John Holbo on þe Persistent Structures of "Establishment Wisdom"
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-23 Th
First:
Finding excuses for “what we have, we hold!”
I have two standard reference points for the persistent structure of anti-liberal thought. The first is Albert Hirshman’s 1991 book The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) <https://archive.org/details/rhetoricofreacti0000hirs/mode/1up>. The second is Stephen Holmes’s 1993 book The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Anatomy_of_Antiliberalism/wSqLS_iJDLQC>.
It is with those in my mind that I ran across this earlier this week: here John Holbo is surprised that George Fitzhugh (1857): Cannibals All! or; Slaves without Masters (Richmond: A. Morris) <https://archive.org/details/cannibalsallorsl35481gut> is not at all representative of proslavery thought before the United States Civil War. Let me give him the mic:
John Holbo: How Moral Revolutions Happen (They Had A Nightmare): ‘The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860…. The only writer in this group I had read before was George Fitzhugh, who turns out to be unrepresentative…. Most of these writers are barely polemical. The tone is concessive, gentleman-scholarly, mild, punctuated by patronizing sighs and arched eyebrows, to add some tone. Of course slavery is… unfortunate; but you can’t expect this old world to be perfect…. Does anyone have a plausible, practical plan?… No. So what are we talking about?… Northerners who won’t be personally called on to do anything so painful…. Abolitionism is so wrong not because slavery is so right–it isn’t!–but because utopianism must always fail. Indeed, it must always cause suffering, by the law of unintended consequences. Better to respect existing property rights, even though we know that if you look far enough in the past, there will always be ugliness at the root.…
I’m surprised by how all of these authors, except Fitzhugh, make only these arguments. They are a pack of George F. Wills with only one joker–one Southern Avenger–in the deck… work[ing] primarily by trying to suck up all the oxygen, preemptively, by projecting an air of establishment wisdom. You narrow the range of respectable positions and then puff yourself to fill that space, exclusively. Just the right balance of seeming to appreciate life, as it is, and world-weariness…. There’s nary a whiff of explicit anti-black animus….
Related point: I hadn’t anticipated how the wretchedness of the state of European (especially British) industrial civilization in, say, 1840, is a powerful argument for anyone wielding conservative moral complacency like a flaming sword. (Here is where the most polemical bits of these writings come in)…
LINK: <https://crookedtimber.org/2013/08/29/how-moral-revolutions-happen-they-had-a-nightmare/>
I, by contrast, am not surprised.
Fitzhugh, you see, puts all his cards on the table: The few should command, and the unworthy many obey, and in fact the strictest obedience is best for the unworthy many. Why? Because they are unworthy. They need to be guided.
All modes of domination must, I think rely at some level on force or fraud (or both). And the fraud part inevitably requires that one keep (at least some of) one’s cards concealed: one is, after all, playing a game of intellectual three-card-monte here.
In the case of American slavery, the game was to maintain that the domination of the few rich slaveholders was essential to keep the white population organized to prevent the greatly feared Great Slave Revolt (the Revolt that Jefferson feared (hoped?) would be assisted by Providence, for that is the context of Jefferson’s “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever…”). What is more, they had to pose that their domination was not really domination over poor whites. It allowed poor whites, after all, do receive a (small) share of the material profits of slavery, and also receive the enormous status benefits of not being from the despised and subordinate race. Thu on the one hand the few big slavefolders needed to get the real essential benefits for themselves: mastership, domination, and wealth. On the other hand, the few big slaveholders had to be perceived by poor whites as simply exercising the function—not very important in the big scheme of things; merely ministerial, really—of managing and preserving the essential thing: white supremacy.
This was a neat trick to pull off.
American slavery, moreover, was not the only case in which rule by fraud partook of this three-card-monte nature. And I think this accounts for a good deal of the patterns that Hirschman and Holmes discern in the persistent structure of anti-liberal thought.
Hirschman sees three elements: jeopardy, futility, perversity. “Jeopardy” is the thing undermined by Fitzhugh’s putting all of his cards on the table: it makes it clear that there is actually no powerful fundamental gain for poor whites from the system that would be jeopardized by movement toward emancipation. And then there is “futility”—the system is strong, and has a powerful time-honored historical rationale that cannot be upset. And then there is “perversity”—the system’s time-honored rationality already satisfies liberal goals as much as they can be satisfied in this fallen sublunary sphere, and liberalism seeks to break the delicate mechanism. Much better to be quiet, especially when talking to Northerners.
