Amos's River of Justice

Tag: Woodrow Wilson

  • The Foundation of American Civil Religion

    Richard J. Bishirjain has argued that a deformation of history has the ability to destroy historical consciousness and replace it with a derivative, pseudo-interpretation. Unfortunately, a deformation of history has already occurred in the United States. This deformed historical consciousness is the foundation of American civil religion.

    Introduction

    When I first read Bishirjain’s article I accepted everything uncritically. I agree that American Civil Religion causes more problems than it solves. But unfortunately, it is impossible to ignore Bishirjain’s partisan attempts to absolve conservatives from any responsibility. For example, he makes Woodrow Wilson into an intemperate war-monger in World War I, even though Wilson tried to keep the United States out of the War.

    Then why did I choose to present this summary? If nothing else, it’s an example of bygone Conservative rationality. (Bishirjain’s article was published in 1979.) This moral approach would just confuse conservatives in Congress today. But unfortunately, Bishirjain seems to have predicted what has actually happened to conservatism.

    One wonders what the left was doing while conservatism was losing its mind. Progressives would have to be in denial to argue that nothing is wrong with America’s national mythos. My hope is that readers of this article will be able to sift through Bishirjain’s critique of American Civil Religion and formulate critiques of their own–whether of Bishirjain’s views, or Civil Religion itself.

    The Western Experience of History

    Apocalyptic prophets are prominent in American civil religion. But they are nothing new. They were a common feature of the early Christian world as well. However, St. Augustine rejected the claim that the prophecy of the imminence of the millennium would be an actual period of a thousand years in which the saints would rule the kingdom of this world with Christ. He did not believe there was a meaningful theological and philosophical course to the rise and fall of nations. We could use a St. Augustine today.

    If historical consciousness were not such a solid part of Western civilization, the claims of modern-day prophets would not merit a comment. But historical consciousness does shape our understanding of ourselves, our fellow citizens, and the world. In the West, the experience of history involves the mystery of being in which the political community shares. The community’s public myths articulate this mystery. They tell us that the origins of historical political communities are providential; that the community exists under the sovereignty of God and serves some purpose. This shapes our identity as persons, as citizens and as a nation.

    Bishirjain calls this the eschatological dimension of history, and argues that it can’t be avoided or denied. After all, it is found in sacred scripture but also in Greek philosophy. The problem is that if it becomes deformed, it will have personal and civilizational consequences.

    Bishirjian describes the problem as follows:

    If salvation is thought to be intramundane, political life takes on new historical importance as it becomes enveloped in the history of salvation; and politics becomes the field of prophecy.

    Bishirjian p. 33

    To understand how it all went wrong, it’s necessary to talk about what politics is supposed to be. Politics is a science requiring rational judgments made with an awareness of circumstances. Politicians must be able to identify the limits of government and potential abuses of state power. And decision makers must have knowledge of the common good and the ability to protect institutions which limit power. (This concern about limited government is clearly a conservative emphasis. This is unfortunate because his concerns are too important for partisan point-making.)

    Civil Religion Represents a Revolutionary Change in Attitude

    America did not start out as a project of global salvation. This came about because Civil religion in the United States has imposed a revolutionary change in attitude. Before Civil Religion, expectations were of a final end beyond time at the end of history. After Civil Religion, expectations changed into some immanent, this-worldly end, and the hope for the future has become dependent on human action. But not just any humans.

    According to Robert Nisbet, our intellectual class has become a ‘clerisy of power’ imbued with a sense of redemptive passion. Other conservatives have warned about this as well. They include Irving Kristol and Michael Novak. According to Kristol, a special section or class within Western democratic society carries this attitude of mind. Michael Novak speaks of the ‘superculture’ and its commitments to the values of modernity–science, technology, industry. We find an all-encompassing politicization of the mind in place of Pragmatic politics.

    Civil Religion is Blamed on Progressives

    Bishirjian identifies Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson as the source of this extreme in American politics. Croly, a progressive, was the first to initiate this superculture. He did this by influencing Teddy Roosevelt and then Woodrow Wilson. Unfortunately, Croly himself, or at least his first 40 years, is a mystery.

    Herbert Croly

    Croly believed secular saints were both possible and necessary. Furthermore, he thought they would be led by a messiah who will reveal the true path. He published his ideas in The Promise of American Life in 1909, and later, a journal, The New Republic.

    Croly believed these secular saints would realize a national purpose in public affairs, embody the nation’s democratic ideal, and bring about a transfiguration. But, so that ‘the American people may believe once again in the promise of American life‘, these saints must formulate and articulate the democratic ideal.

