Amos's River of Justice

Tag: Loren Goldner

  • America’s War Against Political Modernization, 1775-2020

    America’s political system has been described by Loren Goldner ((Goldner, Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man, Queequeg Publications, New York, NY, 2006)) and others as a Tudor Polity.  The jury is still out on whether this was a positive or negative development.

    The United States’ System Compared to Great Britain and Europe

    Samuel Huntington explains the meaning of America’s Tudor polity in more detail. ((Huntington, Samuel P. “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development, and Politics.” Comparative Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, 1971, pp. 283–322. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/421470. Accessed 20 Oct. 2020.))  Writing in 1966, Huntington praises the American system.  But perhaps he would have a different opinion of it today.  In fact, it’s possible he had reservations in 1966.  On page 412 he says:

    Mass participation goes hand-in-hand with authoritarian control.

    But Huntington is not referring to the United States in the previous quote.

    As in Guinea and Ghana, [authoritarian control] is the twentieth-century weapon of modernizing centralizers against traditional pluralism.

    Instead, Huntington’s article contrasts the evolution of British and European systems, which represent two patterns of modernization, with that of the United States.  He seems to think the United States is the superior system.

    There was a process of political modernization in Europe and Great Britain that involved “rationalized authority, differentiated structure, and mass participation…”  But the American system did not undergo any revolutionary changes; it kept the main elements of the English sixteenth-century constitution.

    The Americans did take the step of increasing participation in politics by social groups throughout society.  They also developed new political institutions–such as political parties and interest associations–to organize this participation.  Unfortunately, mass participation doesn’t necessarily result in equality of political power.  According to Huntington,

    Broadened participation in politics may increase control of the people by the government, as in totalitarian states, or it may increase control of the government by the people, as in some democratic ones. (p. 378)

    Mass Participation Versus Direct Democracy

    Huntington doesn’t explain what he means by ‘mass politics’ but an article by Yoram Gat argues the United States’ system is one of mass politics.  I cite this article because he elaborates on one possible meaning of mass politics.

    Due to the symmetry of its decision making process, mass politics has superficial similarity to democracy – a political system in which political power is distributed equally among the members – since both terms describe situations of equality.  The difference is that mass politics is defined in terms of formal equality while democracy is defined in terms of equality of actual political power.

    This seems to describe our present system more accurately, however Huntington’s approach is important because it focuses on the historical process of modernization.

    The American Colonies Fought Modernization

    According to Huntington,  late medieval and Tudor political ideas, practices, and institutions arrived in the New World with English colonists in the first half of the seventeenth century.  The conflict between the colonists and the British government in the middle of the eighteenth century only reinforced the colonists’ adherence to these ‘traditional’ patterns.

    The breach between colonists and mother country was largely a mutual misunderstanding based, in great part, on the fact of this retention of older ideas in the colonies after parliamentary sovereignty had driven them out in the mother country ((Charles Howard McIlwain, The High Court of Parliament and Its Supremacy, New Haven 1910, p. 386. As quoted by Huntington, p. 382)).

    Huntington concludes that America’s political modernization has been ineffectual and incomplete.

           European and English Monarchs of the Sixteenth Century

    The absolute monarchs of sixteenth century Europe were not reactionaries.  They were actually modernizers who oversaw the transition between medieval and modern politics.  (p. 385)  There were many political theorists at that time who tried to provide more ‘rational’ justifications of absolute sovereignty based on the nature of man and the nature of society.  Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, 1651, was a more extreme doctrine of sovereignty than that of Bodin and the Politiques on the Continent.  Bodin and the Politiques looked to the creation of a supreme royal power which would maintain order and constitute a centralized public authority above parties, sects, and groups.

    Hobbes and Filmer represent both the secular and religious versions of the doctrine of sovereignty.  They argued that it was the subject’s absolute duty to obey his king.  Both of them helped political modernization by giving permission for the concentration of authority and the breakdown of the medieval pluralistic political orders.

    Mass participation came much later.  Since the twentieth century authority has been concentrated in either a political party or a popular charismatic leader.  Either one is capable of arousing the masses and challenging traditional sources of authority.

    In terms of modernization, the seventeenth century’s absolute monarch was the functional equivalent of the twentieth century’s monolithic party. (p. 386)

         Parliamentary Sovereignty

    This process also occurred in England with an important difference.  James I tried to follow the Continental pattern of the absolutist monarch but  Conservatives disagreed.  They argued against James I in terms of fundamental law and the traditional diffusion of authority.  However their ideas were already out of date in England.  Their claims for royal absolutism generated counterclaims for parliamentary supremacy.  For example, Hobbes’s and Filmer’s theories of sovereignty provoked Milton’s argument that parliament is above all positive law, whether civil or common.  In short, fundamental law suffered the same fate in England as it had on the Continent but it was replaced by an omnipotent legislature rather than by an absolute monarchy.

