, by rumors and advertisements, instead of instantly and completely, by a universal government bulletin.”
That’s just a bit of it–to give you the flavor. It reminded me of Ayn Rand’s writing, and almost made me wonder if her books are better once you are familiar with clumsily-written socialist propaganda. Perhaps her sledgehammer approach to philosophical writing was intended as a parody.
There are a ton of obvious questions Sinclair fails to answer in the concluding chapters. Given the benefit of hindsight, the “Socialism is Our Salvation” message of the book is truly ironic. Just in the above passage, you may ask “how exactly will this ‘universal government bulletin’ work?” Or perhaps, if you’re after the big game, you might wonder “if price is determined by labor, wouldn’t that mean something produced with more labor–that is, less efficiently–be more valuable than the same good produced with less labor?”
Ok, that second one is unfair. I’m criticizing Sinclair for repeating Marx’s mistake. But if we just stick to the problems with this as a novel, it’s still pretty bad to end your book with a series of “Marty Stu” characters giving speeches. This Socialist F.A.Q. in the last chapter made me think of a quote from Marx–Groucho, that is. In one of their movies, there’s a bit where Chico is asking and answering his own rhetorical questions and then asks Groucho, “Now so far I’m right?”. Groucho responds: “It’s pretty hard to be wrong when you keep answering yourself.”
Now, don’t misunderstand me–I’m sure a lot of the criticisms Sinclair made of the meat industry were quite valid. It was just the solutions where he went wrong, I think. According to Wikipedia, an employee at the publishing company for The Jungle wrote:
One feels that what is at the bottom of his fierceness is not nearly so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich.
Doubtless, Sinclair would say that this employee was just slandering him on behalf of the capitalists in order to crush the glorious proletariat uprising. “Now we see the violence inherent in the system!”
Seriously, though, that person was right that Sinclair hated the rich. He seems to have surprisingly little actual interest in the poor, and besides that, he seems to have had odd little prejudices of his own. (Especially against the Irish–I think nearly all of the bad characters in the book are explicitly noted to be Irish.)
As a novel, it is pretty poor. As a work of propaganda, it is also fairly weak, though it did actually set people thinking and inspire them to take action to make changes in society, even if it wasn’t what the author himself had in mind. It caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt–clearly, it was an effective vehicle for getting a message across.
And if nothing else, it made me glad I’m a vegetarian, even though I’m quite certain the meat industry’s practices have improved over the last century.
A guy I know once told me that he thought Star Trek: The Original Series was a “fascist” TV show. I asked him to elaborate, and he listed me some reasons:
They all wear uniforms that signify their rank within the rigid hierarchy.
The main hero, Capt. Kirk, is a Carlyle-esque “Great Man” figure. A masculine paragon of excellence, who often triumphs through a Nietzschean casting aside of Spock’s “logic” in favor of genuine emotion.
I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now, but it’s a fascinating argument. Of course, I made some counterpoints:
The Federation is clearly supposed to be a neo-liberal society, built on tolerance and understanding between different groups. It is more like an idealized version of the United Nations.
The Enterprise’s goal is ostensibly exploration and understanding, not conquest.
The real “fascist” version of Star Trek was shown in the famous “Mirror, Mirror” episode, in which the war-like crew of the parallel universe Enterprise fit the Fascist bill much better.
Besides this, there at least two other episodes where they bump into copies of the original fascists and the most famous of the “modern day” fascists.
The show’s values were generally liberal and progressive, as evidenced by the diverse cast and certain moments like Kirk and Uhura’s kiss, which was very controversial at the time.
Naturally, I think my argument stands up better. However, my friend’s idea is still kind of interesting. After all, despite that “peace and understanding” stuff, the Federation did find itself at war with those swarthy foreigners, the Klingons, awfully frequently. (I think it’s significant that they changed this for The Next Generation.)
What was the deal with the Federation? Were they just a bunch of nice guys, or was something more sinister at work? Does upholding the virtues of tolerance, inclusiveness and diversity except for the primitive and brutal “Others” still get you into the Tolerant Liberal Club, or does it put you in the Conquering Empire with Good P.R. Club?
Somewhere—I can’t find the exact quote, sorry—the radical libertarian Albert Jay Nock wrote that the people who opposed fascism and also supported a “league of nations” seemed to be saying that a drop of something was deadly poison, but a gallon of it was a miracle elixir. What, Nock’s thinking went, was one-world government, a “league of nations”, if not authoritarian nationalism writ large?