Holmes sees “as much a mindset as a theory, as much a sensibility as an argument”: one in which liberalism is at its essence the corrosion of a valuable social fabric. Why is the social fabric valuable? It is in answering that question that the three-card monte must begin.
One Video:
Sting & al.: Coventry Carol <https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=hahwYqQd_gA>
One Picture:
Wunderkind Cathy Wood’s Ark Innovation ATF:
Very Briefly Noted:
Sneha Mordani: Why HCQ & Ivermectin Were Removed from India’s Covid–19 Treatment Protocol: ‘Little to no effect on Covid-related mortality or clinical recovery of the patient… <https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/why-hcq-ivermectin-dropped-india-covid-treatment-protocol-1857306-2021-09-26>
Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna af Södermöre: ’An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?… <https://www.latin-is-simple.com/en/vocabulary/phrase/134/>
Scott Lemieux: More Evidence that Omicron Produces Milder Infections than Previous Strains <https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/12/more-evidence-that-omicron-produces-milder-infections-than-previous-strains>
Abigail Smith Adams: To John Adams, 31 March 1776: ’ Your Brother’s youngest child lies bad with convulsion fitts. Adieu. I need not say how much I am Your ever faithfull Friend… <https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0241>
Matthew Yglesias: $1.75 trillion Is Plenty of Money to Write a Good Build Back Better Bill: Here are some solid options… <
Paul Krugman: ’Is it just me, or has there been very little reporting on the bond market’s apparent decision that the big inflation scare was mostly a false alarm? Of course the market could be wrong, but still interesting <https://t.co/6sY6E8VAwf>…
Paragraphs:
Ian Beer & Samuel Groß: ‘My other compression format is Turing-Complete!… The sequence of steps which implement JBIG2 refinement are very flexible. Refinement steps can reference both the output bitmap and any previously created segments, as well as render output to either the current page or a segment. By carefully crafting the context-dependent part of the refinement decompression, it’s possible to craft sequences of segments where only the refinement combination operators have any effect. In practice this means it is possible to apply the AND, OR, XOR and XNOR logical operators between memory regions at arbitrary offsets from the current page’s JBIG2Bitmap backing buffer. And since that has been unbounded… it’s possible to perform those logical operations on memory at arbitrary out-of-bounds offsets…. The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream. It’s pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying. In a future post (currently being finished), we’ll take a look at exactly how they escape the IMTranscoderAgent sandbox…
LINK: <https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-into-nso-zero-click.html>
David Dayen: Now Can We Try the Day One Agenda?: ‘The waste of a year’s worth of the time of members of Congress, their staffs, reporters, think tanks, political operatives, advocacy groups, media planners, political advertising producers, and really the majority of the U.S. public culminated on the December 19 edition of Fox News Sunday, with Joe Manchin’s tortured announcement that he simply could not move forward on the Build Back Better Act. “I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there,” a saddened Manchin intoned. I suppose he could have tried actually wanting to get there…. The July 28 document, signed by Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, cementing the terms for a reconciliation bill. Just about everything in it has been incorporated into Build Back Better, and Manchin’s still opposed…. He even wanted an end to Federal Reserve quantitative easing, and while Congress couldn’t possibly guarantee that, the Fed did it anyway, on his schedule…. Manchin’s response would be that he wanted to remove gimmicks that serve to “camouflage the real cost,” by creating temporary programs that would later be made permanent. I have agreed that doing fewer programs on a permanent basis would be better policy; the leadership promised the moon in a tight legislative environment and then hobbled everything when spending was capped instead of eliminating programs, making an unpalatable soup of the agenda. Manchin’s private offer included universal pre-K (so obviously means testing wasn’t a no-go on everything), expanding Obamacare subsidies, and $500 billion to fight climate change. There would be plenty of headroom to include other pieces in such a package, but you’d have to believe that Manchin would actually be willing to get to yes to start pursuing that option. I can structure a lot of frameworks based on things Manchin has historically supported or endorsed days or weeks ago, but I can’t see any cause for optimism that Manchin, from his current crouch, will jump at them…
LINK: <https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/now-can-we-try-the-day-one-agenda/>