    According to Bishirjain:

    …Croly’s call for secular saints who will conduct us into a condition of reconstituted and tranfigured reality, has less to do with political science than with prophecy, enthusiasm, and magic.

    Bishirjian p. 36

    The concept of a national idea is important to Bishirjain too. But it does not exist independently nor is it working its way in human events towards a logical fulfillment. The national life can expire, change its form, become something altogether different, not by means of the twists and turns of a world spirit, but the the weakening or collapse of civic virtue and political judgement.

    Woodrow Wilson

    Woodrow Wilson’s version of a political religion was that history moves according to a plan in which America plays a major role. And in his view, God shaped and directed America’s role from the beginning. Apparently, Wilson believed himself to be the messiah.

    The politics of Wilson were not ‘mere politics, they were a special capacity to announce the immanence of a new age certified by the political leader who experienced a special revelation…

    Wilson was an idealist in the sense that T. H. Green defined an idealist as one who seeks to ‘enact God in the world’ by the pursuit of ideals not fgiven in experience. Wilson was committed to the ideal of a world absent of war, a world he believed to bwe within the grasp of a civilized world. And America’s entry into World War I was largely motivated by the desire to attain such an ideal. That it was to be accomplished by violence did not dismay Wilson It is important to understand that Wilson’s desire to involve us in World War I was grounded in his will to destroy the system of balance-of-power-politics.

    Bishir]ian pp. 36, 37

    But was Wilson’s entire desire to enter World War I grounded in his will to destroy the system of balance-of-power-politics? This a deduction on Bishirjain’s part. He bases it entirely on Wilson’s lack of selfish interests in the War.

    On the other hand, it seems that Wilson is on record saying that he wanted to destroy the old order of international politics.

    Every true heart in the world, and every enlightened judgment demanded that, as whatever cost of independent action every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom would lend itself to a new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics.

    As quoted by Bishirjian p. 37

    Bishirjian argues that Wilson especially aimed to destroy the government of Kaiser Wilhelm. But this speech was given in 1919, so it couldn’t have been Wilson’s reason for entering the War.

    Another mark against Wilson was his efforts to get the Senate to ratify the Covenant of the League of Nations. Wilson’s ideal was not realistic in Bishirjain’s view. And unfortunately, Wilson’s ‘visionary politics’ has become the ‘hallmark of American politics.

    • Wilson wants to defend liberty in general. Bishirjain would prefer that he defend the liberty of the American political community.
    • Our relationship with our friends will be based not on mutual interest, but on their willingness to impose uniquely Anglo-American concepts of civil liberty upon their own societies.
    • It overestimates the capacity of Americans to pay ‘any’ price, ‘any’ hardship, and bear ‘any’ burden. This can foster cynicism and skepticism.
    • The failure of the symbolism of such policies leads to a general revulsion against all politics, and the search for the non-politician, the outsider, the uncorrupted one, to lead the national life. He in turn will reassert the idealism of the ‘true’ American tradition, the pursuit of policies because they are right (to the exclusion of ones in our national interest). And the cycle of ideolgical rejection of political reality begins anew.

    Conclusion

    We have seen some of Bishirjain’s predictions come true, especially the last one. We currently have a non-politician who reasserts the idealism of the ‘true’ American tradition. But it may be a stretch to say it all stems from the Progressive era, especially when you consider subsequent Republican maneuvers. It is possible that the partisan approach limits the effectiveness of his arguments.

    For example, I agree that politics is a science requiring rational judgments made with an awareness of circumstances. The most recent example of that kind of politics was the Progressive platform in the 2016 presidential election. But then Bishirjain also wants limited government and limited state power. These requirements have the ability to completely override rational judgments made with an awareness of circumstances.

    I also appreciate his claim that the national life can expire, change its form, become something altogether different, not by means of the twists and turns of a world spirit, but the the weakening or collapse of civic virtue and political judgement. But when he speaks of defending the liberty of the political community, I wonder which political community he is talking about. Based on actual history, he means the business community, and currently the Democrats are right behind him. Business interests can include weapons manufacturers, and agribusiness. So, whose civic virtue and political judgement are we talking about?

    A clerisy of power is a regrettable development for both parties. And not only because it’s progressive.

  • Harvey on Class Nation and Nationalism

    This article presents the views of Professor David Harvey on class, nation and nationalism. Harvey’s recent video, published by Politics in Motion, touches on an important element of the Pinker-Mearsheimer debate about the Enlightenment. I review the relevant points here.