Of course, Nock was wrong, at least in the case of the Earth. For if there were a “one-world government” modeled on the United States, with each country being functionally equivalent to a State, it would have no “Other” to make into its enemy. It would not, as far as I can see, have the ultimate hallmark of a fascist nation: the racial or at a heritage-based class system. This does not at all mean a one world government is a good thing, but it is not fascist.
But in Star Trek the Federation did not encompass all known sentient life in the universe, although it did seem that its doors were open to all who would join. There were other systems of government and life-forms. The Federation was just trying to… triumph over them. Fascism!
There is an old quote I’ve seen attributed, probably incorrectly, to Huey Long: “When Fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-Fascism!” I suppose you could say that is what the Federation has done, since they are committed to freedom and tolerance… and will destroy anyone who isn’t.
The new Star Trekmovie Into Darknessespecially seemed to accentuate the fascistic element of the series. The grey uniforms the cadets at Starfleet wear (especially the hats), and the warmongering admiral make it seem like it’s on its way to being the Evil Empire.
I haven’t written about the “fiscal cliff” fiasco because I think the whole thing is stupid. Not only does it show that Congress cannot function, but the press’s coverage of it has been awful. They treat the “cliff”–stupid name, by the way–like it’s some kind of unstoppable evil that unexpectedly appeared before us, when in fact it is just the already-known, logical results of acts of Congress.
You may ask: why did Congress pass acts that include provisions so terrible the mere prospect of them going into effect has set everyone into a panic? I don’t know. I’m no legal or legislative expert, but I think this all suggests a lack of foresight on the part of our elected officials. But I haven’t seen a lot of press covering that aspect of the story. They seem mostly focused on the endless fighting between the parties preventing them from fixing the problem–which is certainly worth covering in its own right–but I think people also ought to consider just how this all came about in the first place.
The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.
What’s particularly curious is that the second paragraph of Mr. Douthat’s column begins:
It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility.
On the face of it, this appears nonsensical. “Modern” means “of or pertaining to present and recent time; not ancient or remote“. As such, there can be no “universal laws” about modernity. All we can say is that in modern times fertility decreases, but “modern” is itself a relative term. What is “modern” today will be ancient some time from now, and if the birthrate goes up at some time in the future, the law will reverse itself.
There is a kind of logic to it though, if you buy into Spenglerian theories of civilizational life-cycles. In this view, all civilizations are born, grow and die. If “modernity” is taken to mean “the end of the cycle”, then this makes some sense. I think that is the only way it does, in fact.
When an NYT columnist echoes an ultraconservative German nationalist, it naturally causes a stir. Really though, Douthat’s article is thoroughly in agreement with biological determinism–whatever group of people produces the most offspring will “win” in the eyes of biological determinists, and the quality of the upbringing is only a secondary concern. (I am not saying Douthat actually believes this. I am just saying what he wrote in that column agrees with it.)
It’s the old “nature vs. nurture” debate that lies at the core here, and that debate is so old–I’ve said my bit on it here–I think it’s safe to conclude that it is insoluble. Probably it will turn out that Ray Kurzweil is right, and it is all a moot point anyway.
Via Freddie DeBoer, a good article in the NYT by Christy Wampole about irony in our culture. It’s a good article, but it kind of misuses the word “irony”. Not that it’s much of a misuse, as most everyone nowadays uses “irony” in the same way. But the truth is that irony doesn’t have to mean lack of feeling or sincerity. Greek tragedy is replete with irony, but it does not detract its emotional power. In Greek tragedies, irony means simply that the audience knows the inevitable doom that awaits the characters. But just because you know what will happen doesn’t automatically mean you lose the emotional connection to the characters.
No, what people mean when they speak of those who do things “ironically” is that they have an air of superiority. In his post, DeBoer concerns himself mainly with this attitude in the political arena. I myself fall prey to this attitude, largely because I simultaneously am interested in politics and yet very cynical about most the public relations gimmicks that pass for statesmanship. I can’t help but be a little cynical and jaded about how we go about selecting our leaders, even if it is a very important issue.
The thing about politics is that almost everyone assumes the politicians are disingenuous, and yet they still have to listen to what they say, so consequently you end up being interested and detached at the same time.