Uri: On The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Messaging Apps In Getting Me To Do Things: ‘One of my recent discoveries is that messaging apps can help me work better on various tasks that have nothing innately to do with messaging. For example, I’ve started using Whatsapp as my to-do list…. I’m happy to insult your patience by speculating that the reason this messaging technique works is by somehow hacking your “social brain”…. Various kinds of decision-making and information-retention seem to work better when I’m communicating with another human rather than just putting words on a digital page…. I recently signed up for the amusingly titled <http://bossasaservice.life/>…
LINK: <https://www.atvbt.com/messaging-apps-for-everything/>
Aaron Rupar: GOP Governors’ Covid Messaging Is a Mess. Even Trump Seems Like a Leader by Comparison.: ‘It’s been a bit jarring to turn on TV news in recent days and see Republican governors demonstrate that they’ve seemingly learn[ed] nothing…. Kristi Noem… earlier this year tried to take a victory lap for her laissez faire response… went on Fox & Friends last Friday… was asked… what “common sense” steps she’s taking…. Noem said she’s advising people to wash their hands and take their vitamins…. DeSantis… reacted as though Maria Bartiromo asked him to recite his bank account and Social Security numbers when she inquired about whether he had been boosted…
LINK:
David French: A Powerful, Implied Indictment in the New York Times: ‘I read a remarkable, comprehensive report in the New York Times that attempts to detail the true civilian toll of America’s air wars in Iraq and Syria. I urge you to read the entire thing, but let me summarize: The basic premise is simple to state but remarkably difficult to document—American estimates of civilian casualties in its fight against ISIS are wrong, very wrong. We killed far more civilians than we claim. Lead reporter Azmat Khan and her team made their case through months of meticulous research. They pored over government documents. They visited the sites of strikes. They interviewed victims. And even if you account for a degree of deception and spin, the conclusions seem inescapable. Our aerial attacks may be precise—the weapons almost always go exactly where they are aimed—but the targeting wasn’t always accurate. In other words, we precisely hit the wrong target…
LINK:
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Coffee yesterday morning in the outdoor Berkeley drizzle (although under an awning) with Patrick Iber of U. Wisconsin-Madison <https://patrickiber.org>, author of Patrick Iber (2015): Neither Peace Nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Neither_Peace_nor_Freedom/ZymoCgAAQBAJ>. We talked, as one does, of Léon Blum, Jacobo Arbenz, Muhammed Mosaddegh, Salvador Allende, Ludwig von Mises, Augusto Pinochet, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, T.W. Shultz, Arnold Harberger, Ricardo Lagos, Gabriel Boric, and company.
I have talked about Weimar Russia, Wilhelmine China, National Hinduist India. Perhaps I should talk about history rhyming with interwar France as well? Late-Third Republic America. But, again, it is only history rhyming: their Fox News’s were multiple, and were made up of real pro-Nazis!
Post-1870 (or post-steam-engine or post-rolling-mill or whatever you want to use as the start point for industrial culture) has the prospect of sufficiency.
Given that prospect, agrarian age insecurity management -- what I have, I hold, because sufficiency cannot be general -- is more of a disaster than it was for the last five thousand years or so. (Incumbents strangle innovation, eventually demand all the money, and collapse the economy. Then your empire goes under; it might go under due to conflict with a marcher state that did innovate, or it may just slump into a heap as the fiction of an economy fails, but it's gone. That keeps happening over and over because trusting the system instead of your own power is too hard for too many people, but also because the system allows individuals sufficient wealth to become oligarchs.)
Today, with not only the prospect of general sufficiency but with many more opportunities to arrange co-operating in groups, the more effective strategy is to just not have anybody who is rich enough to do insecurity management by hoarding or by demanding to get what they want no matter who else suffers. (I mean, hey, that way we can avoid an end-Permian extinction event with us in it!)
When the water comes up -- and that's by 2030 from the current sounds of things -- it's going to be full-on into successor states, with a population too large to sustain with anything but industrial agriculture. I don't have much sense anyone is thinking about that, and I could wish they'd start.
Late Third Republic America! What a sobering thought. I'm afraid that I share your pessimism about the near future. I'm particularly concerned about the possibility of violence against prominent progressive figures. These authoritarian apes measure their manliness by their ability to intimidate and violently imposed their will. The Republican figures who could decide this seem utterly indifferent to the danger. There were apparently no lessons learned from January sixth.