A Pierrot painted in Sam Francis's Jungian phase

 ( This essay follows http://clarespark.com/2009/11/02/a-ride-through-the-culture-wars-in-academe/.)

[Untitled poem submitted to London Mercury by an Englishman, Lawrence Binyon (a William Blake reviver of the 1920s):] From the howl of the wind/ As I opened the door/ And entered, the firelight/ Was soft on the floor;/ And mute in their places/ Were table and chair/ The white wall, the shadows,/ Awaiting me there./ All was strange on a sudden!/ From the stillness a spell,/ A fear or a fancy,/ Across my heart fell./ Were they awaiting another/ To sit by the hearth?/ Was it I saw them newly/ A stranger on earth? 

 Here are some prestigious irrationalist accounts of Nazi antisemitism, a problem often linked to the scandal of Western immobility as the destruction of European Jewry proceeded apace.  The explanations I shall discuss have helped to shape postwar academic formulations of twentieth-century conflict and race relations, not only our understanding of the Holocaust.  There is much to recommend them, especially when we understand the great overarching, still disputed question: were the horrors of the Nazi period an aberration, perhaps exacerbated by propaganda and bad diplomacy? Indeed, were the horrors so singular, compared with the excesses of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other brutal regimes?  How important was the presence of Hitler to the success of the Nazis, and to what degree were his racial beliefs common enough to explain his widespread support in all classes?  To the extent that the writers I discuss remind us both of Nazi uniqueness and of their continuities with other antidemocratic regimes of  past and present, I believe they are helpful to the vigilant libertarian.  But we must ask, how precise, comprehensive, and non-partisan is their cultural description of history; how scientific are their analytic categories?  A socially responsible historian may not mold events to fit a predetermined outcome.  I will continue my thesis (in numerous blogs on this website) that many antidemocrats view the Enlightenment itself as a Jewish plot–a shadow on the white wall of Authority, an uncanny innovation that estranged them from their families of origin; the aristocratic radicals, long entrenched in the humanities, are particularly energetic in promoting this interpretation.

 [From Alfred Rosenberg’s “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish World Policy,” conspiratorial Rabbis are speaking:]  “We will adopt every liberal idea of all parties and persuasions and instruct our speakers to dilate upon them, until we have exhausted people with fine speeches and produced in them a disgust for speakers of all persuasions. In order to control public opinion, we must sow doubt and discord by allowing the different sides to express contradictory opinions for so long [that] the Gentiles get lost in the confusion: they will decide that it is best to have no opinion at all on constitutional questions, that the people lack the proper perspective on these things, and that only he who leads the people can really comprehend these things.” [1] 

[Hitler argues with Otto Wegener and Rudolph Hess regarding the possibility of a Jewish state in Palestine:] “The Jew notoriously likes to remain anonymous so long as he is not in our power. He takes off his mask only when he has gained domination—or at least when he believes he has. After the war, it seemed as if, thanks to the war, Jewry had won the upper hand throughout the white world.  So the time seemed ripe for the Jews to pose as the masters. In Germany that was, as it is now, indisputably evident.  Then, when he has succeeded in seizing the leadership in all the white nations, all that remains is the establishment of a headquarters to truly dominate the world.  And that would correspond to the Jewish state. Any sooner, such a state would make no sense, have no significance—it would even be a mistake.

   “The fact that now it is to be situated in Palestine, the Promised Land, the source, three or four thousand years ago, of the migration that would conquer the world—that is not only conceivable, but even proof that my train of thought is correct.

   “It also proves, however, that our struggle and our mission, which only we regard as the struggle and mission for Germany, is perceived by worldwide Jewry as if it were directed against its totality—against the Jews as such.  Therefore, wherever they wield power, they will use it to paralyze and prevent our work.

    “That is why no nation would take in the Jews as a whole if they were to be expelled from Germany, nor would the Jews agree to a Jewish state in the sense of a concentration of the entire Israelite tribe.  For in so doing, they would be betraying their faith in the promise; they would be giving up the struggle, at the very moment when they thought they had, in fact, won it.”

     “It is quite certain,” Hess said, “that we will have the entire Jew-dominated world against us if we simply throw the Jews out of Germany. This they cannot accept, because of the consequences. For in such a case, another nation will do the same, and others will follow in their turn.”

     “We have already reached that point,” Hitler resumed, “when we established the party program.  And to this day, I have been unable to find a better solution than the one we foresaw at that time.

     We must be very clear about the fact that we cannot remove the Jew as such.  Rather, we must make it impossible for parasites to exist; we must prevent them from continuing to gain a foothold on the body of our Volk, from infusing poison into that body or attempting to gain power over it.  At that point, the Jews will leave Germany of their own accord.  For when it becomes impossible for a parasite to live its parasitic existence in a certain place, it wanders off elsewhere, where conditions are more favorable to it, or it perishes.”

    “I truly believe,” I agreed, “that this is the only possible way to achieve our goal.” ["I" is Otto Wegener]

    “But it seems to me that the solution of the social question as we conceive it, and as I would like to bring to fruition and to success in my social economy, also contributes to the possibility of removing this parasitism.”

     “This is contradicted,” Hess interposed, “by the fact that the socialist movements all over the world are run precisely by Jews and were founded by them.”

     “No,” Hitler said.  “That is not a contradiction. The error of the economic order until now, and the error that exists in the general concept of the monetary system, has long been discovered by a few clever Jews, perhaps without their finding a solution.   And the industrialization of the economy and its world-wide expansion will bring it all the more into view—that, too, they have understood.  Therefore they could not help but fear that in time the world will come to the realization that the existing order must be changed—which will certainly also narrow their chances for parasitism, if it does not obliterate them.”

   “ …The Jew’s parasite brain works quickly with its sixth sense. It thinks: if I can no longer engage in my parasitism in its previous form, then I must simply look for some opportunity in the new, in the coming form.  Until now, it was my highest aim to gain power over the state in order to secure my domination and my way of life.  Now, if new forms of government develop, we must simply try to seize power in the newly formed state.  Since the new form will be brought about by revolution and the industrialization of the subjugated working masses, it will be simplest to start by assuming leadership during the revolution.  Then we will be able to use the revolution to bring about, by straightforward means, both the new state and our new domination: the state of the working masses, whom we command and which we rule!

    “It is hard for me to believe the Jew so purposeful and intellectually superior that he actually submitted these considerations so systematically in the councils of the Elders of Zion; that from the first he thought them through in the way just elaborated—that would be uncanny. But his sixth sense guides him instinctively and unconsciously along the correct path, where, admittedly, consciousness has long since come to him.”

   “But then you are dealing with two different methods of the Jews, which must oppose each other and are actually mutually exclusive,” I objected.

    “As long as the Jews use them,” Hitler explained, “they will not hamper each other.  A crow does not scratch out another crow’s eyes.  But if we, for example, wanted to implement such a social economy and establish a state along those lines, resembling the dictatorship of the proletariat, as they call it so splendidly, then you’d be surprised how both groups would pounce on us, the liberalist parasites who employ the methods of the past as well as the Marxist-Bolshevik parasites who practice the new method.  And since they have a firm grip on their populations, although they make up only two to five percent of their number, they will sic these people on us! For now we are dangerous to both: to the one group because we want to free ourselves from them, and to the other because our social economy once again cuts the ground from under them.

   “That is why I am still not at all clear about this social economy. Not that I think it wrong. On the contrary! I’ve already told you as much. But I ask myself whether it is expedient to burden oneself with two enemies at once.  And that is a political consideration.

    “Which is the more dangerous enemy—I mean, the one that threatens us most immediately? Without a doubt it is Bolshevism—we can safely call it Jewish Bolshevism. For if it were not Jewish, it could be given a different format.  In that case, we might even be able to come to terms with it at some later date. But we will never be able to come to terms with Jewish Bolshevism without signing our own death warrant.

“Once we have recognized it as the primary enemy, however, we must avoid rousing the remaining Jews in the world against us until the Bolshevik danger has been removed.  That is why we may not expel the Jews who live in Germany, we may not expropriate their goods, we may not harm a hair on their heads; and that is why we may not go public with our social economy and other problems and plans, with which we would rouse liberalistic world Jewry and the entire liberalistic world against us.  Rather, we must live peacefully with them!  We can keep liberalism in check—indeed we must do so—but it must be done very cautiously, sensibly, with economic expediency. And when we arrive at systematic economic control through the state, which is the problem everyone else is fiddling with, we must manage it in such a way that private property also survives for economic transactions and that private initiative is harnessed for our program.

    “This by no means signifies that we must relinquish or even betray our socialist aims.  The aims remain firm and unshaken.  But the means must be chosen and executed according to the dictates of reason and expediency.” [2]

      Christian antisemitism was conditional: Jews could overcome their badness by conversion to Christianity; whereas in the credo of scientific racism, Jews were genetically unconvertible: stiff-necks were a changeless feature of the national character.  According to Raul Hilberg, the Claude Lanzmann film Shoah, and the public television documentary The Longest Hatred, Christian antisemitism provided the chief precedent for scientific racism, Hitlerian scapegoating, and the toleration of the Holocaust by the Western powers.  The continuing salience of Christian antisemitism must not be ignored.  Whatever it says about complicity or indifference to the fact of the Holocaust on the part of millions of Europeans and Americans, however, this explanation does ignore the actual views of Hitler and his chosen antecedents.  Why should this be?  I would argue that Hitler’s economic response to the Depression may not resemble the carefully equilibrated welfare state created by American conservative reformers before and after the war. While denouncing racism, the leading writers have not relinquished a  pre-existent racialist discourse.

      Ruth Benedict’s Race and Racism (1942) was a warning meant for the upstart capitalists to the Right of the paternalistic New Dealers.  While at first the cultural anthropologist describes scientific racism in “the Third Reich…[as] following a long series of precedents in European anti-Semitism,” Benedict switches.  First she presents a materialist account of antisemitism as false consciousness diverting German workers from the source of their worsening condition: Hitler’s “armament program [which] cut consumer’s goods and increased hours of work and lowered real wages.”  But then she calls for more “social responsibility” with its corporatist, fascist-sounding solution:  “A democratic state, when it lives up to its minimum definition at all, is the one institution that represents all parts of the body politic.  It can propose for itself [sic] programmes which will eventually benefit the whole body.”  I.e., if the American Scrooge did not adopt the reformist tactics of the corporatist liberals, he could expect Nazi-type populist demagoguery directed against the stony-hearted, hyper-individualistic [Jewishly avaricious] bourgeoisie resisting “the regulation of industry,” hence intensifying “racial persecution.”

      Ironically, this type of historical explanation assigns responsibility for Hitler’s rise to power to his self-designated Other: brutal nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism.  Hitler’s völkisch populist politics and dreams of autarky, however, cannot be conflated with liberalism.  I am not saying that Benedict deliberately does that in her publication of 1942; later centrist or Popular Front ideologues  [3] have constantly likened fascists, however, to McCarthy-ite “fascist Republicans” or “big business” or “Wall Street” or “monopoly capital” or “heavy industry” or “Zionists” or the National Association of Manufacturers in order to distance Hitler from other bureaucratic collectivists (i.e., themselves) intervening in collapsing economies during the interwar period. [4]

      Nor was Hitler in any sense Christian, though many of his most ardent Protestant supporters were.  George Allen Morgan was a philosophy professor at Duke University; in the early 1950s a member of the Psychology Strategy Board of the National Security Council.  In a prestigious publication, What Nietzsche Means (Harvard U.P., 1941), Morgan clearly reformulated cultural conflict in the radical thought of Hitler’s immediate predecessors.  Which is not to say that Morgan made the connection; rather, Morgan and his admirers joyfully defended Nietzsche, and, probably like Jung in 1946, took Hitler for a materialist guttersnipe for whom Nietzsche was the antidote.  To nineteenth-century élite social theorists, Morgan wrote, the relevant antithesis was no longer Christian and Jew, but the sternly ascetic “moderate” pagan culture of aristocracy versus the sentimental bourgeois culture of Jews/Christians that ever incited slave rebellions and destroyed genius–the individuality of the displaced aristocrats.  Crucially, Heraclitean cultural relativism sought to delegitimate the universalist epistemology of science: “diversity” was deployed against Jewish-Christian notions of equality.  Indeed, in the Table Talk Hitler clearly specifies his pagan sentiments: Christ was good because he was an Aryan, not the good Jew he appeared to be; rather, he was destroyed by gold-worshipping Jewish materialists for his anti-capitalist revolutionary activity; Paul and his Christian successors were all levelling bad Jews.  Why?  Because they sentimentally defied the aristocratic principle in nature and protected the weak; for Hitler, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were the world’s greatest philosophers.[5]  Morgan’s picture is consistent with the evidence I have seen; it does not jibe with the image of Hitler, the maven of sentimental mass culture, as both “Left” and “Right” factions in the American culture wars of the late 1980s and 90s would have it.[6]

      A second and related explanation holds that the Nazis were irrational because they attacked Good Jews (the assimilated German Jews) and/or confused capitalists with communists.[7]  If we could only get rid of such irrational antisemitism, these numerous social theorists may be saying, class envy would disappear.  According to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “A common mistake…is to attribute the existence of antisemitism to the antisemite’s jealousy of Jews’ economic success, instead of recognizing that the economic jealousy is a consequence of an already existing antipathy towards Jews.”[8] Here is the Harvard line: prejudice creates (correctable) class conflict. Similarly, cultural anthropologists like Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, and Klaus Theweleit concentrate on “types” fruitfully quivering in bipolar allegiance/tension.[9]  As Parsonian functionalists they were responding to left-wing social democratic arguments:  that industrial capitalism creates the material conditions and class agency for democratic reform; thus capitalism and socialism are not Hegelian “opposites” or antitheses; rather the rationalist reform movements, led by the most educated and advanced members of the working class, could progressively realize the unfinished libertarian project of the radical bourgeoisie: privileges and pleasures hitherto reserved for the leisured class could be available to all in a context of material abundance or sufficiency.  This is of course was the socialist theory of the pre-Lenin European Left, the Second International, not the bleak ascetic vision promulgated by many Leninists, radical Catholic corporatists and deep ecologists.[10]  When fascists saw materialist capitalism and materialist communism as closely related, they were often merely following assumptions of other Europeans, from the Left and Right alike.  But there were popular conspiracy theories as well, theories that rely upon “the switch.”

