Ted Cruz, Generational conflict, and Remarque
Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 10:15 pm
Tags: All Quiet on the Western Front, Ben Urwand, Catholic pacifism, counter-culture, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, House of Cards, Jazz Age disillusion, Kevin Spacey, Obamacare, Pacifica Radio, Ted Cruz, will to power
While Ted Cruz was calling Republicans to arms to overturn Obamacare, I was watching the movie version of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), in its uncut version. (Ben Urwand insists that Universal pictures caved to German pressure to remove certain incendiary scenes that impugned the older generation for mindless nationalism that slaughtered their young soldiers. I watched the uncut version that attacked the upper class older generation for murdering their unprepared lower class young men, through glorifying sacrifice for the Fatherland, teaching irrelevant subjects in schools, and for inadequate training, food, leadership, hygiene, and medical care while in combat.)
The original uncut movie reminded me of the pacifism that moved the formation of Pacifica Radio immediately after WW2. Such Remarque-like antiwar sentiments lack an analysis of the lead up to wars, but imagine an undifferentiated class of enlisted men, badly led by undifferentiated old and middle-aged men. Indeed, Remarque himself was born into a Catholic home (his father was a bookbinder, not a politicized worker), then after his recovery from wounds in the war, went on to write numerous novels after his autobiographical first novel (that of course was banned and burned by the (relatively young) Nazis in power. His brazen book was riotously protested before the Nazis were put in power by…old men: the monarchists and conservative nationalists of Germany who hoped to control Hitler and his hotheads in order to destroy communism and the independent working class movement that opposed the Nazis.
Remarque, a handsome fellow, went on to a successful career as an author and affairs with glamorous movie stars. In trying to place him as if he existed later in the 20th century, I would have to locate him in the counter-culture, not in any political faction. In the 1960s, boys like him might have been draft dodgers or protesters against the Viet Nam conflict. But the more politicized would have had a more sophisticated analysis of WW1. For instance, they might have looked to rival imperialisms, or to the failure of the Socialist Parties to oppose the war in 1914, voting for war credits in Germany. Or if more attuned to the errors of diplomats, they might have come to agree with Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.
By the time Remarque wrote his novel, disillusion with the idea of progress pervaded what we now call the Jazz Age. Hemingway had written two antiwar novels (The Sun Also Rises about an aimless generation), then A Farewell to Arms (more overtly antiwar and vaguely autobiographical). I have found one quote where Remarque prefigured the anti-technology sentiments of the counter culture, arguing for a vague humanism and faith in humanity; he was no nihilist.
The conflict du jour is over whether or not Ted Cruz is a hothead and ambitious for personal power. I am reminded of a line from the much lauded House of Cards remake, offered by Netflix to its subscribers. This time, a ruthless Southern Democrat, "Francis Underwood" (played by Kevin Spacey), explains to the audience that he isn't in it for the money but for "power". Such is the charge now leveled at Ted Cruz by an older generation that hews to a more bipartisan approach to the management of social policy.
We know much more about this political war than Remarque knew about his war as an eighteen year old Catholic boy. Given what I have studied about the moderate men—i.e, the older generation in charge today, it is difficult not to call them out for utopianism. (See https://clarespark.com/2010/11/06/moderate-men-falling-down/.)
Tags: aristocratic reaction, cultural pluralism, culture wars, Foucault, historicism, Holocaust Studies, Hunting Captain Ahab, Max Weber, Nietzsche, Norman J. Levitt, postmodernism, Syria crisis, will to power
In an often contentious thread on my Facebook page yesterday, I responded to a critic who suggested that I view my website as if it had the legitimacy of Biblical texts and rabbinic commentary. As part of my response, I argued that Biblical texts and associated commentary were "texts" susceptible to criticism and analysis (just as my blogs are meant to be by readers who fault my reasoning and/or facts).
Mine was postmodern talk (i.e., that all communications are "texts" susceptible to deconstruction) so this blog is about where I stand regarding postmodernism, which I do use selectively as part of my critical toolbox, along with "historicism" (See https://clarespark.com/2013/09/04/the-syria-crisis-and-historicism/.).