As for irony in culture and art, long-time readers know, I rail against over-explaining or predictability in books, movies, etc. I like stories that leave things to the reader to imagine. I realized recently that many people do not have the same tastes in entertainment. I think some people get a kick out of watching predictable movies, for example, because it makes them feel like they are clever because they know what’s going to happen. Personally, I am usually not a big fan of that because it is boring, but to each his or her own.
To reconcile that with what I said above about Greek tragedy, I don’t think that means knowing the story’s ending ahead of time alone means the story is designed to make the audience say to themselves “I called it!” For example, I knew how Revenge of the Sith would end, but I still found it to be a very powerful film. Everyone knew how it would end; but the point of the movie was more about the psychological drama and philosophical underpinnings than it was just watching the plot develop. But there are other films and books, etc. that use the audience knowing the outcome ahead of time simply by using old trope after old trope. And I realize now that some people find this, at some level, reassuring rather than boring.
So, irony is sometimes a means of distancing oneself, but it seems like just as often, it’s a technique used for heightening the emotional power of a story. So, for the phenomenon Wampole describes, I think that “meta” is a better word than “irony”. It’s clever, but it’s also distancing.
What’s interesting is the idea that people are so insecure that they would need this kind of distancing technique to feel better, not just in art, but in everything. Still, I think it’s dangerous to over-generalize these sorts of things, and I think the Wampole article does some of that. “Irony” is certainly a trend in internet culture, but I don’t think it’s as all-pervading as the article would have you believe.
As I think I’ve mentioned before on here, I don’t have cable TV. I just get the major networks, PBS, a few local channels and a bunch of Christian channels. The last are mostly devoted to people on elaborate stages giving speeches and asking for money. However, the other day on one of these channels, I saw a different sort of program.
I don’t know the name of the show or the channel, otherwise I’d tell you. All I know is that it was some older fellow standing in the middle of the desert on the outskirts of Jerusalem, reading from a bunch of papers he was holding and trying to keep from blowing away. The production values were, to say the least, horrifying. If any of you readers can guess what show this may be, feel free to tell me.
What the guy had to say, however, was somewhat… interesting. He was talking about how many intellectuals, especially in the atomic age, desired a “one world government”. He dated this impulse back all the way to Nebuchadnezzar II, and said that they [the intellectuals] did not believe you could have many strong countries, you could only have one government. (I’m paraphrasing.) I got the impression he was getting towards the point that these intellectuals were wrong, and one world government was a very bad idea, and that the Bible had predicted all of this. He was taking his time about it though, and I had work in the morning, so I didn’t get to hear how it all ended up.
(The politics on these religious shows are always interesting. One day, while channel surfing I saw a show claiming that people were now placing their faith in government instead of God. What we need, according to the Bible, so they said, was less government. Smaller government. In fact, watching some of these shows, you get the impression that they feel the Republican Party platform is the word of the Almighty.)
“One World Government” is a phrase conspiracy theorists throw around a lot to mean all sorts of wild things. But I think it is true that many people would like to see more international cooperation and conflict resolution by some means other than wars between nations. I think this train of thought really started because of World War I, which showed a lot of the problems that can arise with multiple competing nations.
In Europe, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, you had lots of strong, independent nations–strong empires, even–such as Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, Germany and so on. The peace among these nations, such as it was, was kept by treaties the countries made with each other. Unfortunately, this system of treaties proved to be unstable in the face of rebellious nationalist agitators and military build-ups between competing nations, and thus, through a complicated series of events, the treaties dictated that a massive war broke out.
In the aftermath, people looked around and said, quite logically, “how can we make sure that this doesn’t happen again?” That very intellectual President, Woodrow Wilson, even proposed the League of Nations, though ironically the U.S. did not join it. Of course, the League failed to prevent ultra-nationalist sentiment in Germany from igniting another, even more terrible war.
The League was replaced with the United Nations after World War II. And ever since, nationalist sentiment has opposed the U.N., fearing that it will destroy all of the country’s traditions and create a one world government. As some readers know, I am fascinated by conspiracy theories, even though I do not believe in any of them. And, as I said, there are a lot of conspiracy theories about the “one world government”, and I think the root reason for all of them is the nationalist elements’ fear of being governed by cosmopolitan intellectuals.
Having said all that, I think really all most people actually want is some international way of resolving conflicts without having to go to war. People, both nowadays and especially in the immediate aftermath of the World Wars, just don’t want to see a repeat of that. Seems hard to blame them, really.