    Introduction of the argument with relevant ideas from of the Mearsheimer-Pinker debate

    In part two of John Mearsheimer’s case against the effectiveness of Enlightenment, he says that because people are social animals, they belong to tribes. We still belong to tribes. Today tribes are called ‘nations’. Because human beings are tribal, their identity is bound up with the tribe or nation. Their interests, their ways of looking at the world, and their views of justice are affected by this identification. And because people belong to different tribes, they often can’t reach political and moral consensus.

    David Harvey’s relation to the argument

    Mearsheimer was refuting the position of Steven Pinker, who argued that people are first and foremost individuals. Pinker thinks that because people are individuals, they ought to be able to use reason to reach a consensus. Here, David Harvey focuses on the idea of nations and nationalism in relation to capital. But his arguments have much to say about the social nature of human beings. This offers perspective on individualism versus the collective tendencies of human beings. It also urges caution in the exploration of nationalism. Harvey’s approach also requires us to rethink our understanding of environmentalism.

    Nation, nationalism, capitalism, and the nation-state

    How we are to understand the concept of the nation and the role of nationalism? Related to this is the question of what nationalism might do to our theoretical descriptions of how capitalism works. For example, what happens when we put the word ‘nation’ in front of the word ‘state’? We normally assume the nation-state has a different character from the bourgeois state.

    It is also important to mention that there is some confusion as to what the argument might be about. For example, Marx in the Communist Manifesto, said the nation doesn’t matter when it comes to thinking about terms of class. The workers have no country, therefore, they wage class struggle. Talking about class struggle is different from talking about the nation. This problem was taken up after Marx’s time.

    At that time there was an argument about how to understand the nation and the right of self-determination of populations. In 1915, Stalin wrote one of the original treatises on the role of the nation-state in politics. So did Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and others. The debate continues in Marxist circles. Harvey’s plan in this and subsequent videos is to discuss how and why the nation-state came about and also what its origins might be. He also wants to talk about its consequences.

    Origins and consequences of the nation-state

    In the early 1920s, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from 1913 to 1021, said the following.

    Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

    This is Wilson’s description of how relations between nations are connected together. Harvey says we need foundation concepts in order to discuss Wilson’s speech and this subject in general. And and these concepts don’t exist in the Marxist literature. Therefore Harvey uses concepts from another domain which has always been historically important. He derives three concepts from his own professional association as a geographer.

    • Questions of the environment: We must distinguish between raw nature (untouched and unmodified by human hands) and the modified environment. We need to discuss the relationship between capital circulation and the environment, what capital absorbs from the environment, and what capital does to the environment, for example, building cities and new environments.
    • Space and space-time: As he has pointed out previously, capital itself is concerned with production of space and new temporalities. Capital accelerates everything. Marx called this the annihilation of space through time. This is a dynamic place for looking at how spacial temporality is transformed. Once spacial temporality is transformed, we have to adapt to it. Capital is constantly transforming the space-time coordinates of its actions and at the same time reshaping the environment and space-time through its actions.
    • Place: Place is not a favorite concept amongst Marxists. However, capital makes places. Capital is born in places and has a certain importance in terms of who we are and what we think about.
    Aristotle’s influence on Marx

    First, Marx was a classical scholar and a great admirer of Aristotle. Aristotle said human beings are political beings, or social beings. In Marx’s language of capital, we are political animals. This means we are always about forming collectives of some kind. Those collective forms of action are sometimes very extensive. As political animals, we have to think of the way in which capital is politicized and socialized in terms of its forms of circulation. (This aligns with Mearsheimer’s argument.)

    Second, when Aristotle talked about the meaning of market exchange and started to analyze the nature of the market, he noticed that it rests on the ideas of equivalence and equality. These ideas are also stressed in Marxism. So the political definition of equality and equivalence becomes fundamental to any society based on commodity exchange. However, Aristotle was not able to develop a labor theory of value. This is due to the fact that in Greek society, all the work was done by slaves. Wage labor was one of the preconditions of Marx’s theory of value.

    Finally, there was a concept that Marx did not take up from Aristotle, but which was foundational for how Aristotle thought. This is the concept of place. Aristotle said place is the priority or feature of all things. (Mearsheimer seems to have echoed Aristotle.)

    Place, space and the environment: a geographer’s view

    Harvey wonders if geography is about place, space and the environment, should we look at those things separately, or as a totality? He answers that he prefers to think back to the totality. A particular place exists in a certain spacial and temporal field, and has certain environmental qualities, both natural and humanly constructed. Therefore, the production of place is as important as the production of space, space-time and environmental transformations.

    Since the field of geography is about the relations between space, place and the environment, we have to start to analyze the spacial moment, the environmental moment and the place movement. Since Harvey has previously talked about the environment and spacial temporality, he will concentrate here on the notion of place.