      The refusal to examine class position and allegiance in ourselves and in our objects of critical inquiry has created the cuckoo-land of the postwar period.  Take the psychoanalytic theory of ambivalence, as we shall see, a central issue in Hitler’s psychobiography.  Although (as psychiatrists) functionalists will recognize “ambivalence” it is usually conceived as a static push-pull of love-hate, Eros-Thanatos, or action-passivity originating solely in the family, that is, in the play of innate conflicting instincts, not as an historically specific dilemma in which one may, like Hitler, be forced to please social classes that may be at odds with each other; or as other rebellious petit-bourgeois intellectuals, be torn between pleasing oneself and one’s patrons.  That is, the artist may identify with the fully observant, fully feeling [Romantic Wandering Jew] then disavow and demolish the family-shattering perceptions (perhaps attached to angry fantasies) that have briefly been experienced and which have destroyed (in fantasy) the good parent who pays the rent.  Nor do the functionalists address the concrete content and “plausibility” of such “histories” as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which the communists are purveyors of false utopias, secretly in the pay of finance capitalists, who, controlling the media, mass desire, and the money supply, can make the masses rise at will (no conflict there!); nor do they examine the ongoing prestige of antidemocratic narratives–the linked cautionary myths of selfish (Jewish) Narcissus and over-reaching (Jewish) Icarus; nor the omnipresence of racial (i.e.,cultural) explanations for historical change, with history itself stigmatized as typical Jewish “reduction of religion.”[11]

      Alan Bullock (1991) emphasizes Hitler’s “twisted” antisemitism (madly confusing capitalist and communist, loathing miscegenation); but Bullock erases the tricky Jewish switch from emancipating communist to enslaving finance capitalist delineated in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Hitler had read, believed, and promoted.[12]  Lord Bullock fortifies instead his construction of a crazy Hitler (earlier identified as narcissistic failed romantic artist produced by “the countryside,”7-8, 11, 5), while curiously suggesting rational reasons (“internationalism, egalitarianism, and pacifism”) for Hitler’s antimodernism.  Bullock reports Hitler’s views:

 “In international affairs Jewish capitalists sought to divert nations from their true interests and plunge them into wars, gradually establishing their mastery over them with the help of money and propaganda.  At the same time, the Jewish leaders of the international Communist revolution had provided themselves with a world headquarters in Moscow from which to spread subversion internally through propagation of the Marxist parties of internationalism, egalitarianism and pacifism, all of which Hitler identified with the Jews and saw as a threat to Aryan racial values.  [Not to “national communism, anti-capitalist on a world scale”; i.e., natural order? [13]]

[Bullock, cont.]   Turning the argument the other way, anti-Semitism provided Hitler with further justification for Germany to follow a policy of conquering additional living space in the East at the expense of Bolshevik Russia, which Hitler constantly identified with the Jewish world conspiracy.  Not only would this strengthen the racial character of the German people, but it would destroy the base of international Jewry, and cut off the poisonous plant of Marxism at the root.     In Hitler’s twisted cosmological vision, the eternal enemy of the Aryans, the race which possessed the power to create, was the Jew, the embodiment of evil, the agent of racial pollution which had undermined and destroyed one civilization after another…(161).  His was a closed mind impervious to argument or doubt (163).” [14]

      The antifascist ethnopluralists, themselves tied to the “identity politics” that disguise competing material interests as the primary locus of social conflict,[15] ignore the testimony of historical actors. For the Nazis, “class” analysis (of the type offered here) was the poisonous plant of false consciousness: the foregrounding of class antagonisms made the true community of interest within the racial group invisible; thus, as their argument runs, the Protocols would make sense.  For instance, Alfred Rosenberg complained that Italian Fascists were blind to the hidden connections between finance capital and Marxism, were oblivious to the racial brilliance of switching Jews in adapting to novel situations and manipulating them toward the goal of world domination, i.e., the defeat of the völkisch, participatory politics the Nazis would initiate:

  [From Alfred Rosenberg, “The Folkish Idea of the State”;  unlike the Italian Fascists, National Socialists are not duped by Jews:] “Fascism still lacks the insight to see that international private and stock-exchange capitalism, against which Fascism has not begun to fight, was and is the very same element which pays for Marxist propaganda throughout the world, that a community of interest between Marxism and international loan capital existed and still exists–namely, to make the national industries which are tied to the soil dependent on mobile loan capital.  And Fascism has not yet comprehended that this community of interest is symbolized by the fact that the leadership of one as well as the other power finds itself almost exclusively in the hands of the Jewish race or of a few personalities compliant to Jewish money.  The danger for Fascism in Italy consists of the fact that it won a great victory, thanks to one personality, but does not yet represent such a strong ideological system that one could hope it would survive the death of Mussolini.  That danger already exists today that Jewish stock-exchange capitalism naturally takes into consideration the new force as such, and in the realization that it cannot be fought against directly, approaches Fascism as a false friend.

[Rosenberg, cont.] …The internationalism of the Jewish world stock exchange, in league with world revolution, stands today at the highest point of its power.  And yet this internationalism is already fighting for its existence, for its strongest opponent–still invisible in many states, in some already under way, fully developed in National Socialism–is growing.  And the world political task of National Socialism consists of knocking one state after the other out of the world-political power system of today, and in the end, leaving no people under international management, but only a series of organic, folkish state systems on a racial basis.”   [16] 

    Rosenberg’s populist fascism opposes the duplicitous tactic of “the rabbis” (quoted above) whose deployment of intellectual pluralism and combat only confuses the masses, subjecting them to the demagoguery that will destroy normal racial solidarity and independence for the pernicious internationalism that is always, at bottom, a ruse for the rule of money.  Rosenberg, a national socialist, knows exactly what the competition is offering; he is neither confused nor inconsistent, given his racialist assumptions.  Bankers are the enemy and the word banker is “raced” as Jewish and bankers are opposed in interest to “national industries…tied to the soil.”

      A third explanation sees Nazism as bourgeois decadence.  Popular among nativist radicals, it brings out the latent antisemitism in some New Leftists and in counter-culture anti-imperialism.  Both the Soviets and American crypto-Tories have made Hitler (the consummate anti-bourgeois, anti-sentimentalist!) into a product of disintegrating capitalism and sentimental bourgeois culture.  They and similar thinkers have conflated American puritans/Jews and Nazis, functionally equating “genocides,” in this case, the extermination of European Jews, the American Indians, American blacks, the Vietnamese, etc.  Harvard professor F.O. Matthiessen, “a Christian and a Socialist,”identified Melville’s Ahab, a prototypical American, with the alleged savagery of the Hebrew prophets (1941, 1948).[17]  Also centered at Harvard were the Walter Langer team, authors of The Mind of Adolf Hitler, originally a 1943 report for the OSS but revised for publication in 1972 to diagnose hippie-fascists.  Langer, aided anonymously by Henry A. Murray, Ernst Kris, and Bertram Lewin, attempted to account for his subject’s “ambitiousness” and “extraordinary political intuition” (atypical of a “basically illiterate peasant family”); Langer and Murray actually gave credence to rumors that Hitler carried Jewish blood: Langer reported that Hitler’s grandmother might have been a servant in the home of the Baron Rothschild; Murray was impressed by a Jewish godfather to Hitler;[18] what’s more Hitler’s brilliant (Jewish) insights into the minds and hearts of the little men (the class base of fascism for the CIA and other moderates during the 1950s) should be adapted by American mind-managers.  Here are more excerpts from the declassified Murray report to FDR, 1943: 

 [The following diagnosis of Hitler’s condition was prepared by W.H.D. Vernon, under the supervision of Murray and Gordon Allport, all Harvard men:] “ Now it is known that syphilophobia often has its roots in the childhood discovery of the nature of sexual congress between the parents.  With a father who was an illegitimate and possibly of Jewish origin, and a strong mother fixation, such a discovery by the child Adolf may well have laid the basis of the syphilophobia which some adventure with a Jewish prostitute in Vienna fanned to a full flame. [fn: “This is mere conjecture and must be treated as such. But it is the sort of explanation which fits known psychological facts”]…Hitler’s personality structure, though falling within the normal range, may now be described as of the paranoid type with delusions of persecution and of grandeur.  This stems from sado-masochistic splits in his personality…Just as the father is the cause of his mixed blood, the source of his domination and punishment, and of the restrictions of his own artistic development; just as in the childish interpretation of sexual congress, the father attacks, strangles, and infects the mother, so the Jew, international Jewish capital, etc., encircle and restrict Germany, threaten and attack her and infect her with impurities of blood…But the mother is not only loved but hated.  For she is weak, besides he is enslaved to her affections and she reminds him all too much, in his role as dominant father, of his own gentle sensitive nature.  So, though he depends on the German people for his position of dominance, he despises and hates them, he dominates them, and because he fears his very love of them, he leads them into the destructiveness of war where multitudes of them are destroyed.  Besides, the Jewish element in his father identification permits him to use all the so-called “Jewish” tricks of deceit, lying, violence, and sudden attack both to subject the German people as well as their foes (78-80).”

 [Henry Murray: Hitler’s “revengeful dominance” is “a counteraction to insulted narcism” presumably inflicted by his (possibly half-Jewish) father:] “…Knowing something of the character of Alois Hitler, we can safely infer experiences of abasement and humiliation suffered by the son….(196)…Since many of the prominent positions in Vienna were held by Jews, some of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, as well as his hatred of Vienna, can be attributed to humiliations received from the upper classes during these years…(199)  [The “determinants” of Hitler’s antisemitism:]…3. The suitability of the Jew as an object on which to project his own repudiated background and traits: his Jewish god-father (and possibly his Jewish grandfather), his physical timidity and sensitiveness, his polymorphous sexual impulses…5. The realization, after having once embarked on the road to militarism, that the stirred-up aggression of his followers needed some outlet…7. In building his military machine the anti-militaristic Jewish people could not be of much help to him.  At bottom, Fascism is the advocacy of the aggressive drive over and above the acquisitive drive (with which the Jew has generally been identified), and, by the same token, it is the substitution of Power and Glory for Peace and Prosperity, a materialistic paradise on earth (with which Communism and the Jew have also been identified).  Finally, the Nazi doctrine of fanatical irrationality (thinking with the blood) is antipathetic to the intellectual relativism of the Jew.  Thus there are several fundamental points of opposition (as well as certain points of kinship) [where?!! C.S.] between Nazi ideology and Jewish ideology (207-209).

 [Murray, cont.]  Hitler has a number of unusual abilities of which his opponents should not be ignorant.  Not only is it important to justly appraise the strength of an enemy but it is well to know whether or not he possesses capacities and techniques which can be appropriated to good advantage.  Hitler’s chief abilities, realizations, and principles of action as a political figure, all of which involve an uncanny knowledge of the psychology of the average man, are briefly these: [21 items follow, including:]…Heiden speaks of “Hitler’s frequently noted incapacity to impose his will in a small circle, and his consummate skill in winning over a crowd prepared by publicity and stage management, and then, with its aid, vanquishing the small circle, too” (211).

     So what is this “Jew”?  Brutal/humiliating/hypermasculine or timid and gay?  Or both, as in Jewish switching, a.k.a. “sudden attack”/”intellectual relativism”?  Not surprisingly, Hebraic types (for Murray, Melville as Ahab) were deplorable to the crypto-Tories/New Dealers, because, after instructing guileless WASPS in mind-control, they turn around to blast good non-humiliating father-figures, to decode the mythic narratives that alone  confer national unity or group solidarity in a pluralist society.[19] 

       The writing of George L. Mosse, distinguished mentor to a generation of New Left cultural historians at the University of Wisconsin, similarly transmits the ambivalence of the moderate conservatives.    Mosse’s investigations into the sources of Nazi culture address modernization theory and develop a utopian, mass political lineage for Nazism.[20]  What were the Nazis: moderns, antimoderns, or a distinctive, confusing new blend of both?  In answer to my letter requesting a clarification of his influential formulations, Mosse replied that he once believed “National Socialism was largely a critique of modernity,” a view he has since revised: “…I think it was part of a protest of modernization…I would say that National Socialism masked modernity even as they were furthering it.” [21] Mosse seems to be saying that, on second thought, the Nazis were cunning and dishonest in their goals.  I wonder if Mosse’s “switch” overrelies on a definition of modernity as the advent of industrialization, not the institutionalization of civil liberties in the state; the unintended effect is to relativize Nazi brutality and level distinctions between autocratic and democratic bourgeois societies, a difference Mosse is elsewhere careful to maintain, cautioning me that I could “certainly compare völkisch movements to American conservatism,” but not “Nazi Germany to the United States.”  He does not say which American conservatives he thinks are völkisch; probably the right-wing populists, not the (élite) ethnopluralists!  Mosse went on to distance himself from analyses like my own that discern analogies between the world-views of ethnopluralism (identity politics) and national socialism.  He wrote, “I reject the current controversy over macho multiculturalism or postmodernism having anything whatever to do with Hitler’s psyche.  That seems to me totally unhistorical.”

      The confusions of conservative Enlightenment permeate Mosse’s writing when he is not in his materialist mood.[22] In The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reasons of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (1968), a book about “emancipation of political action from moral restraint,” Mosse frets that “…the victory of the Dove can lead to unbridled idealism, and the ignoring of secular realities; while the victory of the Serpent means the total acceptance of what the sixteenth century called ‘Machiavellism’” (154).  Mosse lauds the Baroque synthesis that prudently balanced the Serpent and the Dove so that “neither obliterates the other.”  The realism of the secular world was not achieved through science and libertarian ideas, he argues, but through wise adjustments in religion itself (152) [cf. Dumont, 1977].

      The leftward trajectory of the Reformation is an ongoing concern for anyone who analyzes propaganda and fascism.  Writing seven years later in The Nationalization of the Masses (1975), Mosse makes the crucial point that the modern intellectual constantly historicizes and demystifies symbolic discourses; this habit militates against the maintenance of a stable national identity expressed through symbols.[23]  When inside the anti-materialist Aristotelian civic humanist tradition, Mosse will not turn around and demystify “moderate” mind-managers in the West, the followers of Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons.  Given his reputation among New Leftists and other antifascists, Mosse has presented a disturbingly inaccurate synthesis for the intellectual origins of fascist brutality in his “General Theory of Fascism.”[24]  Arguing against the “stereotype” that fascism is a reaction to liberalism and socialism (1), Mosse claims throughout that fascism (Nazism more than Italian fascism) selectively appropriated and, through its control of mass media, put a corporatist spin on Western ideals (5, 14, 17-19).  Hitler and Mussolini are carefully separated; Hitler came out of the jacobin antipluralist, antiparliamentary tradition of mass politics and popular culture (the repulsive part of the West); the more pluralist Mussolini allowed new and old élites to co-exist because he respected aristocratic culture and tradition; this aristocratic culture embraced the German idealism that Mosse suggests was foreign to Nazis (3, 10, 28, 33, 35).  Fascist violence originated in the brutality and camaraderie of World War I (which Mosse blurs with youth and the mobs of the French Revolution, aka Napoleon, “Romantic Nationalism,” “popular sovereignty” and “workers movements,” even “middle-class virtues”), not the medievalism of the aristocracy (4, 6, 9, 10, 17-19, 21, 25, 31, 37, 38).  There was no counter-revolution and no civil war; weak bourgeois institutions simply collapsed, and Hitler and Mussolini presented themselves to fill the void.  Conservatives left the Nazi government after six months (19).