         America

    Meanwhile America clung to the old patterns of fundamental law and diffused authority.  Huntington makes a statement here that might seem contradictory given our current political situation.

    The persistence of fundamental-law doctrines went hand in hand with the rejection of sovereignty.  The older ideas of the interplay of society and government and the harmonious balance of the elements of the constitution continued to dominate American political thought.   In England, the ideas of the great Tudor political writers, Smith, Hooker, Coke, ‘were on the way to becoming anachronisms even as they were set down.’  In America, on the other hand, their doctrines prospered, and Hobbes remained irrelevant…The eighteenth-century argument of the colonists with the home country was essentially an argument against the legislative sovereignty of Parliament.

    American Popular Sovereignty is Latent and Passive

    After stating that in America sovereignty was to be lodged in the people, Huntington admits that popular sovereignty is a vague concept. “The voice of the people is as readily identified as is the voice of God.  It is thus a latent, passive, and ultimate authority, not a positive and active one.”

         The Courts

    America’s continuation of the belief in the supremacy of law, as well as its rejection of legislative sovereignty, explains the power of the judicial branch of government in the United States.  In England, the supremacy of the law ended in the civil wars of the seventeenth century.  The result was that English judges could not oppose any points of sovereignty.  However in America, the mixture of judicial and political function remained.

    The judicial power to declare what the law is became the mixed judicial-legislative power to tell the legislature what the law cannot be…The legislative functions of courts in America, as McIlwain argues, are far greater than those in England, ‘because the like tendency was there checked by the growth in the seventeenth century of a new doctrine of parliamentary supremacy.’

    By contrast, American courts are still ‘guided by questions of policy and expediency.’  (p. 394)  This explains the prominent role of lawyers in American politics.

    Conclusion

    Perhaps the most interesting idea brought up by Huntington is that political modernization in Europe and England was driven by the need for change.  Modernization began when the needs of the time met the simultaneous impossibility of change.   It can be argued that today in the United States there is an urgent need for change, including the need to combat climate change and preserve arable land and clean water.  Yet reactionary forces are cooperating with each other to make change impossible.  This is a strong argument for modernization.

     

  • Melville, Marx and Me

    I criticized some of Loren Goldner’s statements in a previous post, but now I want to praise his ideas for other reasons.  I appreciate his explanation for why American radicalism differs from European radicalism.

    America’s Unique Connection to the Old Testament

    Americans have a different historical perspective than Europeans.  In Goldner’s words,  we have a different “mythical-historical self-understanding.”  ((Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic Man, Queequeg Publications, New York, New York, 2006)) This has led to misinterpretations of American politics and political figures.

    Analysts have assumed that both American conservatives and radical socialists lack a “pre-capitalist frame of reference.”  This implies that they don’t have an imagined feudal idyll to look back to or a post-capitalist future to look forward to.  According to this interpretation, it is impossible to see the present as a mere transition from one state to another as Marx did.  But Goldner thinks this “misses something fundamental about America’s mytho-historical self-understanding.  Americans do have a pre-capitalist frame of reference, but it’s not feudal. It’s “in the imagery of Old Testament prophecy, in the fundamental myth of the New Covenant in the wilderness.  It’s in the relationship between Egypt and Israel and Babylon, in the perception of the peoples encountered in the New World as Adamic man in Paradise.”

    In other words, America’s founders didn’t recognize the past of the Holy Roman Empire or Greco-Roman antiquity as being relevant to their experience.  Their model was drawn from the Old Testament.  It comes from a deep identification between early American experience and that of the Jews ‘going out of Egypt’.

    This has had both positive and negative consequences.  The most negative consequence has been the tendency to identify peoples of color as representatives of fallen man. The Europeans also projected the Adamic myth on other peoples, but they had no direct dealings with the ‘primitive’ element as the Americans did.

    Europe’s Myth of the Cosmic King

    [The European myth was] first the myth of the ‘cosmic king’ of the feudal and later absolutist state, culminating in the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV, and then the pseudo-mythical resurrection of the shattered cosmic king, victim of regicide: the Napoleonic myth.  In Europe, the centralist state haunted the ‘poetry of the past’ of the conservative right, but also, through the phenomenon of Bonapartism with its ambiguous legacy, an important part of the left, far more indeed than Marxists at the time or later cared to concede, particularly when, in the twentieth century, Bonapartism fused with the myth of the ‘Third Rome’ and appeared to many American and Western ‘Ishmaels’ to preside over the first ‘socialist’ state in history.  (pp24)

    This focus on the cosmic king is unique to Goldner and will be examined later.  My focus here is the importance of the Old Testament in America’s mytho-historical ideal.