I.First, wherefore the term "postmodernism"? Here is the Wikipedia definition of the movement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism. Its critics are vehemently opposed to this movement in criticism because of its "nihilism," its denial of "truth," its challenge to the authority of "science," its tendency to "anarchism," and its "moral relativism." In practice, the postmodernists often point to bureaucratic rationality (Max Weber, not Karl Marx!) and mechanistic thinking as the cause of such catastrophic phenomena as the Holocaust. Since the general tendency of cultural studies follows the postmodern/poststructuralist agenda, I will explain why I find much of it useful, if not all.
While in graduate school at UCLA, many postmodernists saw me as sympathetic to their cause, perhaps because I was doing "reader-reception theory" (exploring the drastically changing meanings assigned to Herman Melville's texts since the 19thcentury). I.e., I was looking competing narratives that explained Melville's sometimes difficult texts . There was a similar interest in my finding that many of the key Melville revivers were practicing psychological warfare, while in some cases, caving to academic pressures that conflicted with their spontaneous responses to Melville's often ambiguous, even mysterious life and art.
The key word is "ambiguity" along with "indeterminacy," terms espoused by "pomos." Being an introspective person, I do find my own life to be ambiguous in the sense that I cannot relate a personal history with a definite cause and effect sequence. Where I depart from postmodernism is in its insistence that all of science is "a swindle", or that "mechanical materialism" is a philistine element of the Enlightenment that caused "the Holocaust," or that all attempts at reconstructing the past are fool's errands.
II. Second, a few words about cultural pluralism as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. It is undoubtedly offensive to some readers that I view the Bible as a text, rather than seeing it as God-originated revelation; I imagine that my Orthodox Jewish son-in-law would see my position as Talmudic and typically Jewish. One reason for the duration of our representative republic is the notion of tolerance and relatively free exchange of ideas. Whereas Europe was engulfed in war following the Reformation, the Founders very wisely insisted in a separation of Church and State: there would be no established state religion. The culture wars are fought over this point, and they have polarized the country around competing readings of the Constitution, with "secular progressives" read out of the polity by some pundits on the Right.
III. Third, the notion of "the will to power" (the title of one of Nietzsche's books). I have seen many Facebook comments attributing "the will to power" as the driving purpose of their ideological opponents. Indeed, in a past field exam for the U.S. history graduate students, one question asked us to comment on feminism as "the will to power." I took this to be a hostile response to such usurpers of male authority as Anne Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But in my dissertation research, I noticed that aristocrats threatened with dispossession by partly emancipated women, Jews, and workers after the French Revolution, attacked these rising groups as motivated solely by a demonic, hence illegitimate, desire to control them. It is my view that Foucault and his followers come out of this aristocratic reaction to the rise of the bourgeoisie with its all-engulfing "cash nexus."
During the period that I was shopping my book manuscript, an occasional reader would accuse me of too closely identifying with the dastardly Captain Ahab, and imagining that I had the right answer to the Melville problem, notwithstanding that I refused to conclude anything in particular other than the suppression of key documents in Melville's life and art that would have made his more influential critics look really bad. There are problems that are insoluble, particularly where the human psyche and a dearth of primary source documents are involved.
Some other Melvilleans claimed that I was vindictive owing to my firing as Program Director of KPFK in 1982! Obviously, I, a female with strong views about censorship, must be possessed by "the will to power" over authoritative male literary historians. Whereas I should have backed off and admitted that there are a "multiplicity of readings" on all matters of fact. For these nay-sayers I perhaps invoked Hawthorne's sketch of the uppity, puffed-up "Woman" : Hester Prynne was modeled on Anne Hutchinson as Michael Colacurcio once argued.
As the late Norman J. Levitt insisted in his takedown of the postmodernists among the academic Left, some science is "settled." But the "bourgeois apologist" Levitt is dead, and I hear rumors that 2+2=5.