      Mosse is politically allied to the pluralists and pragmatists of the moderate center (many of whom were intrigued with Italian Fascism during the 1930s) and who have abandoned the open-ended processes and unpredictable outcomes of liberal nationalism, instead redefining American nationality on the basis of a mosaic of rooted ethnic groups; i.e., they are ready to play ball inside the fences erected by élites.  With intellectuals like Talcott Parsons and Henry A. Murray, the moderate nationalists have recommended that the state rely on the manipulation of symbols to enforce “integration” and “national unity” while simultaneously denouncing the tyrannical animal called mass politics!

     Of course, as Mosse also realized, one problem with the formulation of a clear-cut Nazi radical conservatism or reaction [25] was Hitler’s desire to bring railroads, improved tools, and “welcoming farms” to central Europe; and, like other eugenicists, Hitler believed he was scientific, critical, and independent, following the truth wherever it might lead.  No less than the Burkean conservatives (including “socialists” like Karl Pearson, then the Fabians), the weaving, quilting Hitler wanted modernity and progress without the loss of a stable national/ethnic identity: capitalism without tears, slavery without guilt.  Sentimental Christians and Jews were de trop.

 [Hitler, Table-Talk, Oct. 15, 1941:]  Inflation is not caused by increasing the fiduciary circulation.  It begins on the day when the purchaser is obliged to pay, for the same goods, at higher sum than that asked the day before.  At that point, one must intervene.  Even to Schacht, I had to begin by explaining this elementary truth: that the essential cause of the stability of our currency was to be sought for in our concentration camps.  The currency remains stable when the speculators are put under lock and key.  I also had to make Schacht understand that excess profits must be removed from economic circulation….All these things are simple and natural.  The only thing is, one musn’t let the Jew stick his nose in.  The basis of Jewish commercial policy is to make matters incomprehensible for a normal brain.  People go into ecstasies of confidence before the science of the great economists.  Anyone who doesn’t understand is taxed with ignorance!  At bottom, the only object of all these notions is to throw everything into confusion (65-66).

 [Hitler, Nov. 5, 1941:]  The Jew is the incarnation of egoism…The Jew has talent for bringing confusion into the simplest matters, for getting everything muddled up…The Jew makes use of words to stultify his neighbors. And that’s why people make them professors….

     If the Jew weren’t kept presentable by the Aryan, he’d be so dirty he couldn’t open his eyes.  We can live without the Jews, but they couldn’t live without us.  When the European realizes that, they’ll all become simultaneously aware of the solidarity that binds them together.  The Jew prevents this solidarity.  The Jew owes his livelihood to the fact that this solidarity does not exist (119-120).

[Hitler, Feb. 3-4, 1942; Hitler identifies with heretics; Jews have instigated the “collective madness” of witch hunts carried out by organized Christianity:]  A Jew was discovered to whom it occurred that if one presented abstruse ideas to non-Jews, the more abstruse these ideas were, the more the non-Jews would rack their brains to try to understand them.  The fact of having their attention fixed on what does not exist must make them blind to what exists.  An excellent calculation on the Jew’s part.  So the Jew smacks his thighs to see how his diabolic strategem has succeeded.  He bears in mind that if his victims suddenly became aware of these things, all Jews would be exterminated.  But, this time, the Jews will disappear from Europe.

     The world will breathe freely and recover its sense of joy, when this weight is no longer crushing its shoulders (288).

               [2] Henry A. Turner, Jr. ed. Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant (Yale UP, 1985): 69-72. Otto Wagener “was a prominent oficial in the Nazi Party with close ties to Adolf Hitler from the autumn of 1929 until the summer of 1933. Wagener served as chief of staff for the storm troop auxiliary, the S.A.; headed the  Economic Policy Section of the party’s national executive (Reichsleitung); worked on special assignment for Hitler in Berlin; headed the party’s Economic Policy Office during the early months of the Third Reich; and briefly served as commissar for the economy.” [ix]

                [3] See the writings of Nation editor Cary McWilliams or the speeches of Michael Parenti.

                [4] Though he distances himself from Marxist explanations for Nazism/fascism as the rule of monopoly capital, Ian Kershaw does see entrepreneurship as a prominent value of Nazism. See The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives, Fourth edition (London: Arnold, 2000): 67. “The mammoth profits of the major concerns were no incidental by-product of Nazism, whose philosophy was closely tied in with provision of a free hand for private industry and eulogization of the entrepreneurial spirit.”

                [5] Table Talk, May 16, 1944, 720; but Hitler also admired Uncle Tom’s Cabin!  Could it be because the freed slaves were to be repatriated in Africa?

              [6] [From my letter to an historian of madness:] I’ve started to read the short book on Hitler and power by Ian Kershaw, and was fascinated to see that he follows a Weberian model of the charismatic leader casting a spell on the nationalized masses, and notes, without explanation, that Hitler sees everything in black and white, vulgarly simplifying complex historical events…And there is not a word about German Romanticism, or Herder, and only unexplained mentions of the volkisch Right. Hitler is treated as the man of the mob, its embodiment even, an outsider and autodidact. So for these conservative writers (like Kershaw), Hitler is fascinating as the encapsulated horror of five centuries of lower-class hubris. And the lower orders really are outsiders to the empyrean realms of traditional elites, are they not? 

                [7] For examples of German irrationality in confusing capitalists and communists, See J.P. Stern, Hitler: The Fuehrer and the People (U.C. Press,1975): 80; Arno Mayer, Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? (Pantheon, 1988): 92; Jeffrey Alexander and Chaim Seidler-Feller, “False Distinctions and Double Standards: The Anatomy of Antisemitism at UCLA,” Tikkun, Jan-Feb 1992, 12-14.  For the latter, genocide was waged initially against assimilated German Jews; it was not about class, rather “nonrational, psychological, and symbolic causes were more important causes of antisemitism than many had once believed.”  The crazy German explanation permeates New Left culture, see Ellen Willis’ well-known article on the myth of the powerful Jew, Village Voice, 9/3/79.  The oddness of the Germans in confusing capitalists and communists seems to be taken for granted by nearly every Jewish scholar I have consulted. See also Louis Harap, who applies the same formula to the Populists: “For Donnelly, the Jews were the preternaturally clever men who were both the money power and the brains of the revolutionary resistance to that power. (This was an example of the polar stereotyping that was to become more common in the twentieth century, culminating in the canard that the Jews were not only the banker- capitalists who were impoverishing the people, but also the leaders of the Bolsheviks, who were leading man into a subhuman state.” Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), 428. But evangelical Catholics in the 1930s were attacking materialistic civilizations (i.e., rational, secular society): Capitalism and Bolshevism had similarly elevated “natural man.”

     More recently, Saul Friedländer creates a set of opposites that are not antitheses: Referring both to rhetorical strategies in both Mein Kampf and the film The Eternal Jew, and noting that “images of superhuman control typically gives way to the second one, subhuman threats of contamination, microbial infection, spreading pestilence,” he writes, “Images of superhuman power and subhuman pestilence are contrary representations, but Hitler attributed both to one and the same being, as if an endlessly changing and endlessly mimetic force had launched a constantly shifting offensive against humanity.

“Many of the images, not only in Hitler’s vision of the Jew but also in Nazi anti-Semitism generally, seem to converge in such constant transformations. These images are the undistorted echo of past representations of the Jew as endlessly changing and endlessly the same, a living dead, either a ghostly wanderer or a ghostly ghetto inhabitant. Thus the all-pervasive Jewish threat becomes in fact formless and unrepresentable; as such it leads to the most frightening phantasm of all: a threat that looms everywhere, that, although it penetrates everything, is an invisible carrier of death, like poison gas spreading over the battlefields of the Great War.” In Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York:  HarperCollins, 1997): 101-102. Friedländer begins the quoted paragraph by criticizing Hitler’s view of the Jewish conspiracy as implying “a stupefied, hypnotized mass of peoples completely at the mercy of the Jewish conspiracy,” but is he offering a similarly irrationalist explanation as “in fact formless and unrepresentable”? Although Friedländer describes “The Eternal Jew” exhibition of 1937 (p.253-54), an exhibition that presented “racially typical” images of Jews, he does not go on to review the Christian myth of the Wandering Jew (also  der ewige Jude) in all its variants; variants that suggest the wandering Jew as having the characteristics of the return of the repressed; i.e., the facts of the material world that cannot be successfully repressed, but that return in distorted and threatening forms that must be controlled or eliminated for the sake of social harmony.

                [8] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Executioners, p.40. Cf. Ivan Illich, KPFK broadcast with Jerry Brown, April 5, 1996.  Class societies beset by political conflict (hence structurally discouraging friendship) arise from the artificial manipulation of needs and desires in the modern world.  Overstimulating music (whatever departed from quieting Gregorian chants) have contributed to [anomie].  Illich participates in the ongoing luxury debate, argued against materialism and on behalf of politeia.

                [9] See Gregory Bateson, “Morale and National Character,” Civilian Morale, Second Yearbook of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, ed. Goodwin Watson (Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942): 71-91; Ruth Benedict, Race and Racism, 1942, 163: “If we are to make good use of the great powers of education in combating racism, two goals should be kept clearly distinct.  On the one hand, it is desirable to teach in the regular social studies the facts of race and of the share of different races in our civilization.  On the other hand, it is necessary to hold up ideals of a functioning democracy; it is necessary to help children to understand the mutual interdependence of different groups; it is necessary to encourage comparison of our social conditions with conditions that are better than ours as well as with those that are worse.”  Of course, the idea that race yields other than superficial physical differences is denied throughout, so why is she so insistent on maintaining race as an analytic category?  Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1989) takes the same “moderate” position, defining its gentle, poetic, pacifist, fragment-loving antifascism against totalitarianism: both militarist (armored) Right and bourgeois scientific hyper-intellectual (armored) Left (including Marx and Freud).  Unlike these avowedly feminist theorists, the fascist type loathes the people he mobilizes (this is the conservative view of Hitler as bad Jew).

                [10] Cf. Meinecke, German Catastrophe, 72-73: “Hitler wanted to overtrump the bourgeois, class-egotistical nationalism of his heavy-industry patrons and money providers, and also the Marxism of the Russian bolshevists, which he attacked with special zeal and which wanted to condemn the bourgeoisie to extinction.  He therefore seized upon the idea that the creation of a new fruitful folk community need not rest upon the one-sided victory of the one or the other of the social forces contending against one another–that the natural groupings of society did not have to be unceremoniously destroyed–but that they must be steered around and educated to serve a community which included them all.  Hitler’s undertaking seemed to promise more continuity with the traditions and values of the existing bourgeois culture than the radical new edifice of bolshevism.  With this idea he bribed a wide circle of citizens.  The working class, he intended, should be inspired with the full pride that their productive work merited and thereby lose all their inferiority complexes which sprang from the beginning of the class struggle.  The same fundamental idea of nurturing the special pride of the professional classes and amalgamating them with the all-embracing community was also extended to the peasantry.  There was no lack of specious enticements for all classes–celebrations, festivals, and so forth…[To combat liberalism’s amorphousness, Hitler created] those youth organizations which were expected to give the whole coming generation uniform basic conceptions and at the same time to satisfy the natural impulses of youth.”

                [11] See editorial, “Psycho-analysis and Faith,” Times Literary Supplement, May 27, 1939, 313, quoted in Freud Without Hindsight: Reviews of his Work 1893-1939, ed. Norman Kiell (International Universities Press, 1988): 647-648: “What is perhaps most remarkable about this theory [Moses and Monotheism, that barbaric Europeans are scapegoating Jews because they (Nazis) are really anti-Christian] is that it is peculiarly Jewish in its reduction of religion to the plane of history, though this plane is conceived with a new comprehensiveness.  But unlike the similar attempt of another great and influential Jewish thinker, Karl Marx, Freud’s is based on the conviction that Jewish monotheism, and its creative development into Christianity, are definitely in the main line of human progress.”

                [12] See Norman Cohn, Warrant For Genocide (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968).  Cf. my account of the Protocols with Leonard Dinnerstein, “Antisemitism in Crisis Times in the United States,” Anti-semitism In Times of Crisis, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (N.Y.: N.Y.U. Press, 1991): 216.  “According to the “Protocols” Jews had an affinity for Bolshevism, manipulated economic and political power, and were determined to undermine the world order.  They allegedly favored alcoholism, spread pornography, subverted Christian principles, and would no doubt take over American government and society if allowed to do so.”  The Introduction argues that religious antisemitism was secularized: “…the perversity of the Jew’s nature in betraying Christ over and over again (throughout history) becomes the biologically determined quality of the Jew which leads to the Jew’s heartless role in the rise of capitalism (or communism–take your pick)….”  The functionalist authors, themselves wedded to “identity politics,” have erased the particular threat of “Jewish” science and anthropology which found a fluid “identity” in learned experience, not tradition or the acquired instincts of national character.

                [13] See Hitler’s Secret Book (N.Y.: Grove Press, 1961, written 1928): 132, 135: “…present day Russia is anything but an anticapitalist state.  It is, to be sure, a country that has destroyed its own national economy but, neverthless, only in order to give international finance capital the possibility of an absolute control…” p.135: “…we base ourselves [!] on the hope that one day the Jewish character–and thereby the most fundamentally international capitalistic character of Bolshevism in Russia–might disappear in order to make place for a national communism, anti-capitalist on a world scale.  Then this Russia, permeated once more by national tendencies, might very well come up for consideration in terms of an alliance with Germany.” This is a very damaging quote to those who think that Nazism was not a movement of the Left, or who while deploring the right-wing direction of nationalism, make tactical alliances with national liberation movements, no matter how anti-intellectual.

                [14] Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Harper Collins, 1991).  See pages 160-61 for Bullock’s distortion of Hitler’s attitudes toward propaganda as revealed in Mein Kampf, taking his quotes out of context and implying the canard that Hitler cynically and consistently promoted the Big Lie (to bamboozle Germans), rather than fastening such deceptions on the Big Jewish Press and British propaganda during the World War,  but the good father/good teacher Hitler was protecting the masses from the confusion that resulted from ambiguity and uncertainty. ).

                [15] Not only between capital and labor but between producers competing on the market. Whether one is a Marxist or libertarian will affect one’s evaluation of market competition.

                [16] Alfred Rosenberg, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” “The Folkish Idea of the State,” Nazi Ideology before 1933, Introduced and transl. by Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J.Rupp (Austin: University of Texas, 1978): 57, 64-65, 70-71.  These ideas should be compared to David Welch’s reading of the 1934 Nuremburg rally (as presented in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) in which Welch ignores Hitler’s obvious attempt to affirm labor unity with the Party after the purge of the S.A.Rohm-Strasser faction, apparently in order (for Welch) to claim the over-riding interest of establishing “the principle of leadership” (i.e., Hitler is the hypnotist lacking a coherent ideology).  However, the theme disclosed in Welch’s evidence is not leadership as domination, but merging/the rebuilding of Germany as a proletarian nation/immortality.  See David Welch, Propaganda and German Cinema 1933-1945  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983): 156-157.  The lines Welch quotes that refute his own argument include “…Corpsmen. ONE PEOPLE, ONE FšHRER, ONE REICH!” ONE.  Today we are all workers together and we are working with iron… SONG. We are true patriots, our country we rebuild.  We did not stand in the trenches amidst the exploding grenades but nevertheless we are soldiers. VARIOUS..down with the Red Front and reaction. ALL. You are not dead, you live in Germany.  HITLER. My comrades, you have now presented yourself to me and the whole German people in this way for the first time.  You are representatives of a great ideal.  We know that for millions of our countrymen work will no longer be a lonely occupation but one that gathers together the whole of our country.  No longer will anybody in Germany consider manual labor as lower than any other kind of work.  The time will come when no German will be able to enter the community of this nation without having first passed through your community.  Remember that not only are the eyes of hundreds of thousands in Nuremberg watching, but the whole of Germany is seeing you for the first time.  You are Germany and I know that Germany will proudly watch its sons marching forward into the glorious future….”