    The Indo-European Myth

    Goldner mentions additional sources and thinkers that I have used in this blog, for example he cites Melville’s mention of Sir William Jones.  Jones is important to Goldner because in 1780 he demonstrated that Sanskrit was an Indo-European language. (pp 49)  Indian scholars have objected to this claim.  In fact they have objected to the entire Marxist view of India.  But Goldner is trying to situate Melville in a broader historical movement of ideas with which he was obviously acquainted.  To accomplish this Goldner sketches the history of what he calls the myth. 

    This is probably a good place to mention my use of Edward Moor’s book, The Hindu Pantheon.  In previous articles I have discussed Hindu deities as described by Moor without providing his controversial background.  Moor is controversial today because he worked with Sir William Jones in India when India was still a colony of the East India Company.  On the other hand America’s understanding of Hinduism has had a Western bias from the beginning.  Hindu symbolism, or an American interpretation of it, influenced American culture in a negative way when the medical profession adopted of the caduceus of Hermes.  Now back to Goldner.

         Georges Dumezil and the Source of Western Literature

    Since the 1930s, figures such as Georges Dumezil have uncovered a remarkable coherence of myth within the Indo-European cultural sphere, and in world mythology generally.  Dumezil’s work on Indo-Iranian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian mythology have amply confirmed the quip that ‘the first half of the nineteenth century discovered that all of modern English and French literature derived from German and Scandinavian folktales.  The second half of the nineteenth century discovered that all German and Scandinavian folk tales were derived from Indian mythology.

    For Goldner this illustrates the importance of India and Egypt–not just Athens or Jerusalem–for the origins of science, religion and art, (pp 87,88).  For me it represents another source that I have in common with Goldner–Georges Dumezil.

    All things considered, it was probably natural for Marxism to be part of the progressive conversation after all.  Hopefully we can develop the ability to acknowledge our diversity, discover our similarities, and use this knowledge to build something better–something uniquely American.

     

  • Who Are the Progressives’ Friends?

    I’m not trying to end to our conversation with people in these categories.  I’m trying to clarify the position of progressives by comparison with competing voices in the “progressive” movement.  I put progressive in quotation marks because there are non-progressive participants in this movement. In fact, there are categories of participants that we may not be aware of. I’m thinking of socially conservative Marxists, progressive Trump supporters, and the Greeks. Everyone who differs with us is important for purposes of comparison if nothing else. But who are the progressives’ friends?

    We can learn from our exchanges with them if we have the courage to ask hard questions and disagree when necessary.  But if we keep silent about our differences the conversation can’t help but be empty and purposeless, and it will become vulnerable to special interests.  The consequences of capitulation on our part will no doubt be very unpleasant.

    Aside from enriching our debates, many of these ‘voices’ have served our causes.  One individual in particular has worked hard to advance our agenda for the environment.  We could not have accomplished the things Pope Francis has accomplished in such a short time and I plan to remember what he has done and honor him for his service to us.  However, I think the time has come to identify what is American in the progressive conversation and for that matter, what is progressive about it.

    Occupy Wall Street and Marxism

    Since Occupy Wall Street burst on the scene we’ve seen a lot of Marxist rhetoric from the alternative media.  Most people who subscribe to these channels don’t know anything about Marxism except that it claims to be a solution to our present troubles.  Likewise, they don’t know anything about Occupy Wall Street.

    Unfortunately, it is likely that the agenda some of our allies are espousing will keep everything the same.  For example Caleb Maupin, a “Marxist” on YouTube, has been insisting that Marxism has always been socially conservative.  This is a direct challenge to progressive support for Roe v Wade. Similar to right-wing pundits, he resorts to a litany of Margaret Sanger’s racism and Malthusianism to justify his position and to ‘prove’ that Roe v Wade was a misguided piece of legislation from the beginning.

    It is also important for progressives to speak frankly about Roe v Wade and how it constrains our conversation.  The right for a woman to obtain an abortion–which is a medical procedure and not technically a political issue–is a very low bar as far as women’s rights are concerned. It is sad that we are forced to continually fight for it.  Unfortunately, the fight for Roe v Wade, which is already the law of the land, is as progressive as we are allowed to be in this political climate.  I regret this situation while I acknowledge the fight as necessary.  I also regret the way we are forced to be cheerleaders for abortion in response to conservatives’ obsession with it.