Orwell, Power, and the 'Totalitarian' State
Tags: bad mothers, British Labour Party, Eric Hobsbawm, fascism, Giovanni Gentile, Homage to Catalonia, integral nation, Jacob Talmon, James Burnham, Jeffrey Meyers, mind-body dualism, narcissism, Nazi Germany, New Deal propaganda, Nietzsche, Orwell's 1984, sadomasochism, separation anxiety, Soviet Union, the Devil, totalitarianism, will to power
[Updated 6-4-13:] This blog has three purposes: 1. To demonstrate that there is no such thing as "power" as an end in itself, and in Orwell's most famous book, his villain O'Brien explicitly makes mind-control the chief end of the Inner Party. But in doing that he separates mind from body, suggesting that Orwell was never a materialist, in contrast to Freud and his materialist followers. In prior research, I noted that the formulation of "the will to power" (as an end in itself) was asserted by aristocrats, like Nietzsche, critical of the rising middle class, of rising women, and of the "jewified" bourgeoisie in general. 2. To suggest that social democrats fastened onto the term "totalitarian" (invented by Italian Fascists) in order to distinguish themselves from rival statists, whether these be fascists or communists. It is my contention (and here I find both Eric Hobsbawm and Jacob Talmon very helpful) that fascists and communists had antithetical orientations to the Enlightenment, notwithstanding their terroristic methods and lack of regard for dissent. But communists acquired adherents among artists, for instance, because they promised emancipation from the philistine bourgeoisie and the commodification imposed by "capitalism." That Bolsheviks (including Trotsky) did not deliver on this promise is often forgotten by today's New Left and the counter-culture with which it is in alliance. 3. To suggest that George Orwell was taken up by British social democrats, even though he was obviously concerned about the direction of the (anticommunist) British Labour Party as he wrote his last book. The companion piece to this blog is https://clarespark.com/2013/04/21/fascism-what-it-is-what-it-is-not/.]
One of the chief claims of Orwell's 1984 is that, for the Inner Party (the state terrorists who destroy the autonomy of Winston Smith–one of the Outer Party intellectuals who writes history according to the ideological needs of Big Brother, but who struggles to maintain his inner freedom– the aim of O'Brien and his cohort is to maintain power for its own sake. Such an attachment to total control as an end in itself is a symptom of the 'totalitarian state', i.e. Nazi Germany and its supposed twin, the Soviet Union. "O'Brien" makes this explicit as he tortures Winston Smith:
[Part 3, Chapter 2:] "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?' [O'Brien]
…'We are the priests of power,' he said. 'God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery". Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter — external reality, as you would call it — is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.'" [End, excerpt from 1984, my emph.]
However, the fact that both loathsome dictatorships murdered millions of their own and warred with rival peoples, does not justify lumping them together as if each had exactly the same historical trajectory; as if each and every member of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union was successfully inveigled to love Big Brother. Indeed, Orwell may have been criticizing capitalism, not some variant of socialism, so as not to become commodified in a world where every human relationship is on the market, measured by "the [Jewish] money power," as the broken Winston recites 'Under the spreading chestnut tree /I sold you and you sold me –'.
It is my suggestion that "totalitarianism" as a conception (from Italian Fascism, coined by Giovanni Gentile) was adopted by social democrats in order to remove the stain of proto-fascism from themselves. Hence, in opposition to these admittedly violent dictatorships, they could grab the flag of freedom, while conflating Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as structurally equivalent tyrannies, and as predictable outcomes of the Enlightenment. Such a strategy was brilliant, for it constructed statist New Dealers in America as the polar opposites of the hated dictators, notwithstanding the New Deal's social policy rejection of the Enlightenment conception of the autonomous individual in favor of collectivist political identities and rule by Platonic guardians. (For more on the "integral nation" see https://clarespark.com/2013/01/20/an-awesome-inauguration/.) Indeed, many of Roosevelt's social psychologists and sociologists were busy looting Hitler's remarkable sykewar arsenal, admiring Hitler's management of "the little man" whom they held responsible for his popular appeal. (For examples, see https://clarespark.com/2012/09/05/proto-fascism-and-the-democrat-peoples-community/, https://clarespark.com/2009/12/13/klara-hitlers-son-and-jewish-blood/, https://clarespark.com/2010/04/18/links-to-nazi-sykewar-american-style/.)
And so it is with numerous academic studies of Orwell, written by members of the British Labour Party, in which the word "totalitarianism" is thrown around (or, in one case, was seen as somewhat old hat, as a Cold War strategy that became passé after the 1950s, yet the word was used by this academic). Similarly, they do not question the notion of "power" as an end in itself, which of course, in their emotional identification with "the working class," they wholeheartedly reject.