    What Aristotle means when he says place is the priority or feature of all things is that all of us have a place of our origin. And that place, where we were born, how we are raised, plays a defining role in who we are. Therefore, we don’t have to start off with the abstractions of space-time and the question of whether or not the environment is human-made. We should start with the concreteness of the fact that we were born into a particular place. We have a certain set of experiences that shape us for much of our lives.

    The dialectical view of place

    When we say place is the first of all things, we mean that is where we begin upon our search to understand the world. That search will redefine not only who we are particularly, but how the world around us is made. It will also redefine what it is made of and how its transformations come back to transform us further. In other words, we take a dialectical view in which we say we change the world in order to change ourselves. One of the ways in which we change the world is by building different places. The concept of place becomes foundational in this way of thinking.

    We see that this concept is very distinctive when we reflect on the nature of what place is about, how place works and all the environmental and cultural elements that are attached to it. Harvey contends for example, that in a place like the United States you could probably look at the postal zone someone comes from and have a pretty good idea of what sort of person they are. He has observed that when American students meet each other in Europe they ask each other where they are from. Place enters into the personality and the understandings of the world. We develop these understandings from our upbringing and other surrounding influences. So when Aristotle says place is the first of all things, he means that where we begin and how we experience that place is very critical.

    Born in Gaza

    The Documentary Born in Gaza was filmed shortly after the 2014 Gaza War. It examines how violence has transformed the lives of 10 Palestinian children who survived that war. At the time of filming, these children still didn’t understand how or why people did those things to them, or what it meant. It’s likely that those kids became the back bone of Hamas today. ‘That kind of treatment can ‘form the cadre for a different kind of political world’. Harvey says we should take this carefully into account because it is shaping future generations and laying the foundation of many things that will happen later.

    So, when we say place is the first of all things, we mean it’s very likely that if you were born in Gaza and experienced these things, you would probably end up joining a political movement. Then the political animal would start to come out and lead to the formation of something like Hamas.

    A word of caution

    So, place is an important starting point. However, there is a problem with this starting point. This has to do with the fact that Aristotle is stating something very significant.

    When Aristotle says place is the first of all things, what he’s doing is stating something that is very significant, but it is taken up in other things…the notion of place played a very important role in a lot of philosophical thinking.

    Professor David Harvey

    One of the people who took up Aristotle’s notion of place was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was tolerant of Nazism, and he associated himself with it philosophically. This was true even after the end of the second world war. In fact, he never disavowed it. For this reason, Harvey Heidegger is a problematic figure. Heidegger is someone you may not want to listen to, in Harvey’s opinion.

    However, he acknowledges Heidegger had a ‘distinctive’ notion of place. For example, Heidegger said that ‘Place is the locale of the truth of being‘. In this, he was close to Aristotle, but he took it deeper. He was saying there is a certain truth that attaches to the notion of place, and that truth is essential to being or becoming.

    If you go on to interrogate where Heidegger was coming from, you will find that some of his passages are anti-capitalist. Harvey quotes a rather long passage about how distances in time and space are shrinking. (Marx would phrase it as ‘annihilation of space through time’.)

    I’ve decided not to include Heidegger’s passage in this review. I’ve come across certain concepts and beliefs in the course of writing this blog that I consider dangerous. In this case, I take Harvey very seriously when he says we may not want to listen to Heidegger. We can’t be sure where certain harmful influences come from–whether from logical argument or from the general tone and atmosphere. It’s impossible to know which attributes have won people to this way of thinking in the past. So I chose not to include it here. I’m aware that this omission will cause many readers to go directly to the video to find out what he said. Of course they are free to do so, but at least I haven’t had to spend my time typing it.)

    Heidegger’s similarities and differences with progressivism

    According to Harvey, the passage in question is interesting in the way it talks about logical space and time in a Newtonian way. Also, it seems Heidegger was a great enemy of cosmopolitanism and market exchange. Many of his writings are anti-capitalist. But again, there is that note of caution. ‘There is something different in Heidegger’.

    What Heidegger is doing is an ultimate critique. It’s very Marxist in its own way, but Heidegger is a very conservative figure. The theory of place has been dominated by Heideggerian thinking, and includes questions of dwelling, how we appropriate the world and work with the things around us. Due to this influence we do it in such a way as to appropriate the world to the self. We start to internalize much of what we find in the place we are in.

    This is the kind of work which is these days coming back into left thinking. This is particularly the case with the effort to better understand indigenous culture and places. ‘There is the sense of feeling, the sensitivity to environmental variation, the closeness of things, which we can appropriate, how we understand them at the same time as those things can be very distant in mere physicality.’