    Was Occupy Wall Street Socially Conservative?

    I believe Maupin was associated with Occupy Wall Street, which also claimed to have a Marxist foundation. Was OWS proposing socially conservative policies too?  This possible association is pretty enlightening, given that OWS temporarily took over our conversation in its early days. Were they proposing their own agenda for the conversation?

    This leads me to wonder whether the mutual admiration expressed between OWS and Vatican II Catholics indicates a deeper alliance than we realize.  Again, this is not a rejection of their ideas.  It is a request for clarification.

    For progressives, social conservatism usually implies control of women. This is not a progressive position.

    Reproductive Rights Are Not Faith-based

    Some will say that women have always dealt with social control and the country has more important things to worry about at this time.  That may be true, but what if the problems we are facing are a result of our culture’s control of women?   I’ve written about this in the past and I will write more in the future.

    Marxism on Population Control

    Another Marxist, Loren Goldner, claims that humans don’t have population limits like other species do because humans continually interact with the environment to create new environments.

    The universalism of Marx rests on a notion of humanity as a species distinct from other species in its capacity to periodically revolutionize its means of extracting wealth from nature, and therefore is free from the relatively fixed laws of population which nature imposes on other species.1

    This is clearly a matter of faith and I completely disagree with it.  I also believe it is contrary to the progressive agenda which advocates slowing population growth as much as possible and finding ways to care for the population we do have.  It is my understanding that this is the reason we fight for better management of the environment.

    Marx and Engels Use Class Analysis for Male-Female Relations

    Goldner’s praise of Marx and Engels on the importance of quality relations between men and women falls into this discussion about how humanity creates its own environment.  Basically Marxists deal with this issue under the heading of class.  This of course, diminishes the standing of women. On the contrary, I would argue that male-female relations are in a class of their own.

    Male-female relations should be decided by customs within the extended family, not by Marxist theory or work arrangements. However, Marxists don’t want to talk about this any more than capitalists do.  They would prefer to discuss same-sex marriage and gender rights. That way, they don’t have to make any changes to the fundamental position of women.

    Same-Sex Marriage and Trans Rights

    I agree that discrimination against gays and trans-people must be illegal, but the interesting thing in this development is the lack of attention to the position of women.  Why do we see this convergence of the left and right on women?

    It is clear to me that right-wing talking points, regardless of whether they come from the right or the left, cannot refute the current progressive movement.  Our agenda is the only sensible response being offered at this time to the realities of human existence.  But if the “Marxists” are successful in winning over the progressive movement, nothing will change because their policy proposals are identical to the Right and the Democratic establishment in the only ways that really matter. They negatively influence our relationship with nature and the way our culture deals with women.

    Loren Goldner on Marx and Civil Society

    Goldner envisions the following options given our current predicament:

    The fundamental question before the international left today is whether or not Marx was (as this writer believes) right to think that civil society could be abolished…on a higher level (which preserves and deepens the positive historical achievements of civil, that is, bourgeois society) and not on a lower level, as happened in Soviet-type societies. The second question, which follows hard on the first, is: if Marx was wrong about the critique of civil society, and was in fact a protototalitarian, what, if anything remains valid in his critique of political economy and its programmatic implications?…

    I haven’t yet said anything under the heading of progressive Trump supporters.  It seems to me this category overlaps with the people who supported Jill Stein in 2016 and those who are now arguing that Trump is better on foreign policy than Biden.  It also overlaps with those who have been refuting the DNC’s claim of Russian interference.

    I agree that the DNC is an embarrassment in many ways, but their opponents’ arguments verge on support for Putin, who is seen by many Christians as a champion for Christianity.  I would argue that there is one good reason to vote for Joe Biden and it can’t be rationalized in order to drum up support for Trump.

    Trump’s Covid Response

    During the covid19 pandemic Donald Trump has actually carried out policies that he knew would kill more people in blue states, and especially people of color.  In other words, he has not only admitted to homicidal tendencies, he has acted on this impulse.  Any progressive who argues that we should consider Trump as a candidate should not be trusted.  We don’t know if Joe Biden will be better, but at least he has not admitted to being homicidal!

    Unfortunately, the DNC is replaying Hillary’s 2016 choice of a vice presidential running mate.  Biden’s new running mate, Kamala Harris, is like a clone of Tim Kaine in her unpopularity with progressives.  Therefore I think it is possible that the Democrats don’t want to win in 2020 and that they didn’t want to win in 2016.  The only choice left to us is to turn out in such large numbers that Joe Biden wins in spite of himself.

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