     Cf. the introduction to the screening of Triumph of the Will, on public television, 9/17/92.  Film critic Michael Medved explained that the world’s greatest culture had succumbed to monstrous madness; the thrust of the propaganda was put vaguely as Hitler the Savior’s unification of Germany in response to the S.A. purge, the only source of divisiveness Medved mentioned.  The film was so compelling, he said, that only clips could be shown in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series.  The issue of Nazi Germany’s pseudo-proletarian identity was entirely evaded by Medved, yet it was the principle theme of the film, with the frequent reiteration of Germany’s classless and casteless new social structure (at the same time legitimating the leadership of the most racially fit fighting minority that had selflessly brought the revolution to this stage).  In fact, the S.A. was not a source of division, but the stronghold of “left” populists who had demanded a völkisch, anticapitalist revolution that would abolish class divisions to restore racial unity; it was always the materialist bourgeoisie, Marxists and Jews who intruded, not the S.A. splitting the country.  I found the two hour film soporific; the claim that it is brilliant and irresistible supports the thesis that Hitler successfully deployed propaganda to put one over on the German people.

                [17] See F.O.Matthiessen, American Renaissance (Oxford U.P., 1941); From The Heart of Europe (Oxford U.P.,1948): 182-183.  See Lord James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol.II (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1891): 275-276, 278, 281-82, for a more ambivalent account of American [Chosen People]: “If you ask an intelligent citizen why he so holds [incorrect majorities will be persuaded of the right], he will answer that truth and justice are sure to make their way into the minds and consciences of the majority.  This is deemed an axiom, and the more readily so deemed, because truth is identified with common sense, the quality which the average citizen is most confidently proud of possessing.  This feeling shades off into another, externally like it, but at bottom distrust–the feeling not only that the majority, be it right or wrong, will and must prevail, but that its being the majority proves it to be right.  This feeling appears in the guise sometimes of piety and somtimes of fatalism.  Religious minds hold–you find the idea underlying many books and hear it in many pulpits–that Divine Providence has specially chosen and led the American people to work out a higher type of freedom and civilization than any other state has yet attained, and that this great work will surely be brought to a happy issue by the protecting hand which has so long guided it (276).”

                [18] Walter Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (Basic Books, 1972): 102-103. Murray, op.cit.

                [19] Alex Bein (cited above) relies on Alan Bullock and the Langer report in his presentation of Hitler’s personality.  The influence of the crypto-Tories in American Studies is the terrain of my book on the Melville revival.  One of the central debates in American history surfaces in an essay by Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” Region, Race and Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (N.Y.: Oxford U.P., 1982): 143-177.  This subtly argued essay challenged the New Left/American Studies interpretation of white supremacy (not class conflict) as the motor of American history.

         [20] Compare to Sternhell, Ze’ev. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Meisel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Pre-fascist ideology in France set the stage for the Vichy Revolution in 1940-41. Revolutionary syndicalism and radical nationalism of the late 19^th century were fused in the 1920s and 1930s to create a novel, mass based, youth-inspired revolt against materialism and decadence blamed on liberalism, democracy and reformed Marxism (i.e. social democracy). For the prefascists, the enemy was finance capital and monopoly, seen as Jewish, American and British. The deracinated individual was the source of decadence, and the compensatory discourse was corporatist/communitarian and meant to integrate the proletariat into the nation through a strong planning state, coterminous with the nation. Emphasized family, work (in tradition of medieval guilds), and region. Did not eliminate profit or private property. Neither ideology nor economic crisis alone could have created this revolutionary departure from the principles of 1789; hence the implicit warning to other social democrats: don’t allow economic crisis to develop: this ideology is still extant. Sternhell somewhat plays down the antisemitic, Christian character of the sources of the ideology, though he does not deny it. France was “impregnated” by the ideology of fascism (a revolution of the spirit: modern, aesthetic, and moral, exalting blood and soil, instinct, force, violence, the healthy body, sacrifice, and monkish asceticism, futurism, modern architecture of Le Corbusier, and Freud). The nonconformist journalist politicos in the 1930s penetrated popular culture; only a few of them, however, explicitly embraced nazism and fascism, though they came very close. Henri De Man the principle theorist of an idealist Marxism. (Sternhell does not consider historical materialism to be idealist.)

    This book is directed against Marxist interpretations of fascism as a reaction by monopoly capital to working class militancy in a period of economic crisis. Sternhell thanks A. James Gregor (a self-described fascist and biographer of Mussolini) in the acknowledgments.(vii) and places five of his books in the bibliography. Also Mosse’s General Theory of Fascism, and Masses and Man.

    Sterhell does not explain how Freud could contribute to fascist ideology, given that Freud did not advocate unleashing the instincts, as did Jung, for whom the unconscious, home of the racial ancestry and spirits, was a source of creativity.

                [21] Cf. Erik Levi, Music In The Third Reich (N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1994): 124, commenting on the paradoxical Nazi views of technological progress misted over with anti-industrial romanticism. , a conflict that was apparent in confused music policies.

                [22] See The Crisis of the German Ideology (1962), and Toward The Final Solution (1980).

                [23] George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany From the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (Howard Fertig, 1975).

                [24] See Mosse, “Introduction: A General Theory of Fascism,” International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979): 1-41.

                [25] Mosse’s Nazi Culture was criticized by readers as ignoring the role of technology in the Third Reich, he reports.  See also Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967)

Time enough for a quick thought about not getting caught up in trying to settle on the perfect answer…

The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.
- Ruth Benedict

The Native Voice is the official organ of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, an organization which has been active since 1931 and continues to do good work, especially in relation to aboriginal fishing rights, and aboriginal fishers themselves.  The NBBC has put PDF copies of  many editions of the Native Voice online from the years 1947-1955.  These archived issues offer a fascinating glimpse into the the mid-20th century state of First Nations politics, and everyday life besides.

To the right, for example, click on the text image to go to an issue wherein the NBBC riffs (positively, in this case) on  a Ruth Benedict article.

The Dionysians Strike Back

It is rare to see such responses (positive or negative) to the Anthropological Literature. Scroll lower in that article for 1947 ‘News from Ahousat”, a statement on segregation in PRince Rupert cinemas, and an odd “humour” column which seems rather offensive and patronizing in retrospect.    I am looking forward to trawling, or trolling, through these archives as the days go by.  Kudos to the NBBC for not only putting these documents online, but for the excellent, clear digitization — clearly someone took care making these files.

E’ stato recentemente ristampato da Laterza uno dei più famosi saggi del Novecento dedicati alla cultura giapponese, Il crisantemo e la spada di Ruth Benedict (pp. 350, € 20). Si tratta di un’opera commissionata all’autrice, docente alla Columbia University, dall’Office of War Information degli Stati Uniti nel 1944 per studiare il misconosciuto Giappone, in modo tale da colpire con più efficacia i suoi punti deboli.

Ecco la presentazione, tratta dalla Prefazione di Ian Buruma:

Il crisantemo e la spada è un classico in virtù della sua lucidità intellettuale e stilistica. La Benedict era una scrittrice eccellente che spiegava idee complicate senza ricorrere al gergo tremendo degli addetti ai lavori. Lo stile, qualcuno direbbe, è un riflesso del carattere. Era una scrittrice di grande umanità e generosità di spirito. Pur essendo la descrizione di un nemico mortale approntata in tempo di guerra, questo libro, se letto oggi, forse potrebbe non offendere un lettore giapponese, anche qualora lui o lei fosse in disaccordo con alcune delle conclusioni dell’autrice. Nonostante i numerosi cambiamenti che hanno trasformato il Giappone e i giapponesi nel corso dell’ultimo mezzo secolo, c’è molto in questo libro che ancora suona vero.

Indice: Prefazione di Ian Buruma – Ringraziamenti – I Il Giappone come oggetto di studio – II I Giapponesi e la guerra – III « Ognuno al proprio posto » – IV La riforma Meiji – V I debiti nei confronti del passato e del presente – VI La difficile impresa di ripagare l’« on » – VII Il modo più difficile di ripagare un debito – VIII Il dovere di cancellare il disonore – IX Le passioni umane – X Il dilemma della virtù – XI L’autodisciplina – XII L’educazione del bambino – XIII Il Giappone dal giorno della sconfitta – Glossario – Note – Indice dei nomi

Un brano dell’opera: La difficile impresa di ripagare l’« on »

L’on è un debito e come tale, bisogna pagarlo, ma, in effetti, i Giapponesi considerano le forme di pagamento vero e proprio come appartenenti a tutt’altra categoria. Essi ritengono la nostra etica, che confonde, teoricamente e praticamente, due categorie diverse quali sono quella degli obblighi e quella dei doveri, altrettanto curiosa di quanto sarebbero curiosi, ai nostri occhi, i rapporti commerciali in comunità tribali il cui linguaggio non distinguesse il «debitore» dal «creditore» nelle operazioni monetarie. Nella società giapponese, la più importante, ed onnipresente, forma di debito che va sotto il nome di on è totalmente distinta dall’atto assolutamente costrittivo con cui il debito viene pagato e per indicare il quale si usa una terminologia che denota un contenuto concettuale completamente diverso. L’avere un debito (un on) non è un segno di merito, mentre il ripagarlo lo è. Il merito è, infatti, legato al fatto che ci si dedichi attivamente all’« impresa » della riconoscenza. Per capire questa questione del merito, può essere utile per noi fare un parallelo con quello che avviene in America nel campo delle operazioni finanziarie, comprese le sanzioni previste per i trasgressori delle leggi sulla proprietà. La gente è obbligata a mantenere gli impegni assunti e non vi sono attenuanti per chi si appropria dei beni altrui, così come non si considera il fatto di pagare o meno il debito contratto con una banca collegato a una questione di impulsi personali e si ritiene il debitore responsabile dell’aumento degli interessi e della somma originaria presa a prestito. Invece, il patriottismo e gli affetti familiari, per esempio, vengono visti come appartenenti a tutt’altra sfera, in quanto l’amore è visto come un fatto emotivo, il cui valore aumenta, aumentando la spontaneità con cui viene dato. Il patriottismo, inteso come il fatto di porre gli interessi della propria patria sopra a tutto, è ritenuto un atteggiamento alquanto donchisciottesco, e del tutto incompatibile con la debolezza della natura umana, a meno che gli Stati Uniti non vengano attaccati dal nemico. Venendo a mancare il fondamentale postulato giapponese del grande debito contratto automaticamente da ogni essere umano per il fatto di essere stato messo al mondo, pensiamo che ogni individuo dovrebbe, in caso di bisogno, avere compassione dei propri genitori ed aiutarli, che non dovrebbe picchiare la moglie e che dovrebbe provvedere alle necessità dei propri figli. Non si considerano, però, questi doveri alla stregua di un debito pecuniario, né se ne trae un tornaconto come se si trattasse di una questione d’affari. In Giappone, invece, si considerano tutti questi comportamenti alla stessa stregua in cui si considera, in America, la solvibilità finanziaria e le sanzioni previste sono altrettanto severe di quelle previste in America per chi non paga i conti o non corrisponde gli interessi ipotecari. Per i Giapponesi si tratta, cioè, di questioni di cui non ci si deve preoccupare solo in casi di emergenza, come, ad esempio, in caso di una dichiarazione di guerra o di grave malattia dei genitori, ma sono cose che costituiscono una costante preoccupazione per ogni individuo indistintamente, paragonabile a quella di un piccolo agricoltore dello Stato di New York preoccupato per le ipoteche che gravano sul suo podere o a quella di un finanziere di Wall Street, che veda il mercato salire dopo aver venduto «allo scoperto». I Giapponesi dividono in categorie distinte, ciascuna con regole sue proprie, le forme di pagamento dell’on che non hanno limiti né di valore né di tempo, da quelle con un equivalente quantitativo e che si è tenuti a rispettare in casi particolari. Il pagamento illimitato di un debito si esprime con il termine gimu e di esso si dice: « Non è possibile ripagare neppure una decimillesima parte di (questo) on. Il gimu di ciascun individuo comprende due diversi tipi di doveri: ripagare l’on verso i propri genitori, indicato con il termine ko, e ripagare l’on verso l’Imperatore indicato con il termine chu.

There’s a story of a little 102 pound man in India who went around half naked, who lived in a mud hut that never had a telephone or an electric light or running water.  He did not own a car.  He had no wealth, no armies, no servants, nor diplomats.  He never sought, nor ever held, public office, and yet the great British Empire realized they could not rule India against Gandhi and they could not rule India without Gandhi.  Because of his uncompromising honesty and unmatched willpower, Mohandas K. Gandhi was the most powerful man in India despite being socially retarded, having a bad temper, and being a self-declared coward in his earlier life.

Similarly, a young man grew up in rural South Africa content and at peace with his circumstances and the world.  “I was not born with a hunger to be free,” he writes:

“But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free.  That is when the hunger for my own freedom became the greater hunger for the freedom of my people.”  Nelson Mandela slowly and incrementally transformed from a content country boy into an active freedom-fighter against the cruel Apartheid South African government.  He further explains, “It was this desire for the freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life, that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to live like a monk.  I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next man, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free.  Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me (Mandela, 1994)”

Mandela spent over 27 years in prison for fighting against injustice.  A short time after he was finally freed from prison he became the president of his home country, South Africa.

What was it that made these “cowardly” and “frightened” men become the most powerful men in their respective nations?  Louis Fischer, Gandhi’s biographer, calls this process by which a below-average human being can raise himself to great power and accomplishment the “miracle of personality (Fischer, 1948).”

Personality and Personality Dynamics

Personality may be defined as the underlying causes within the person of individual behavior and experience (Cloninger, 2008).  From this definition, and slight variations of it, stem what are called personality dynamics.  Personality dynamics refers to the mechanisms by which personality is expressed, often focusing on the motivations that direct behavior (Cloninger, 2008).

There are many motivations, on many levels, that add direction and energy to behavior.  Many theorists have developed theories trying to explain different possible motivations behind behaviors.  Freud believed that sexual motivations were the underlying personality.  Carl Rogers thought there was a tendency for a person to move toward higher levels of development.  Viktor Frankl believed finding meaning was the motivating force behind personality.  Even when life is not ideal and even at its worst, life has found its worth if there is meaning as a motivating force.  Frankl (1959) states, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of sacrifice.”  Other theorists proposed that each individual has their own goals and motives of personality and therefore there are a multiplicity of categories and adjectives to explain these motives.