Are these Labourite authors both narcissistic and statist (as one friend suggested today)? Reading British Labourites on the Orwell problem,* I tend to agree with the view that statists are narcissistic. Like George Orwell, they imagine "the working class" as one happy, warmly attached family, lodged in its compassionate, emotionally expressive, and self-enclosed "community." So Orwell's greatest quality is his identification with such working-class communities, where egalitarianism reigns supreme. Perhaps this confusion of themselves with working class students whom they teach, is a projection of their own grandiosity as advocates of the (hypermoral) planning state.
Why do I then reject the notion of "power" as an end in itself? First, the word power is abstract and empty. It only has content with respect to "power" over something. As I read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938) and then 1984 (1949), I was struck by his belaboring of the theme of dirt and smell, all the while imagining that working class folk in Spain or in a future Britain, had the gift of comradeship and a lust for life, something missing in his own family and in his schooling. He also belabored/glorified suffering along with the total control exerted by his villains: in this he reminded me of a practicing sadomasochist (Steadman Thompson) in middle management whose collages and fantasies I examined in the Sadomasochism collection at UCLA Special Collections. Like Orwell in his latter years, S.T. believed that revolutions were pointless in that masters and slaves simply changed places, with former slaves becoming as brutal as the former ruling class. Second, the only character in the history and mythology of "the West" who wants power for its own sake is the Devil. One cannot argue across religious lines.
The persistent theme in S. T.'s writing was this: once he had subjected himself to caning or whipping by a maternal dominatrix, he was restored to the lap of the good parent. (See https://clarespark.com/2009/07/13/eros-and-the-middle-manager-s-m-with-implications-for-multiculturalism/.) Of all the biographies I have read, only Jeffrey Meyers has emphasized the masochistic elements of Orwell's personality, but even Meyers does not report the tedious quality of the early pages of Homage to Catalonia, dwelling as they do on the repulsive aspects of trench warfare in northern Spain for page after page. However, Meyers's biography does pick up on the suicidal tendencies of Orwell's management of his own health.
We don't see often enough that middle managers (college professors or high school teachers) are masochistic insofar as they submit to the bullying direction of their superiors, but sadistic in depriving their students or the workers whom they manage of the skills necessary to reject illegitimate authority. By crippling their students of the power to think, and to see the inseparability of mind and matter, they are minor league O'Briens. (It is materialists like myself who insist on the unity of mind and body.)
From the vantage point of my years, I have often seen the desire for boys and girls alike to control Mothers—mothers who may cling indefinitely, or who, conversely, may separate too crudely and quickly from their small children. It is in such twisted experiences of early childhood that we might find the appeal of "power as an end in itself" or the notion of totalitarianism itself. The abandoned child wants to control straying Mother, while the suffocated child needs to push Mother away. But in the real world of adulthood, such maternal imagos may not have the power imagined by Orwell or by his character, "the Last Man in Europe." The antimodernist Orwell, who sees Nature as a maternal refuge, apparently even in the hostile, punishing Hebrides, was emotionally and politically confused. One of his critics should point this out. Stephen Ingle's second book makes a stab at the political confusions, but is limited by his "ethical socialist" commitments. But we must not forget that Orwell was worried about central planning by the new managerial class, as warned by James Burnham. I don't want to psychologize this structural change and thus reduce it to family relations alone.
Owell passport photo
*Orwell's 1984 was welcomed by rightists and Cold Warriors in 1949 and afterwards as proof that Orwell, as in Animal Farm, had exposed the bogus democratic pretensions of the Soviet Union. Much of the voluminous subsequent academic scholarship was devoted to retrieving Orwell for the "socialists" in Britain, not that these authors were themselves unequivocal in the accomplishments of the British Labour Party.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Brunsdale, Mitzi M. Student Companion to George Orwell. Greenwood Press, 2000.
Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. Basic Books, 2002.
Ingle, Stephen. George Orwell: A Political Life. Manchester UP, 1993.
__________. The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell: A reassessment. Routledge, 2006.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. Norton, 2000.
Newsinger, John. Orwell's Politics. Macmillan, 1999.
Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. Secker and Warburg, 1986.
__________. 1984. (Read online)
Rai, Alok. Orwell and the Politics of Despair. Cambridge UP, 1988. Chapter two is devoted to tracking the conception of totalitarianism, which he traces back to Giovanni Gentile, Mussolini's confederate and a major figure in Italian Fascism.