A Little Bit Of Soul...

2010.11.10
Days Remaining: 201

1. First off, the title for today's blog has no great significance whatsoever. It is, however, the title of the song (by the band Music Explosion) currently playing on my iTunes program as I sit here and begin typing.

2. Second, for any of you who have tried to post a comment as per my request but were unable to do so because you didn't have a qualifying account, I have fixed the problem, and anyone can now post comments as "Anonymous" if they would like to do so. My apologies for the previous setting, I apparently didn't set this account up quite as correctly as I had thought. Anyway, it's now open season on postings, for anyone reading.

3. I got a very interesting question from one of my Native American Religions students last night; this week we're discussing Native American Christianities (in general and under the course topic/unit of "revitalization movements"). One of the essays they read was for yesterday was about the religious cultures of the so-called Old Colony (basically Masssachusetts before Rhode Island and Connecticut officially hived off on their own), and the ways in which Puritans' and Native Americans' religious traditions actually had quite a bit in common. So this student wrote and asked me if this was a religious version of a phenomenon called "the Middle Ground" (analytically developed by a historian named Richard White in a book entitled "The Middle Ground"), where two cultures (specifically French/English and Native American) come into contact and develop a whole range of shared values, institutions, etc. This student's query is such a good question! Basically, I responded that the essay we read is about what I'd call a proto-Middle Ground; there were movements towards developing shared institutions, values, etc., but the English just kept immigrating, and didn't like doing things like intermarrying, and so eventually they drove Native Americans away or isolated them in specific "Indian towns" (this happened in Delaware, home of my heart, btw). This got me thinking about exactly how much Anglos (and later Anglo-Americans of many different ethnicities) at a certain point stopped intermarrying, and how much that shaped US history and culture. We know of lots of intermarriages in the Middle and Southern Colonies from New York to Georgia up through the early 18th century, but then things get complicated. Many of the leading figures in Mvskoke (Creek) and Cherokee history in the 18th century were the descendants of European-Native marriages, but Anglo (and then American) societies increasingly viewed them as exclusively "Indians" and thus radically different from Europeans. This is particularly striking because the timing aligns well with the development of institutionalized racial slavery in Virginia in the late 17th and early 18th century (see the book Foul Means by Anthony S. Parent). So, basically, English colonial societies in North America began to shift towards racial theories of human nature (and politics) in the late 17th century, and we've been paying for it ever since. This is terrifying, but also, I think, highlights one of the key lessons history has taught me: we can't change the past, but we are gravely mistaken to underestimate the consequences of human agency. The world we live in is partly our inheritance, but it's also partly the result of our decisions, which become our successors' inheritance in turn. This, plus the realization, based on anthropological data, that there are very few (though important - physicality and location being the biggest ones) ahistorical factors determining our behaviors (i.e., culture is really important). We have options, and all we have to do to exercise them is live with the consequences.

4. This is one of the reasons why I am fundamentally not a conservative. Aside from the specific current political alignments and issues, at heart I just don't believe that it was inherently better before, or that we are best off not changing anything now. I see too many options, and too much historical contingency around me, to commit to an underlying social system as "natural." I'm also anti-authoritarian (though, in the interests of self-awareness, I admit that I have Thomas Jefferson's disease, and am really committed to the proposition that no one person should have absolute power, unless they are me), which aligns nicely with a deep resistance to conservatism, but since liberalism can produce despots just as easily, I can't be an absolutely committed liberal either, though at present many of the societal problems we're faced with are best, I think, dealt with via varying degrees of state action. On the other hand, I am committed to many ideals I see articulated in the Bill of Rights (which I see as amenable to being interpreted as either a conservative or liberal document, though its historical genesis is profoundly anti-federalist - see Woody Holton's excellent, though dense, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution).