Cognitive Processes and Culture and Personality Dynamics

Through senses and cognitive processes interpreting stimuli, we have an understanding of the world.  If attention is not given to a stimulus or our senses are dulled or handicapped, we will interpret the world differently than if we perceived the stimulus in a more veritable form.  The person who is blind will perceive the world in ways in which a seeing person has no idea, and vice versa.  Within the brain of a blind person, sight is not processed in the visual cortex but that visual cortex has adapted to giving above average attention to hearing and proprioception. (Schwartz, 2002).  Thus, cognition-or the lack thereof-is compensated to a degree from one area to another.  Through cognitive processes giving attention to and interpreting our senses, one grasps somewhat, those motives discussed earlier, and acts and reacts according to one’s personality.  To understand human functioning, it is imperative to account for the physical, emotional, mental, social, cultural, political, and spiritual dimensions and how one cognitively interprets these respective facets of understanding (Corey, 2005).

Today, the term “culture” is widely understood to refer to the systematic body of learned behavior which is transmitted to children from parents, schools, and communities (Robbins, 2006).  Not very long ago, “culture” was a concept that was part of the vocabulary of only a small and technical group of anthropologists.  It hadn’t yet been widely accepted that from the moment of our births, the customs into which one is born exert an enormous impact on one’s experience, personality, and behavior.

This changed with the work of one of the world’s most renowned anthropologists, Ruth Benedict.  According to her student, friend, and colleague, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict’s work is the main reason that the words “in our culture” have come to be widely used and understood.  Largely thanks to her, people have come to understand how profoundly one is shaped by the cultures in which one lives (Robbins, 2006).

Important Influence on Personality Development

Culture, in its more inclusive sense, is an important and major influence on personality development.  It is a combination of innate personality characteristics reacting with one’s culture, including environment and social interactions, which produce behavior in an individual.  To understand one’s personality one must understand the culture which gave it fruition.  And through that understanding one is able to gain a deeper understanding of that person’s behavior.  Gandhi’s and Mandela’s behavior would appear heinous and senseless without the proper cultural context.  Yet within the proper context these men are referred to with such adjectives as “hero”, “freedom fighter”, and “Mahatma” (great soul).  Understanding personality is a monumental task that includes understanding a person’s whole self.

Article by Ernie Wild

I am down with the flu so I am coasting.  The only good thing about this is  people don’t expect you to move much.  I’m presently sitting in state surrounded with books I have been trying to read for months.  If I act sick enough family leaves me alone and the only problem with that is you can’t run a household which consists of a lot of animals without blowing your cover.  I am yelling downstairs, getting hoarse, trying to evaluate who is where (dogs) and what is happening with the cats.  I am also falling asleep with the daytime meds that claim this doesn’t happen.

I have this pile of books, one of them Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a fascinating post WWII study of Japanese life and culture.  She was ordered to Washington to do this study, and since it was during 1944, she did it by interviewing Japanese detainees in camps here in the States.

Now we have hundreds of books on Japan and the Japanese, but back then there was only John Embree’s Japanese Nation and some few studies done in the late 19th century.  So she’s breaking a lot of ground here, and one of the sections (actually a theme that runs through the entire book) is about shame and guilt.  She was intrigued that the Japanese she spoke with were less concerned with internalized, standardized rules about right and wrong, and more interested in others’ opinions.

Frankly, this is a deep study and blows the lid off a lot of mythology we Westerners have about the Japanese psyche and culture.

Ack!  I am also trying to get my bleary eyes around Kato’s  A History of Japanese Literature (the first thousand years).

Perhaps I will need two influenza to do this.

The Japanese have the most beautiful books, bound in such lovely styles, and the glossiness of them are a delight to hold in your hand.  Love Songs from the Man’yoshu is a book so beautifully done that it seems a physical work of art.  It is, because the papercuts inside are unreal.  The poetry, too.

Perhaps it is because the heat down here in the South is abating a bit, the rains are coming and there is a touch of that lovely fall we race through August just to sniff and embrace, but I am turning my head towards this study.  “The Zar Tale” is mostly in the can, and I am anxious to get back to a half-finished novel  “The Kimono” and see what can be made with that.

Beginning that book was like falling down a rabbit hole.  It started with an actual antique kimono I bought from a dealer in Atlanta, and it’s a heavy, black silk crepe, something a married woman would wear.  There are 5 chrysanthemum crests on  the body of the piece, with an ivory tan inside, but what is most beautiful, intriguing is this river of silver cloth embossed with embroidery that runs like a river around the hem in waves and up into the inner construction of the furisode.  It dates from the Art Deco period.  When I had that gown in my hands, it was like I was transported somewhere, where I didn’t actually know at the time, but I was to soon.  Writing a physical description to someone was like a transport back into some other time.  So….this book, a time warp from the 21st century with a magical, haunted kimono to the 16th century was born.

I am rambling now, and I use the excuse of the meds.  But pick up Benedict’s book if you want a good study.  Of course, there probably are many better now, but this work was seminal.

Lady Nyo

THE STILLNESS OF DEATH

Lady Nyo knelt on her cushion, her tea cup before her. She did not move.

Lord Nyo was drunk again and when in his cups, the household scattered for hiding places. In the kitchen was a crawl space. Three servants were hiding their heads under there and a fourth was wearing an iron pot on his head.

Lord Nyo was known for three things: archery, temper and his drunkenness.

Tonight he strung the seven foot bow and donned his quiver high on his back. He looked at the pale face of his wife, his eyes blurry, and remembered the first time he bedded her. She was fifteen. Her body had been powdered silk, bones like butter with the blush of ready passion coursing through her like a tinted stream. She was still beautiful, but too fragile for his tastes. Better a plump courtesan, not all delicate and saddened beauty.

In quick succession he drew back the bow and let five arrows fly through the shoji screen. Each grazed his wives’ ear.

Lady Nyo knew her life hung on her stillness. She willed herself dead. Death, after all these years with him, would have been welcome.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2009

From “A Seasoning of Lust” lulu.com

]]> http://psycentral.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/thats-just-the-way-i-am-problem-solving/ Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:32:42 +0000 Gary Wood http://psycentral.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/thats-just-the-way-i-am-problem-solving/

This weekend, while I should have been working on cramming all sorts of anthropological theory tidbits into my already over-crammed cranium, I made some progress of another kind.

Came up with a great idea for my wedding invitations that was inspired by this photo:

I found it on the Post-Secret France website a while back, and after seeing it pop up on a few other blogs, it stuck. At fist I thought I’d do something completely different inspired by it, something with paint and wood and glue. But then I found this fantastic plastic wood paneling that  will work perfectly as a tree. So our invitations will be some combo of a red and black back ground, with a tree on it, with our names carved into the trunk in a cutesy little heart. And there will, most likely, be a small bird somewhere. Now if only we could figure out what time the wedding should be at!!

The other kind of work, the study work, is not going as well as planned. While my final exam is less cumulative than anticipated, the sheer volume of articles that must be read and, as my prof puts it, “digested” is far too large for me to find a comfort zone. Especially when you consider that every time I think of Ruth Benedict I can’t at all remember what kind of a theorist she was (although she did study under Franz Boas ['father' of anthropology]) but I can remember that she had a relationship with her most famous student, Margaret Mead. Somehow I don’t think my prof would find it funny if that bit of info somehow made it into my exam booklet. Just as useless is the fact that when I think of Margaret Mead, after Ruth Benedict pops up, the next thing I remember is that her third husband’s name was Reo Fortune.

Again, useless.

The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers – Ruth Benedict

[This is an essay I wrote on cultural relativism, for one of my introduction to ethics papers, some time back. It's an incomplete version, I'm still hunting down the original references, and it's probably not as readable as I would like - the story about how I got pulled in before the paper supervisor to defend it would probably be more interesting. Nevertheless, some of its arguments are still serviceable.]

The diversity of human life and the multiplicity of social groups and cultures presents the ethical theorist with a problem. Can the notion of ahistorical, transcultural moral norms be maintained with the apparent diversity of values between cultures? Does there exist an independent standard to judge the different moral views of cultures? One response to these questions is cultural relativism, which denies that there are moral facts independent of our evaluative stances. This paper will consider the arguments for cultural relativism, whether these arguments successfully undermine belief in the objective status of moral truth, and then briefly survey the opposite position, objectivism, and how the objectivity of moral facts might be convincingly framed.

The Doctrine of Cultural Relativism

Within the conceptual framework of moral theory, cultural relativism advances the doctrine that moral evaluation is grounded in and inseparable from the beliefs, experience, and behavour of a particular culture. It disavows any objective moral principles or that there might be one basic, universal standard of morality that should ultimately guide everyone, in all times and places. Therefore what is good or bad, just or unjust, is relative to the views found in a particular polity or society. Thus, as pioneer anthropologist and proponent of cultural relativism Ruth Benedict argues, what might be the “most valued traits of our normal individuals” within one society may be “looked on in differently organised cultures as aberrant”. Several claims are given to justify this position. These include the argument that cultures and societies disagree widely about morality, the fact that morality is a product of culture, and that there are no clear ways to resolve moral differences and disagreements. Each of these arguments will be treated separately for, if valid, each provide a strong defeater to the objectivist position.

The Argument from Cultural Diversity

The cultural diversity thesis has as its premise the variation in normative beliefs between one societal context to another, from one historical context to another, and even between different groups and classes within complex communities. Citing the abundance of anthropological and sociological findings that show disharmonious cultural outlooks, the relativist argues to a conclusion about the status of morality: that there can be no objective truth in moral judgments. However, under scrutiny, this argument shows serious weaknesses. Even if the initial premise is conceded, the inference is invalid. It is erronous to infer an ontological conclusion about objectively from the variance of subjective convictions. Disagreement does not demonstrate subjectivity. In fact, disagreement about an issue could be quite consistent with one side simply being mistaken.

Another area of weakness for the cultural diversity argument is that its first premise itself is not immune from certain skepticism. It is been argued by some that there is not as much as diversity about fundamental values as anthropologists suppose. Similarities between moral beliefs of diverse cultures have been proposed and many commentators have particularly argued for significant common ground. What the relativist fails to distinguish is the deeper moral axioms and those differences in the surrounding man-made circumstances and physical environment that often facilitate the establishing of variant moral practices. It can be argued that a consensus exists in regard to fundamental moral values because they are inherent in human nature, and that the relativist mistakenly focuses on the diverse ways these values are applied in varying sociological, political and institutional contexts.

The Argument from the Irrational Origin of Moral Beliefs

A second argument for cultural relativism relates to the causal origins of moral beliefs. The process of moral development for each individual, it is argued, is embedded within a cultural milieu and therefore because our moral judgments can be explained via social or other psychological factors, we are therefore unable to attribute an absolute or objective truth-value to such judgments. However this form of argument is deeply problematic and analogous to the genetic fallacy. A fallacy of irrelevance, the genetic fallacy is committed when one confuses questions of the causal origin of someone’s belief in a proposition with questions of what evidence, arguments, or justification there may be for the proposition itself. For example the fact that many people in our society have certain beliefs about cosmology or biology can sometimes be causally explained in terms of cultural factors. But this has nothing to do with the question of whether the propositions concerning biology or cosmology themselves are true and what justification they might have. Certainly the existence of such genetic explanations of why some people have mathematical and scientific beliefs does not show that the propositions themselves are not about objective matters.

But even if there is evidence to show that all our moral judgments are sourced in completely irrational origins, this would at most lead to epistemological skepticism about moral beliefs, not to any conclusions about the relativity of morals. At most it would show that we have trouble at achieving moral knowledge. But this would not rule out that we might occasionally believe what is true -  that we, in fact, might sometimes happen upon true beliefs in moral discourse.

The Argument from the Impossibility of Settling Moral Disputes

Another argument often offered for cultural relativism is the claim surrounding the apparent difficulty of mediating moral disagreements, or even of knowing what would decide them. This provides an argument for cultural relativism because one possible explanation for our difficulty to settle moral disagreements is that they really are beyond settling, and that there is no third level or independent position to judge one moral view over another. The relativist argues that this is because what one ethic subgroup believes about morality is right for them and what another ethic subgroup believes is right for them. This argument however depends on similar assumptions to the cultural diversity thesis and is therefore is susceptible to similar criticisms An additional problem with this argument is also that it exaggerates the difficulty we actually find in settling moral disagreements. Again, there could be other explanations that could be considered for the difficulty we do find. There are many issues that are disputed as equally as ethical concerns yet are nevertheless regarded as having objective answers: questions such as which religion is true, which account of human psychology explains human life, which theory of human society is the most just. The argument also minimizes the fact that moral discourse can, in practice, be warped by distorting factors such as personal interest and social ideology.

Objectivism Revisited

If the central arguments marshaled by cultural relativists fail as defeaters to objectivism – the belief that the truth value of moral statements is essentially independent of subjective stances – we should still be interested in how we might go about framing the objectivist position. It is beyond the aim of this paper to chart a robust defense, instead it will be the intention to merely survey some of the contours of this project and what implications this might have on moral discourse.

Throughout the stream of philosophical history, objectivism has been appealed to through many means. These have generally been thought to be represented by two main varieties, naturalism and non-naturalism. The difference in approaches, primarily, is a difference in attitude about where moral facts are located; whether moral facts are apart of the natural universe or whether they transcend it. Naturalism has concentrated on explaining the place of value and obligation in the world of natural facts as evinced by science. It insists that we can learn about moral value by methods similar to those by which we learn of other natural facts. However, this line of reasoning has not been without criticism, importantly by David Hume and then at the turn of the century by G. E. Moore. The British philosopher, Moore, argued that any attempt to reconcile morality with naturalism was problematic because whatever natural phenomena these theories considered as constituting goodness, the question still remained whether or not such phenomena were intrinsically good. Even if the ethical naturalist can show that altruism is valuable from the supposed fact that altruistic acts promote survival, we are still left with the unjustified assumption that survival is an intrinsic good. So rather than naturalizing value, the naturalist merely relocates it.

Extrapolating moral value from our common human nature, or from the real selfhood of humanity, may seem an intuitive starting point – and especially attractive for the ethical naturalist. For since those who have moral experiences are humans, we might expect moral concepts to correspond to the underlying nature of humanity. Recent examples to revive the objectivity of moral value by drawing on certain biological data and other empirical explanations have taken these “clues about the deeper nature of our wants as they are rooted in natural needs and capacities” to delineate that which is good. But this endeavour is captive to similar difficulties inherent in the naturalist position. One significant problem for the naturalist is the ability to talk about a common human nature when naturalistic science and evolutionary theory undermine both the metaphysical concept of humans as substances with human natures and the biological distinctiveness of our species. More significantly than this is the effort of extrapolating normativity and how things should be from a description of how things are. To do so, we must know something about our ideal function and ultimate purpose. But nature is blind and impersonal, it is morally apathetic, without agenda or teleological orientation. To find a telos in human nature we would need a view from eternity. We can only say that a human being is functioning in an ideal way if that human being has an original purpose, or intended way in which to function. But only if humans were purposefully designed, with an original designer, could we know this. We would need therefore to understand the intention of a designer to reveal and give purpose to human beings. J. L. Mackie, a naturalist philosopher, has conceded: “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them”. So at the very least, to begin to justify an objectivist position and posit a state of ideal human flourishing and proper human functioning that charts a life human beings were meant to live, we need to go beyond the natural universe. At the very least, the notion of obligation and objective value requires a worldview that can encompass more than the physical universe.