    Heidegger’s dwelling vs Lefebvre’s inhabiting

    The idea of place is foundational for how we think about how people dwell. Dwelling was one of Heidegger’s main concepts. It was a critical feature for him. He did not use the term alienation, but he suggested that we can be alienated from nature, from space-time, from each other. Marx would understand it as general alienation from commercial culture, market related structures and capital accumulation. He would agree that this world, which is being built by capital, is a world full of alienation. And part of alienation is set up by an attempt to recuperate the realness and sensitivity that comes from dwelling.

    But, what Heidegger does is claim that places are sacrosanct, that they are places of memory and encounters. This has been taken up on the left by Lefebvre, who studied Heidegger before his Nazi sympathies became well-known. Lefebvre has changed Heidegger’s term, dwelling into inhabiting. ‘We are who we are by virtue of the kinds of places we inhabit.’ And he is not talking about ‘planting yourself on top of things’, but about trying to wrestle with the reality of environmental conditions, space-time relations, etc., and trying to incorporate them in our collective sense of self. It is that which develops the concept of nation and nationhood.

    According to Harvey the result is a form of environmentalism close to what Nazism was about. He thinks it has an ecological feeling, like Nazi youth camps in the forest. This isn’t as strange as it seems. Some writings of that time depicted Germany as one of the first ecological states in the sense of a close assemblage between the natural world and submission of one’s self to the conditions of life in that world.

    The significance of Marx in this context

    This is rather ‘bothersome’ in Harvey’s view. But he thinks it explains something significant about Marx. Marx understood there were nations and they needed to be talked about. He took up the idea of national self-determination and was particularly concerned with the case of Poland’s fight for independence. In fact, Marx was supportive of it, as he thought it might be a first step to socialism. In other words, Poland’s struggle was progressive.

    On the other hand, Marx was not supportive of Czechoslovakian independence. The Polish people fought for independence from Tzarist rule. But in Czechoslovakia, the ruling class was trying to pull the people back into serfdom. This sort of judgement is characteristic of the Marxist approach.

    Brexit and Scottish independence: a Marxist illustration

    Harvey illustrates his own experience with this type of judgement with two recent events. One was Brexit, which he opposed, and the other was Scottish independence, which he supported.

    After Jacques Delors’s term as president of the European Commission, The EU became more right-wing and reactionary. On this basis, Harvey would have supported Brexit. However, it turned out that the people behind the Brexit movement were reactionary right-wingers who were anti-immigrant and anti regulatory. So he didn’t support Brexit.

    By contrast, in the case of Scottish independence the people were working against neoliberal governance in London. This government was robbing Scotland of North Sea oil and other depredations. Scottish independence called for a progressive welfare state where Scotland could control its own resources. In addition, it included everyone who lived in Scotland, not only people with Scottish heritage. By comparison, Heidegger would have limited it to those who could prove Scottish heritage.

    Conclusion

    Probably Harvey’s most important clarification or addition in regard to John Mearsheimer’s debate points is his conclusion that you can’t immediately say whether national identity is good or bad. It depends on whether people use it for positive or negative reasons. The main difficulty for analysis is that there is no real foundation for a theory of place. That is, aside from a better understanding of how places form and what they are about. Therefore, Harvey concludes that a theory of place is crucial. And this theory can’t be divorced from its context in space-time and environmental conditions.

    There is a power in place-making

    So, we have begun to recognize a certain power in place-making, and how the way places are made has a big impact on how culture forms. We should tale note that the world is made up of places. However, when you are talking about space-time, you are talking about an abstraction. It makes more sense if you talk about space-time in particular. For example the space-time coordinates of places in the world. For example the coordinates which make Lisbon like Lisbon and Barcelona like Barcelona. This would include a consideration of how much the politics of those places really matters. In addition, cases like the Scottish referendum illustrate the use the notion of place as a political lever to engage in certain kinds of action. Harvey provides another example, the experience of the Paris Commune.

    The Paris Commune

    Surveys were done with the people who had been part of the Paris Commune. Many of them said they were there because they were loyal to Paris. When the painter Courbet was put on trial, he gave as his reason for being in the commune that he loved Paris. Paris was a significant feature of political organization.

    It is important to ask what is going on in terms of class struggle and what is going on in terms of national struggle. Can we distinguish between national interests and class interests? What’s the relations and between class and nation? In what sense are class interests and national interests related to each other? What is the national interest about and how does it work? These questions will be addressed in Professor Harvey’s next video.

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