5. Anyway, I don't have a major point there, but it's something I was thinking about today. On that note, here's something else that I've said in various contexts over the years, but which I think I managed to articulate clearly (at least for myself) when talking to Octavian about politics a few months ago. One of the benefits of a solid education is the ability to understand what and why words mean things. I don't think that there is such a thing as a "natural" meaning, but it's useful to be able to figure out what any word means in a particular context, and to be able to figure out if this meaning is intended or accidental, clear or unclear, useful or unproductive, and so on. One of my betes noirs in the past several years is the term "Islamo-fascist" (usually, though not always, used by those who identify as conservative or neo-conservative in American politics). Used as such, this term is an attempt to co-opt the general meaning of "fascism" as "un-American" or "evil" and apply it to certain groups of Muslims and their theological and political claims. I'm not in favor of those specific groups of Muslims, but in fact I can't see how the word "fascist," used with any historical specificity, actually applies to them. When the Encyclopedia Britannica (prior to WWII) included an article on "Fascism," they invited Mussolini to write it, and his essay (whatever one thinks of Mussolini) makes it clear that "Fascism" is about the relation of the state to the individual and about the ways in which the state relates to the economy. Classical Fascist theory differs tremendously from the intellectual and social theories of Communism and Socialism. What it had in common with them in the mid-20th century was that all three forms of government were eventually manifested in dictatorial states (Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's USSR, and Hitler's Germany). But conflating the three of them because of this is to ignore the socialist states that didn't become dictatorships, the complexities of how fascism (for instance) developed and functioned outside of Mussolini's Italy (such as in Peron's Argentina), and thereby to impoverish our ability to analyze and compare productively.

6. Because what we're really talking about in equating those three different types of government are two things: 1) the underlying claim, made by Americans, that anything not capitalist and democratic is bad, and 2) that dictatorships are bad. Now, I agree with the second claim, but I'm not as dogmatic on the first (especially since this country has had a mixed capitalist/socialist economy for a long, long time). The only thing that the various Muslim terrorist organizations have in common is a theocratic ideal used to justify actions by stateless actors. Compare the Taliban with al-Qaida - the Taliban had a theocratic ideal in place as a state, whereas al-Qaida is deliberately and explicitly only interested in a government if it is the restoration of their idea of what the caliphate was - anything less than that is insufficient. Functionally, al-Qaida, the Taliban, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and others are alike primarily in their willingness to use violence and terror (i.e. threat of violence) to achieve their ends. But, and this is crucial, that wasn't an explicit part of Mussolini's theory of Fascism (though I would argue that any system that privileges the system over its constituent members will tend in that direction).

7. Even more interesting is that repressive states are pretty much always governed by either a monarchy or an oligarchy (rule of the few, whether a Party, a junta, a specific economic class, or a series of ministers) who use the available technology to monitor and control their citizens. It doesn't matter if this is justified by communist, socialist, fascist, or capitalist ideology. What matter is whether or not the state behaves in this fashion. By using the god awful portmanteau "Islamo-fascist" we're misidentifying al-Qaida as a state-focused group, but they have never given any indication of wanting to found a state of their own. That's important, because it means that we can very easily misidentify their goals, values, and methods. It also means it's easy to assume that what al-Qaida opposes is diametrically opposite to "fascism." But many things that we have done in the war on terror, under both Bush and Obama (elements of the Patriot Act's attempted negation of civil liberties, the use of extrajudicial torture, various powers claimed for the office of the president, etc.) are actually more aligned with the idea of privileging the state over the individual than we would like to admit. That is, some of our responses to the War on Terror actually look kind of like Mussolini's fascism.

8. On the other hand, calling Bush a "fascist" isn't right either. Cheney, you could make the argument either way. Far more troubling is the expansion of authorized state surveillance, lack of accountability or oversight, and (in Cheney's case) the collusion of industry and state to dominate major sectors of society without any public knowledge (I'm talking here about his Energy Task Force). But if we don't know what Fascism was, then we can't make a productive comparison to current events. And the use of the term "Islamo-fascism" distorts the word's meaning so much as to render it simply a synonym for "bad." And even if you were using Mussolini's definition of Fascism as your guide, it's not at all clear to me that calling someone a "fascist" would have to be an insult or accusation. We live in a democracy, we need to be able to judge between various competing choices. Being able to see what those choices involve and to characterize them in relation to each other and history is important. And precise use of language will help with that tremendously. There are things that one can say in defense of Cheney's idea of government (whether one agrees with them is a different matter) but in order to do that, we need to be able to identify what that idea of government is like in historical and contemporary terms. But we've lost the easiest way to do that by letting our terms drift into pointless generality.

9. When I spoke on the telephone with my Mom on Monday afternoon, Euander insisted that he wanted to talk with me, and when he got on the telephone he informed me that "[I] didn't come to [his] party [on Sunday]." He's four, and he has mastered Avuncular Guilt Production.

10. And that's about it for now.