A final consideration here concerns the claim that objectivism, if true, engenders and justifies forms of tyranny. It is argued that the objectivist position must be shunned on the basis that an objective moral philosophy can lead to philosophical or political arrogance, where an ideal moral doctrine is forced upon members of an individual society. Cultural relativism should be favoured, it is argued, because it promotes and gives special support to an attitude of toleration for moral codes which diverge from our own. If we accept relativism we will have a higher view of tolerance and not be so quick to engage in foreign adventures that have the ambition of – or at least are justified by the claim – to defend our own moral beliefs. In response it must be said that such a claim is more emotive than helpful, and ultimately self-defeating. It can be agreed that we ought to tolerate and make allowance for the beliefs of other cultures about manners, etiquette, and so on. But the principle of tolerance espoused by cultural relativism goes further than this. It claims that the moral beliefs of other cultures must always be tolerated. This infers that we must tolerate slavery where it is culturally accepted, or apartheid where it is entrenched. Not only is such a practice repugnant, but ultimately conceptually paradoxical to relativism. To accept a principle of transcultural principle of tolerance would contradict the relativist denial of any universally or transculturally authoritative principle. Only the objectivist position can justify a principle of tolerance, and a principle that is sensitive to the different quantities of moral customs that should be tolerated. Similarly, only in objectivism can there be the prescription against such attitudes of arrogance or tyranny.

In conclusion, it has been shown that the central arguments for cultural relativism are inadequate and that objectivism should be explored as a more plausible response to the meta-ethical question concerning the truth-value of moral judgements.

Il 13 novembre 2008, ad ora di pranzo, il TG2 ha mostrato in successione due servizi: la toccante confessione di Buffon, che svelava a tutti la vita difficile di un calciatore depresso, e il concorso per l’elezione del “lato B” - hanno fatto anche gli spiritosi sbarazzini - (machile e femminile) più bello!
Come si può poi dire che Beppe Grillo non ha ragione quando chiede l’abolizione dell’albo dei giornalisti e insulta la categoria dei giornalisti… :S

Invece di violenza, calcio, tette e culi nei telegiornali italiani dovrebbero mandare in onda servizi sull’integrazione degli immigrati e il rispetto reciproco.

Ho appena visto questo cartone animato fel 1946. Purtroppo è in inglese senza sottotitoli, ma abbastanza abbordabile. Farebbe  molto bene alla nostra nazione alla deriva la messa in onda a reti unificate

Brotherhood of Man

Prima parte

Seconda parte

UPA, United Auto Workers
Distributed by: United States Navy
Directed By Robert Cannon.
Produced By John Hubley.
Written By Phil Eastman, John Hubley, Ring Lardner Jr., Maurice Rapf.

Sarebbe altresì interessante proiettarlo negli istituti scolastici durante qualche ora di inglese!  Se tra i lettori del blog c’è qualche insegnante (non necessariamente di inglese!), spero che abbia conservato un pò di voglia di insegnare e formare i ragazzini e si adoperi per  mostrare (o far mostrare dai colleghi addetti alle lingue) ai propri studenti la breve animazione!

A tale scopo aggiungo le seguenti informazioni.

Le illustrazioni del filmato sono state ricavate da un opuscolo intitolato Razze dell’Umanità (“Races of Mankind”), scritto nel 1943 da Ruth Benedict e Gene Weltfish, antropologhe della Columbia University.
Fu ideato per essere mostrato agli uomini delle forze armate* come antidoto ai pregiudizi raziali, ma obiezioni da parte dei politici del sud ne causarono la divulgazione tramite la Public Affairs Committee, Inc.

Ho trovato un piccolo estratto in inglese del contenuto del libretto (essenzialmente ciò che si dice anche nel filmato) su wikipedia; lo copio qui, in attesa di trovare il tempo di trascriverlo in italiano:

“The world is shrinking” begin Benedict and Weltfish. “Thirty-seven nations are now united in a common cause—victory over Axis aggression, the military destruction of fascism” (p. 1).

The nations united against fascism, they continue, include “the most different physical types of men.”

And the writers explicate, in section after section, the best evidence they knew for human equality. They want to encourage all these types of people to join together and not fight amongst themselves. “The peoples of the earth”, they point out, are one family. We all have just so many teeth, so many molars, just so many little bones and muscles—so we can only have come from one set of ancestors no matter what our color, the shape of our head, the texture of our hair. “The races of mankind are what the Bible says they are—brothers. In their bodies is the record of their brotherhood.”

Environment has to do with our physical traits. Dark skin affords some protection against strong tropical sunlight, for example.

But whatever our physical traits, regardless of the shape or size of our head, we are equally intelligent. “The best scientists cannot tell from examining a brain to what group of people its owner belonged….Some of the most brilliant men in the world have had very small brains. On the other hand, the world’s largest brain belongs to an imbecile.”

Environment has more to do with intelligence than birth does, including how much money is spent on schools. “Southern Whites”, for example, scored below “Northern Negroes” in the IQ tests administered to the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in World War I. And the per capita expenditures on schools in the South were only “fractions” of those in northern states in 1917.
The difference….[arose] because of differences of income, education, cultural advantages, and other opportunities.

Not only is the intelligence of people the same, on the whole, but the blood has the same chemical composition. Different peoples don’t have different blood—”all the races of man have all [the] blood types”—and can receive transfusions from one another to save lives.

And all people are of mixed race, produced by “the movements of peoples over the face of the earth…since before history began.”

This knowledge, and more, was intended to work against superiority—the superiority “a man claims when he says, ‘I was born a member of a superior race.’….Racial prejudice,” write the authors, “makes people ruthless.”

*questo sembrerebbe suggerire che potrebbe essere mostrato anche a certi corpi di polizia municipale italiana…

El noble Asano es uno de los dos daimios nombrados por el Shogunado para encargarse del ceremonial mediante el cual todos los daimios hacían periódicamente juramento de fidelidad al Shogun. Los dos maestros de ceremonias son nobles provincianos, y por ello tienen que pedir instrucciones sobre la etiqueta requerida a un gran daimio de la corte, el noble Kira. Desgraciadamente, el servidor más sensato de Asano, Oishi –el héroe del relato-, que hubiera podido aconsejarle prudentemente, se halla en la provincia, y a Asano no se le ocurre ofrecerle un “regalo” suficiente a su importante instructor. Los servidores del otro daimio al que instruye Kira son hombres de mundo y cubren al maestro de ricos regalos. Kira, por tanto, instruye a Asano con mala voluntad e intencionadamente le indica un atuendo totalmente inadecuado para la ceremonia.

En el día señalado, Asano se presenta con esta indumentaria, y cuando se da cuenta de la burla de que ha sido objeto saca su espada y hiere a Kira en la frente antes de que logren separarlos. Su virtud como hombre de honor -el giri hacia su nombre- le obliga a vengarse por el insulto de Kira, pero sacar la espada en el palacio del Shogun sería una falta hacia el chu. Asano se ha comportado virtuosamente en cuanto al giri hacia su nombre, pero, solamente puede satisfacer el chu matándose, de acuerdo con las reglas del seppuku. Se retira a su casa y se viste para el sacrificio, esperando solamente el retorno de su más sabio y fiel servidor, Oishi. Cuando los dos se han intercambiado una larga mirada de adiós, Asano, habiéndose sentado en la forma requerida, clava la espada en su vientre y muere por su propia mano. Ningún pariente quiere suceder en su puesto al señor muerto que ha violado el chu y caído en desgracia ante el Shogunado, por ello el feudo de Asano es confiscado y sus servidores se convierten en ronin sin dueño.
De acuerdo con las obligaciones del giri, los servidores samurai de Asano deben hacer seppuku en honor a su señor, como él lo ha hecho. Si por el giri hacia su señor hicieran lo que él hizo por el giri hacia su nombre, esta acción expresaría su protesta por la ofensa de Kira a Asano. Pero Oishi decide secretamente que el seppuku es un acto demasiado pequeño para expresar su giri. Lo que deben hacer es completar la venganza que su propio señor no había sido capaz de llevar a cabo cuando los servidores le separaron de su encumbrado enemigo. Deben, pues, matar a Kira.

Pero esto implica violar el chu, ya que Kira está demasiado cerca del Shogunado para que el Estado otorgue a los ronin el permiso oficial para realizar su venganza. En los casos más comunes, el grupo que proyectaba vengarse presentaba su plan al Shogunado declarando la fecha límite, antes de la cual debía llevarse a cabo el acto de venganza o abandonar la empresa. Este acuerdo permitía que algunos afortunados pudieran reconciliar sus obligaciones hacia el chu, hacia el giri. Oishi sabía que ni él ni sus compañeros, podían recurrir a esta solución. Así, reúne a los ronin que habían sido guerreros samurai de Asano, pero no les comunica su plan de matar a Kira. Había más de trescientos ronin, y -según se contaba esta historia en las escuelas japonesas en 1940- todos estaban de acuerdo en cometer seppuku. Oishi sabía, sin embargo, que no todos ellos tenían un giri ilimitado -en la frase japonesa,”giri más sinceridad”-, por lo cual sería dificil una vendetta contra Kira.

Con la intención de separar a los que tenían “simplemente” giri de aquellos que tenían giri más sinceridad, utiliza como prueba la repartición de la renta personal de su señor. A los ojos de los japoneses, esta prueba era igual de válida tras tomar la decisión de suicidarse, como de no haberlo hecho, ya que quedaban sus familias como posibles beneficiarios. Hay un violento desacuerdo entre los ronin sobre en qué basar la división de la propiedad. El mayordomo jefe, que tiene el sueldo más alto de los servidores, dirige la fracción que propone dividir la renta en proporción a los ingresos anteriores. Oishi es el jefe de la fracción que quiere dividirla a partes iguales entre todos. Tan pronto como queda establecido cuáles son los ronin que tienen “simplemente” giri, Oishi muestra su acuerdo con el plan del mayordomo jefe para la partición de la hacienda y permite a aquellos que han ganado que abandonen la compañía. El mayordomo jefe se marcha, y por ello adquiere fama de ser un “samurai perro”, “un hombre que no conoce el giri” y un réprobo. Oishi juzga que solamente cuarenta y siete de ellos son lo bastante fuertes en giri como para hacerles partícipes de su plan de vendetta. Estos cuarenta y siete que se unen a él se juramentaron mediante aquel acto para que ni la buena fe, ni afecto alguno, ni tampoco las obligaciones del gimu entorpezcan el cumplimiento de su promesa. El giri se convierte en su ley suprema. Los cuarenta y siete se hacen un corte en un dedo y se unen en un voto de sangre.
La primera tarea es despistar a Kira. Se dispersan y fingen haber perdido el honor. Oishi frecuenta las casas públicas de menos categoría y se entrega a las peleas más indignas. Bajo el pretexto de su vida disipada se divorcia de su esposa -un paso habitual y completamente justificado para cualquier japonés que se veía a punto de enredarse con la ley, porque así no se le podía atribuir, ni a su mujer ni a sus hijos, ninguna responsabilidad en el acto final -. La esposa de Oishi se separa de él con gran tristeza, pero su hijo se une a los ronin.
Todo Tokio especula sobre la vendetta. Quienes respetan a los ronin están, por supuesto, convencidos de que intentarán matar a Kira. Pero los cuarenta y siete niegan tener semejante intención. Fingen “no saber lo que es el giri”. Sus suegros, ultrajados por tan deshonrosa conducta, les echan de sus casas y disuelven los matrimonios. Los amigos les ridiculizan. Un día, un amigo íntimo encuentra a Oishi borracho y divirtiéndose con mujeres, e incluso ante este amigo Oishi niega el giri hacia su señor. « ¿Venganza? -dice-, eso es una tontería. Uno debe disfrutar de la vida. No hay nada mejor que beber y divertirse.» Su amigo no le cree y saca la espada de Oishi de la vaina, esperando que su brillo resplandeciente desmienta lo que ha dicho su dueño, pero la espada está oxidada. Esto le obliga a creerle, y en plena calle le pega una patada al borracho Oishi, escupiendo sobre él. Uno de los ronin, necesitado de dinero para cumplir su parte de la vendetta, vendió a su esposa como prostituta. El hermano de ésta, también uno de los ronin, descubre que el conocimiento de la vendetta ha llegado a oídos de ella y se propone matarla con su propia espada, pensando que con esta prueba de su lealtad Oishi le dejará formar parte de los vengadores. Otro ronin mata a su suegro, y aun otro manda a su hermana a servir como criada y concubina a casa del propio Kira para que los ronin puedan recibir información desde el interior del palacio y saber cuándo podrán atacar; este acto la obliga a suicidarse una vez cumplida la venganza, pues ha de reparar mediante la muerte la falta incurrida al simular estar al lado de Kira.
Una noche de nieve, el 14 de diciembre, Kira da una fiesta en la cual se bebe sake y los guardias se emborrachan. Los ronin atacan la fortaleza, derrotan a los guardias y entran directamente en el dormitorio de Kira. El no se encuentra allí, pero su cama aún está caliente, y los ronin saben que está escondido en alguna parte del recinto. Por fin descubren a un hombre agazapado en una casita destinada a almacenar carbón de leña. Uno de los ronin mete su lanza por la pared de la choza, pero al sacarla no hay sangre en ella: desde luego, la lanza ha atravesado a Kira, pero al ir retirándola él limpió la sangre con la manga de su kimono. Su truco, sin embargo, no le ha valido de nada: los ronin le obligan a salir. Declara que no es Kira, sino el mayordomo jefe, pero en ese momento uno de los cuarenta y siete se acuerda de la herida que su señor le hizo a Kira en palacio de los Shogun. Por esta cicatriz le identifican y exigen que se haga de inmediato el seppuku. El se niega, lo cual demuestra sin ninguna duda que es un cobarde. Con la espada que el propio Asano había empleado para el seppuku le cortan la cabeza, le lavan ceremoniosamente y, habiendo concluido su tarea, emprenden una procesión para llevar la espada doblemente ensangrentada y la cabeza cortada al sepulcro de Asano.
Todo Tokio vibra de entusiasmo por la hazaña de los ronin. Sus familias y los suegros, que habían dudado de ellos, corren a abrazarles y a rendirles homenaje. Los grandes señores les ofrecen hospitalidad a lo largo de su camino. Ellos siguen hacia el sepulcro y allí colocan no sólo la cabeza y la espada, sino también un mensaje escrito a su señor que todavía se conserva.
Hemos venido hoy aquí a rendir pleitesía. ..No hubiéramos osado presentarnos si no hubiéramos realizado la venganza que tú iniciaste… Cada día que esperábamos nos parecía tres otoños… Hemos escoltado a mi señor Kira hasta tu tumba. Esta espada que tú tanto valorabas el año pasado y que nos confiaste, nosotros te la devolvemos ahora. Te rogamos que la aceptes y que golpees la cabeza de tu enemigo una segunda vez y que tu odio se desvanezca para siempre. Esta es la declaración respetuosa de cuarenta y siete hombres.
Han pagado su giri. Pero aún les falta pagar su chu. Sólo en la muerte pueden coincidir ambos. Han quebrantado la ley del Estado contra las vendettas no declaradas, pero no están en rebeldía contra el chu. Lo que se les exigía en nombre del chu tenían que cumplirlo, y el Shogunado decreta que los cuarenta y siete deben hacerse el seppuku. Como dicen los libros de lectura japoneses de quinto grado:
Puesto que actuaron en venganza de su señor, la firme rectitud de su giri debería servir de ejemplo para todas las generaciones futuras… Por esta razón, el Shogunado, tras estudiar el caso, exigió el seppuku, una solución que mataría dos pájaros de un tiro. Es decir, al matarse con sus propias manos, los ronin pagaron la suprema deuda con el giri y el gimu.

BENEDICT, Ruth. El crisantemo y la espada, Madrid, Alianza Editorial S.A., 1974 (Pags.181-185)

“The choice to rely … on cultural anthropologists in the rebuilding of a defeated enemy has particular resonance now as the United States struggles to rebuild a stable and viable Iraq. … As the occupation of Iraq appears more complex by the day, where are the new Ruth Benedicts, authoritative voices who will carry weight with both Iraqis and Americans?”
—–Alexander Stille, “Experts can help rebuild a country,” The New York Times, 19 July, 2003.

(Notes and comments on:
Bunzl, Matti. (2008). The quest for anthropological relevance: Borgesian Maps and epistemological pitfalls. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 53-60.)

Reasons for Irrelevance: It’s an Inside Job

The discussion between Bunzl and Besteman-Gusterson has some rewarding points to it. Bunzl begins by observing what most of us already know to be the case that,

Put simply, many of us chafe under a perceived public irrelevance, especially when compared to the glory days when anthropological titans like Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu regularly addressed millions and had a real impact on debates in education, public policy, and beyond (2008: 53).

Specifically, Bunzl chooses to use one single text as the focus, or as the vehicle, for his critical analysis of why this is so. He thus speaks of Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, and published in 2005. He says that the authors in that volume (which I have yet to read myself) took on top public “pundits” in the U.S., from Thomas Friedman to Samuel Huntington. George Marcus, in a quote on the front cover, called it “a bold attempt … to remake the terms of public debate.”

Bunzl sees the book as failing to achieve its aims of recouping the legacy of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, of anthropologists becoming engaged as public intellectuals, noting that the book was largely ignored, for all its heroism (2008: 53).

The book failed in its aims, Bunzl argues, for a number of reasons:

“the book was issued by the University of California Press, an outfit not particularly known for its ability to reach broad audiences. As a result, Pundits was essentially an inside job. It was written by anthropologists, of course. But it also appeared in an anthropology series, although one explicitly devoted to public engagement. And yes, the blurbs cited earlier were by other anthropologists as well. Pundits may have staked a claim to the public sphere, but, as far as I can tell, few outside the world of anthropology knew, let alone cared, about that” (2008: 54).

Bunzl criticizes them for narrowing “punditry” to the workings of reactionary myth-makers who work to support the privileged, while ignoring the presence of successful left-wing pundits (eg, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein), and distancing themselves from public punditry. Bunzl asks: “if progressive punditry is in fact possible, then how do we explain the persistent failure of contemporary anthropologists, including those in Pundits, to play a more prominent role in the public sphere?” (2008: 54). He sees this gap in the book’s foundation as one that undermines the whole premise of the book.

Bunzl’s question has to do with why anthropology has largely disappeared from the public sphere. Is it due to powerful exclusionary forces, working on top of and against the discipline, from outside the discipline, or are there reasons internal to the discipline that can help to explain anthropology’s public irrelevance? (2008: 54).

Some might object that anthropology does not need to be publicly engaged, does not need mass audiences, and thus eschew the common goals of both Bunzl and Besteman-Gusterson. I disagree. Anthropology will not reside safely in peace, ensconced in the Ivory Tower, because there too it is suffering from increased marginalization, and that’s in the cases of universities that actually have an anthropology program of some sort. Moreover, any discipline whose purchase covers a wide range of publicly relevant, directly relevant, issues should say something in public. There is no point being a mute bystander as public debates rage about race, the family, violence, religion, and thus act like some dog in the manger. Even those disciplines that some might think engage in “navel gazing” — philosophy, English literature — have had, and have, scholars with a higher public profile than we do, and here I am speaking only of the North American context. If we were speaking of scholars in places such as France, even Trinidad & Tobago, then this discussion would not be as relevant, or relevant in the same ways.

Bunzl’s main argument is, “there is something about the contemporary variant of sociocultural anthropology, for which Pundits is paradigmatic, that has precipitated its increasing marginalization” (2008: 54).

Bunzl says, admitting to producing a pithy sound-bite:

“the glory days of U.S. anthropology seem to be over because today’s anthropologists are not radical enough” (2008: 54)

Generalizing, as the Bongo-Bongoists Rear their Ugly Heads in the Cayman Islands

On pages 55 and 56 Bunzl takes us through a familiar, but effectively condensed, review of the demise of positivist science in anthropology, the questioning of searches for universal laws, the emergence of ideas of anthropology as a science of meaning, based on interpreting specific discourses, and greater attention paid to how knowledge is not neutral, but is a function of power, privilege, and hierarchy. The problem, as Bunzl argues, is that in the course of these developments, anthropologists began to reject generalization. Generalizations were seen as part of a discourse of objectivity and expertise, a language of power in Lila Abu-Lughod’s view.

(We should also recognize that the critique of power in anthropology typically extends only as far as our analytical and rhetorical practices, and not our very institutionalization, i.e., that which enables to speak Abu-Lughod as a professional authority, as a professor, and the exclusions that had to occur in order for her to occupy that position.)

Generalizing assumes that the analyst can stand outside of what is being analyzed, and tends to take small cases, and diverse differences, and flatten them out, homogenizing them, producing pictures of coherence and timelessness (2008: 56).

So far so good, except that I now worry that perhaps “generalization” has been confused with “totalization” and “universalization”, which it resembles. Generalizing about what appears to be the case, for the most part, that is, by and large, does not remove the analyst (a figure in the crowd itself, who notes where most of the crowd is heading), and does not pretend that there are no differences (most of the crowd surged forward, but some of us remained behind). The opposite of generalizing is the incessant natter of what Ted Llewellyn called the Bongo-Bongoists — these are obnoxious and sometimes agitated hecklers who interrupt to say, “but in my tribe, among the people I study, among the Bongo-Bongo, no such practices exist.” I recall being taken to task for, of all things, generalizing about how deeply slavery marked the Caribbean experience and how “blackness” was still stigmatized as the most negative, socially undervalued identity. The objections? That in the Cayman Islands (a wealthy colony packed with white expatriates) … that in Montserrat … in places where pearls and turtles were the backbone of the economy, and so forth. In other words, in the tiny micro-exceptions the generalization did not work…except that it does, because it is generally accurate for most places, most people, and most times.

The other extreme, of course, is to see the Bongo-Bongo as representatives of all of humanity — the logical shortcoming here is generalizing from the single case. But that does not mean that one cannot and should not generalize from multiple, or most cases. The Cayman Islands don’t prove generalizations about the Caribbean wrong; instead, it’s that we cannot let the Cayman Islands stand in the way of such generalizations, nor, worse yet, serve as a template for understanding the rest of the Caribbean.

As Bunzl explains, the rejection of generalization leads to the rejection of the concept of culture. Culture “militates against the specificity of partial truths” and yet those renouncing culture still had an idea of culture, as “contested, temporal, and emergent” (which is surely also a generalization in its own right) (2008: 56). In Abu-Lughod’s view, “culture” also became a conceptual tool for othering.

Don’t YOU Dare to Other ME

Again, this is a problem in anthropology — when we speak of “others” we are making the mistake of bundling a whole set of very different ideas into one, as if all “othering” was “bad” and somehow evitable. Whether we choose to “other” or not, there will always be persons who are different, who stand aside, and outside. You cannot “invent” or “construct” an “other” — you might be able to invent or construct an image of an other, but not the person who is other, that person who is not me. It is ironic then, that in battling against culture, Abu-Lughod ends up right back in the trap of universalizing — without culture, there are no others, and we are all the same — or, we are all bundles of particular specifics, that defeat generalizing language…except, of course, for the term “specificity” itself which can then become a substitute for culture, difference, and otherness. (I will say a lot more about these issues in coming months, especially once I summon the energy to finally do an in-depth review of Vassos Argyrou’s Anthropology and the Will to Meaning.)

This is not deny the seduction of plunging oneself into deep specificity, into fragments of knowledge, of diverse tales and documents and persons and voices. Whether this means that exoticism has thus been defeated is still very much open to question in my view, and the fact that these wonderfully dynamic, localizing, particularistic feats of writing are almost always done in some thatched hut village in Indonesia or wherever else, except at home, leads me to think there may be no good answer. A second question has to do with the assembling of fragments and specifics: who does the assembling, the editing, the rewriting, and according to what framework? Is it purely random, escaping all of one’s prior socialization? I very much doubt it — it’s just that the framework has been silenced.

Let’s Hear from the Book Club

This leads me to pity what we do to students, pitching one approach after another, one trend after another, one ethnography after another, one theory after another, one big-name author after another, leaving so many to become confused, always running on a bibliographic treadmill, becoming professors and always on an angry and/or anxious lookout for the next big book, which we must all read, and all of us must quote. I hate that feeling, that I have been involuntarily recruited into some small town book club, where it is to be assumed that we have all read the latest Ong-and-Tsing, as if these were the only ones to read, as if they ought to be read.

Bunzl argues that ethnographies of the particular, like (guess who?) Anna Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, are still caught up in positivist epistemology (2008: 57):

Sociocultural anthropology may have rejected a scientistic variant of positivism, but it retains, even augments, a more immediate form, one that purports that all empirical phenomena are amenable to observation and description. What else, after all, is the demand to eschew false generalizations in the interest of more accurate representations of complexity?

Bunzl also observes how old abstractions and generalizations are often replaced by new abstractions and generalizations, except that these are less amenable to criticism; that “culture” might be rejected as an essentializing abstraction, but not so much “gender” and “class” as other essentializing abstractions (57).

[See my posts on anti-anti-essentialism: here, and there.]

The Devil is the Details

Bunzl, referring to Borges’ famously funny story of the quest for the ever more perfect map of the empire, which then grew to the size of the empire itself, argues:

Driven by an unselfconscious demand for “exactitude in science,” it is on a quest to find the perfect representation of human reality, one that is free of all essentialisms and generalizations. What it does not realize is that such a representation—if it could be had at all (and, of course, it could not)—would be entirely unwieldy. Even worse, it would be altogether useless, not because it would be false but because it would be true (57).

Where Pundits fails, in Bunzl’s view, is its repeated, persistent charge that America’s top pundits are “simplistic.” Indeed, how many of us who are anthropologists have heard that a book is great because it is “sophisticated” and treats “complexity” complexly, or something along these lines? Sophisticated? A sophisticated text that “explodes” that which it “interrogates”, with a fine sense of complexity — talk about a bad mixing of metaphors, almost all of which stink of elitism and domination.

Bunzl ends by calling for renewed respect for an epistemological program that existed and still exists in anthropology, in the figures of Boas, Geertz, Sahlins, and Ortner, a program that,

recognizes the limitations of anthropological generalization but is not terrified by this possibility. It knows the impossibility of finding laws in a natural scientific sense but is prepared to uncover meaningful connections through interpretive speculation. It is aware that in a philosophical sense, all empirical knowledge is provisional, partial, and subjective, but it seeks to transcend that limitation to find the truth about the world. It understands that objectivity is not fully possible but strives for it nonetheless (59).

This statement can be taken further, as it opens out onto similar goals and tendencies across the social sciences, humanities, and yes even the natural sciences. I will talk more about this when I finally review and produce some notes from Immanuel Wallerstein’s Open the Social Sciences, which I read over a decade ago.

I should note the discussion that followed the article within the pages of the American Anthropologist:

Besteman, Catherine and Hugh Gusterson. (2008). A response to Matti Bunzl: Public anthropology, pragmatism, and pundits. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 61-63.

and

Bunzl, Matti. (2008b). A reply to Besteman and Gusterson: Swinging the pendulum. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 64-65.

Responses from the Anti-Pundits

Besteman and Gusterson seem to be particularly offended with the criticisms of their book, even stating that Gusterson was “heavily criticized” — I don’t know, it seemed to me that Gusterson was criticized more in passing, and was hardly the focus of Bunzl’s piece. The more important point is that the editors of Pundits insist that their target was not punditry as such, but right-wing punditry, and not generalizations as such, but crassly inaccurate ones that justify imperialist programs. These two sets of authors, who would seem to be sympathetic to one another, seem to have passed each other in a foggy night.

Besteman and Gusterson, offer an unnecessary listing of names of people they think are examples of something different to what Bunzl claims, which also serves to define the “in group,” and to exclude Bunzl of course. Lists are always problematic in these cases, and best to avoid, not only because they are objectionable devices used to privilege certain speakers, and thus create a hierarchy, but also because in this case the list offered by the editors is so very short when compared to the thousands who constitute American Anthoroplogy alone. In other words, they make Bunzl’s points twice for him.

The editors get on to something interesting, finally, which has to do with their reasoning as to why anthropology is not publicly relevant as it once was:

It is true that today’s anthropologists are not household names in the way Margaret Mead was. But the reward structure of the contemporary neoliberal academy grants tenure, promotions, and pay raises for academic books and refereed articles and disdains those who write for a popular audience. Mead herself was forced to build a career in the interstices of academia and public life. Also, since Mead’s time, anthropology has moved away from sustained attention to some of the issues that deeply interest so many U.S. citizens: family, marriage, divorce, children, adolescence, love, romance, and parenting. Finally, anthropologists cannot afford to lose sight of the texture and nuances of the communities and issues we study. A deep knowledge born out of long-term relationships with interlocutors based on trust is our distinctive contribution to public discourse. Appreciating and translating nuance is an ethnographic project at odds with roughshod punditry. In saying this, we are not agreeing with Bunzl about a supposed anthropological aversion to generalization but are, rather, pointing to a friction between ethnography’s interest in nuance and the glibness of some punditry. We believe that a public anthropology combining the phrase-making skill of a Friedman with the nuance of a Geertz and the passion for social justice of a Paul Farmer is possible.

Was this Rewarding? Well, on the one hand…and on the other hand…

I am very happy to see Besteman and Gusterson raise the issue of the “reward structure” of the “neoliberal academy” that emphasizes certain kinds of publications in certain venues (for the non-tenured mind you…the tenured have a choice, one that is usually exercised in doing everything possible to achieve greater rewards, such as full professorship, a standing in multiple editorial boards, sitting on various committees of high-powered funding bodies, and so forth). They are right to raise this issue, except that structure precedes neoliberalism, and they are part of the academy, and the academy has very conservative biases in terms of its everyday working assumptions and practices. Otherwise Besteman and Gusterson are to be applauded for going on the record.

We need to keep in mind that academics themselves serve as the guardians and police of this reward structure. They themselves frown on certain publications, even on the very teaching texts that they use for teaching, an attitude that I will never understand. They sneer at websites, and arch an eyebrow at a newspaper column. Hopefully we can start hearing academics making a lot more noise about what gets rewarded and how, and I think this is slowly starting to happen.

It is also interesting to see the editors of Pundits confess to the fact that much of what anthropologists study is simply not interesting to a wider public, a terrible self-indictment. Bunzl’s response to the response seemed to me to be a little circumspect and tranquilized, missing some golden opportunities to turn the “dialogue” into a moment opening out onto transformation. Too bad.

Whenever people in the United States have been tested for “HIV”, members of the officially recognized racial groups have yielded different results: blacks always test “HIV-positive” more often than others, Asians always test “HIV-positive” less often than others. Whites test “HIV-positive” significantly more often than Asians, Native Americans somewhat more often than whites, and Hispanics significantly more often than Native Americans.

The same racial bias in “HIV” tests is found in other parts of the world: within South Africa (pp. 75-6 in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory); between sub-Saharan Africa and northern Africa; within the Caribbean; in Europe (HIV: THE VIRUS THAT DISCRIMINATES BY RACE, 11 April 2008; HIV: A RACE-DISCRIMINATING SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED VIRUS!, 16 April 2008; DECONSTRUCTING HIV/AIDS in “SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA” and “THE CARIBBEAN”, 21 April 2008).

A comprehensive recent review acknowledges the racial bias in testing “HIV-positive”:
“racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans and Hispanics, are disproportionately affected….
in Europe … many infections today are found among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa” (Cohen et al., Journal of Clinical Investigation 118 [2008] 1244-54).

The racial disparities in testing “HIV-positive” are as firmly accepted in mainstream discourse as any aspect of HIV/AIDS is.

WHY? Why are “HIV” tests racially biased?

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For reasons that need no reiterating, deep and delicate sensitivities are aroused by any discussion of human differences associated genetically with the commonly used racial designations. One should therefore bear in mind that race is a matter of biology, not at all the same thing as perpetrating racism, which is a matter of social practices and public policy. The eminent anthropologist Ruth Benedict had wise things to say on this score (Race and Racism, first published 1942; page references from 1983 edition, Routledge & Kegan Paul):
—“a student may have at his tongue’s end a hundred racial differences and still be no racist” (p. vii)
—“Race is not ‘the modern superstition,’ as some amateur egalitarians have said. It is a fact. . . . Race . . . is not the modern superstition. But racism is.” (pp. 96, 97)

Benedict makes clear the distinction between race and culture. Race is a biological matter having to do with phenotypes, genotypes, DNA, physiology, colors of eye and hair and skin, and so on. Culture is a matter of learned behavior, and culture and behavior are not determined by race; innumerable cultures have maintained their distinguishing characteristics while the racial composition of the people expressing those cultures changed; and no race has always expressed some unique culture of its own everywhere.

“Race” is a very crude biological classification. There are only half-a-dozen or so human groups in the typical list of “races”, and there is enormous genetic variation among members of any one of these groups. Yet the classification has its uses, particularly perhaps in medicine, in view of significant statistical associations of race with predisposition to such conditions as Tay-Sachs disease or sickle-cell anemia.

But it is rather few predispositions that are significantly linked to this crude classification into half-a-dozen racial groups. That’s what makes the racial disparities in testing HIV-positive so extraordinarily difficult to explain on the basis of HIV/AIDS theory. Testing “HIV-positive” is unquestionably linked to biological race. HIV/AIDS theory ascribes testing “HIV-positive” to behavior. Thus HIV/AIDS theory appears to require that sexual and drug-abusing behavior be determined by biological race to an extent that is seen with rather few other characteristics and that has certainly not been found with any other form of behavior.

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If HIV is an infection transmitted predominantly via sex, then racial disparities in its distribution have to be explained in terms of racial disparities in sexual behavior. That is contrary to the evidence, and it is contrary to what anthropology and biology and psychology and sociology know. Is there any way in which racial disparities as to HIV could be explained in non-racist terms?

One would have to postulate that there are racially linked genes that influence how a person reacts when exposed to the virus. Perhaps people with certain genetic traits are more likely to be infected upon exposure? In that case, one would not have to ascribe racial disparities in rates of actual infection to differential rates of exposure, that is, differences in sexual behavior.

Much research has aimed to identify genetic factors that make for resistance to “HIV infection” or resistance to progression to AIDS after “infection” (or seroconversion), by studying so-called “long-term non-progressors” or “elite controllers” or individuals persistently exposed to HIV without seroconverting. These searches have remained unsuccessful. It has become something of a shibboleth that genetic variants of CCR5, a “co-receptor” of HIV, provide resistance, but this does not begin to accommodate the facts as to racial disparities: the pertinent allele is found “at high frequency in European Caucasians (5%-14%, with north-south and east-west clines) but is absent among African, Native American, and East Asian populations”; but non-CCR5-protected Asians resist “HIV” even more strongly than supposedly-CCR5-protected Caucasians, and Africans are affected by “HIV” far more than are Native Americans. Moreover, the CCR5 allele in question appears to have been the subject of neutral evolution over thousands of years and certainly was not selected for under the pressure of supposedly fatal infection by “HIV” (Sabeti et al., PLoS Biology 3 [(#11, 2005] e378.) http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0030378

The facts as to a putative resistance to infection also speak quite stubbornly against such a phenomenon. The probabilities of apparent transmission are the same for blacks, whites, and south-east Asians, always on the order of 1 per 1000 acts of unprotected intercourse (relatively more for male-to-female and less for female-to-male), according to (at least) three published reports from Africa, one each from Haiti and Thailand, and nine from the United States (individual sources cited at p. 44 ff. in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).

Since the apparent probability of transmitting “HIV-positive” displays this remarkably reproducible figure of about 1 per 1000, differences in prevalence of the “HIV-positive” condition can only be ascribed—under HIV/AIDS theory—to differences in frequency of exposure or type of sexual behavior.

There is no way around it. To accept HIV/AIDS theory means to accept that there are characteristic differences in sexual behavior between Asians, Caucasians, Native Americans, Hispanics, and blacks; and, among Hispanics in the United States, characteristic differences in sexual activity between the East and West coasts, differences that happen also to run parallel to differences in racial ancestry. That requires acceptance of a radically extreme version of sociobiology, namely, that sexual behavior is determined genetically and not culturally. Such acceptance also constitutes what Ruth Benedict correctly described as racism and as contrary to fact.

Ever since this blog entry, way back in Japan, I’ve been wanting to read Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, to go back to the source, as it were. I don’t know if I’ll have time to really read it deeply, but even just dipping into the thing has been revelatory, so a couple quick notes. First of all, this isn’t just a war-time book, this is a book that is so fundamentally shaped and driven by American wartime imperatives that to call it anthropology, you pretty much have to admit that the discipline of anthropology is a continuation of warfare by other means. For example, the book begins with the phrase “The Japanese were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought” and goes on to explain its reason for being written in the problem that this incommensurable difference posed for the war effort: “Conventions of war which Western nations had come to accept as facts of human nature obviously did not exist for the Japanese…[and] we had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it.” The chapter is entitled “Assignment: Japan” and the book was commissioned by the Office of War Information, who she thanks for the opportunity in the Acknowledgements section.

It is a propos, of course, to note that the book was written not via participant observation, not by actually living with and trying to understand actual Japanese society, but by writing down what Japanese immigrants to the United States were telling her about the Japanese society they had left (and which their adopted country was now at war with). Moreover, given the US practice of rounding up and interning Japanese-Americans at the very time Benedict was writing her book, it takes a remarkable leap to imagine that the sorts of things Japanese-Americans told her about Japan would be scientifically reliable, as opposed to a very strategic effort to establish themselves as good Americans. After all, the logic behind interning Japanese-Americans the already widespread belief that Japanese immigrants were so alien that it was impossible to assimilate them into American society; in wartime, went the argument, they had to be separated from the rest of society to keep them from impeding the war effort. So it’s not surprising that, first of all, Benedict comes up with the novel idea that the Japanese are a fundamentally alien culture, nor is it surprising that, second of all, she was able to find Japanese-Americans who were willing to indulge her in this fantasy. Would it surprise anyone to learn that there were German Jews who were willing to confirm the Nazi’s worst racialist fantasies, given the conditions they found themselves in? So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Benedict was able to find Japanese Americans who were willing to tell her whatever she wanted to believe.

That said–and I think it‘s worth saying–making Benedict out to be some kind of hack lackey of the OSS is too easy; it might be a tasty fruit, but it’s low enough to the ground that no one needs me to pick it for them. I guess I just don’t want to deny the book’s particular savvy, either; after all, although it strikes me as a deeply racist text, the book has also been surprisingly popular in Japan. There are many ways to explain that apparent incongruity, but I think it is worth taking into consideration. One way would be simply to observe that Japan has never been in the position of cultural inferiority that an actually colonized society has, such that the sorts of racism that sting in other contexts (like Japan’s former colony Korea, for example) are less deeply felt in a country still rather inclined to consider itself the peak of the social evolutionary ladder.

On that note, in fact, it’s worth reproducing a passage I find hard to simply diagnose and move on. As she’s describing the ways that Meiji reformers went about modernizing their country and culture in the late 19^th century (a fact that runs directly contrary to the notion that there is an “age-old” Japanese identity), she writes:

“Meiji statesmen were quite conscious about their objectives. During the eighteen-eighties Prince Ito, framer of the constitution, sent the Marquis Kido to consult Herbert Spencer in England on the problems lying ahead of Japan and after lengthy conversations Spencer wrote Ito his judgments. On the subject of hierarchy Spencer wrote that Japan had in her traditional arrangements an incomparable basis for national well-being which should be maintained and fostered. Traditional obligations to superiors, he said, and beyond all to the Emperor, were Japan’s great opportunity. Japan could move forward solidly under its ‘superiors’ and defend itself against the difficulties inevitable in more individualistic nations. The great Meiji statesmen were well satisfied with this confirmation of their own convictions. They meant to retain in the modern world the advantages of observing ‘proper station.’ They did not intend to undermine the habit of hierarchy.”

I find this interesting, if only because of the suggestion that Spencer was the nineteenth century version of a development expert. But more importantly, the example is fascinatingly counterintuitive, since it illustrates simultaneously how Japan was making itself and how it was a product of its own underlying culture. In other words, Benedict is here straddling a contradiction that has fuelled much debate on “cultures” such as Japan: is the “Japanese Mind” a historical constant that you can look to as an explanation for things that Japanese people do, or is it better to think of it as a contingent product of underlying social forces and conflicts? Does culture make or is culture made?

There isn’t an easy answer to this question, since either conclusion leads you into some pretty sticky problems: if culture makes, then what do you do with all the people who worked so hard and diligently to define and demonstrate what kinds of culture needed to be taught to the people? A book like Gluck’s Japan’s Modern Myths wonderfully demonstrates how successful the Meiji reforms of the late eighteenth century were at inventing and imposing a variety of very new ideologies (even if they recycled and repackaged old ideas like Shinto or Buddhism) on the newly forming Japanese society, which is to say, first conceptualizing new ways of being Japanese and then convincing the inhabitants of the islands that they were Japanese in those terms. Gluck does a great job of both demonstrating the incredible energy that went into this project (an energy and anxiety, she deduces, which implies resistance) and showing some of the contradictory and incoherent ways that Japanese culture makers produced the idea of Japanese culture: first adopting Shinto, then dropping it in favor of Buddhism, then switching back to Shinto, and so forth. On the other hand, if culture is simply made (a kind of facile superstructure model), then its always an epiphenomenon, an outgrowth of the real determining factor, be it economics or something else. And you then fall into the trap of dismissing culture as essentially superficial. If it seems to you that I’m thinking this through with the example of Kenya in the back of my mind, you’re right: “tribalism” whatever it is, both causes the violence and gets caused by the violence, in a way that defies the style of facile analysis that both the mainstream media and academia tend to favor.

So I would call attention to the fact that Benedict is able to see Japanese culture coming into existence (the manner in which Meiji statesmen reformers are making their society) even as she relies on a kind of cruder culturalism by which the Japanese mind is the explanation for what Japanese people do. One answer to this problem would be that you can’t have it both ways, but another would be that you have to have it both ways, that both are partly true even if they‘re insufficient on their own. So rather than choosing between flawed alternatives, I instead set her before you as a failed but nevertheless interesting assault on a problem that we don’t exactly have the answer to either.

In other words, for all her problems (and the complete militarism of her project seems to be a pretty huge one) it’s hard to dismiss someone like her unless you have the answer yourself, and I’m pretty sure the only people who think the have the answer are delusional in their own particular and interesting ways. For example, I’m inclined to thing that Benedict is making a certain kind of hay out of Herbert Spencer’s reputation; after all, by finding the influential British scientist to be in full support of Japan’s “traditional arrangements” she can reproduce a kind of rogues gallery of anti-individualistic feudalisms for America to be better than, lumping feudal England into the same category as feudal Japan. I mention this because I think she’s using the example as a means of distinguishing the American imperialism of the Macarthur years (in which the imperative is national self-determination on American terms) from the already failing European imperialism, which was all about civilizing savagery. Japan is a great rock on which to smash European belief in a monocultural concept of “civilization.” After all, if even Herbert Spencer recognizes the stability and civilizational value in their system of aristocracy, then the European model of doing empire starts falling apart: if they aren’t merely savages, but are, as Benedict proclaims again and again, a civilization both worth respecting and alien from anything we could ever understand, then liberal modes of doing empire (where everyone in the world has to find their own unique way of becoming the modern, how there are many roads but only one destination) get a big boost. We have to teach them to find their own culturally-specific way of creating a country, flag, government, etc. Which is sort of what MacArthur was charged with doing in Japan, what the post-war American effort to sponsor decolonization in Africa, for example, was all about: the US, with its new found global hegemony tried to both liberate formerly colonized nations and pull them into the Western capitalist democracy fold. Be yourself, claimed the Americans, but let us show you how to be yourself.

So there are problems with it. But what then do you do with someone like Benedict, and with the observations she made in service of this mission? What do you do with the Japanese who bought the Japanese translation of her book and found it not nearly as objectionable as I do?