“As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the cor- porate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race re- quires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon cor- ruption of that system, it is up to the individu- als to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the pro-

cess is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assem- bled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an ille- gal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Execu- tives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and dis- crimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming sys- tem through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, con- finement, and cruel treatment of countless ani- mals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip em- ployees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut work- ers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the

culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have de- liberately declined to recall faulty products en- dangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have pro- duced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or pro- vide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to mur- der prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the tor- ture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass

destruction in order to receive government contracts.

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to ad- dress the problems we face, and generate solu- tions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard! Occupy Wall Street”

— October 4 

Propaganda: “Foolproof Against A Reality Which The Movements Promised To Change…” Hannah Arendt

“The advantages of a propaganda that constantly “adds the power of organization” to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are obvious beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality.”

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1948: Harcourt, Brace, New York (pub. 1979) Pp 363

Saturday, 27 March 2009

“One of the researches most urgently needed is into the whole problem of compromise and noncompromise. I am dangerously and mistakenly much against compromise: “my kind never gets anything done.”  The (self-styled) “Realists” are quite as dangerously ready to compromise. They seem never sufficiently aware of the danger; they much to quickly and easily respect the compromise and come to rest in it. I would suppose that nothing is necessarily wrong with compromise in itself, except that those who are easy enough to make it are easy enough to relax into and accept it, and that it thus inevitably becomes fatal.  Or more nearly, the essence of the trouble is that compromise is held to be a virtue itself.”

James Agee: From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Cited in Robert Coles: Teaching Stories. Modern Library, New York: 2004. Pp. 233.

Centrism may not really exist. Moderation may be an illusion.  Please consider this premise for the moment.

Maybe there is a “center.” While you read our argument, please keep in mind our openness to this proposition. Maybe you are a scholar and a leader in the domain of that “center.” It may exist. Maybe there are several! There may be substantial, reasoned and reasonable policy positions, ethically supported and credible, somewhere around the region of space we fondly and fuzzily call “the Center.” 

We, the Editors, are willing to have this whole line of inquiry be completely wrong. Divisive, inflammatory and offensive, even. Oh, yeah. But we ask you to consider the following as a radical thought experiment. As always, our postulate is not a solution. We theorize not to conclude anything, but to deepen the question and invite the conversation. (We urge you to read our Essay entitled HYPOCRISY IS BAD: A deliberate, Numbing Assault On Our Public Conversation and dated 05 November 2008 at  http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=904 ).

So please indulge us for a moment. We apologize for some weak geographical metaphors, and we ask you to consider this proposition:

Centrism may not really exist. At any “center,” maybe there is no substantial policy, no ethically supportable stance, no passionately held and shared belief (or indeed belief of any kind). Or even a valid opinion. Just observing reality from a place can only be fuzzy, soft, incorrect and epistemologically incomplete.

“The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason: Pp 211

Is it an illusion that there is anything at any sort of “center” that is not vacuous?

There really is no “place” in this region of the map. There is no “center” that can be reliably found and identified by any honest geography, or any honest geographer.

At the empty space at the “center” of our peculiar cartographic discourse there is really only fear and directionless immobility: inertia.

There is something at this certain “Center,” but it is not opinion, policy, ethical conviction, or shared belief. It is nothing of the kind. This something is not without “gravity.” It is fact extremely dense! It is like a black hole of Infinite Ignorance, from which no meaning and communication can escape. (Please see our Essay entitled EXTREMISM IS SAFE: How Is Radical Extremism reassuring? and dated September 5, 2008 at http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=174 ).

It is a kind of perch where the unsure, insecure and ignorant find a craven, sanctimonious pulpit from which to chortle and dismiss.

Have we have simply lost any shared clarity of language about a real, responsible “center” of policy positions and ethical substance? Maybe this is nothing more than a semantic issue, or a matter of confused and uncertain definitions. Has it become confusing and opaque due to imprecision? Intellectual sloppiness? Failure to consult our dictionaries?

We assert that if so, this is in itself a bad thing. At best things are certainly muddied and blurred by confusion. Imprecise, ambiguous usages are simply incorrect. We owe it to ourselves, and to one another, to commit ourselves to certain, precise and respectful use of language.

The richer, more nuanced and multi-dimensional our dialogue is, the more understanding we will share. Multiple meanings and metaphor add immeasurably to the art of communication.  Language is a living thing. Do we kill it by disrespecting its whole, ineffable existence? Believe us; we (the Editors) are social and anthropological radicals. A look around this website should convince you that we strive to be anything but dogmatic stiflers of language.

To be sure, the fearsome matters before us are complex, contradictory and multi-dimensional. Do we imagine we are simply being respectful of cultural and ethical difference? Do we accept another’s unique usage of terms because of her “unique social position, experience and subjectivity?” No. Mutual respect for cultural and personal difference does not allow us to simply invent our own language from our respective “experiences.” It is dishonest and destructive. We can only recover intellectual honesty, and the means to understand one another truly, with intellectual rigor about our meanings.

“Rereading Hofstadter at the end of the nineties, I was struck by the old-fashioned fairness of his scholarship- not the bogus “objectivity” or bland centrism that always locates truth equidistant from two points, but a serious attempt to engage the arguments of opponents and acknowledge evidence that runs contrary to one’s own biases.”

Susan Jacoby: The Age Of American Unreason: pp. xvi

Confusion and blurring may reflect more an intellectual sloppiness than a moral weakness- but we believe that both do us great harm. Mutual respect requires us to commit to complete, mutual integrity and shared, dogged pursuit of what we -and our words- truly “mean.” To fail is a moral weakness.

Moral weakness exposes us to genuine peril, though. We detect a theft of our language-  abstruse and dishonest: a hijack of  our public conversation. We witness the discursive appropriation of power through the appropriation of language and discourse. Done by “Blue Dog” Democrats, yes? Heinous! Grave injury is done to shared meaning, real ethical commitments, and convictions. Honest public conversation is suffocated by the instruments of power and identity. The true natures of ideas (and of ideological conflicts) are trivialized and debased.

But! Maybe worse yet: maybe the “center” is an epistemological falsity, a tautological error and a failure of reason. Under cover of smug righteousness, it mesmerizes us, and confounds and paralyzes serious contemplation of matters of ethical gravity. 

“Moreover, the much lionized American centrists, sometimes known as moderates, are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling-block to deeper, instinctive “ways of knowing.”"

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason:___ (***) Pp 211

Okay. Maybe you are not religious, but not antireligionist. (And not an activist.) Maybe you are uncomfortable with the consequences of religious extremism. Or  hey- maybe you are an anti-religionist. More power to you.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about violence, or dislike it.  Or maybe you are passionately, committedly opposed to it, and you abhor violence by extremists— from any of the cardinal points of extremism. Or maybe you are actively anti-violent. More power to you.

But maybe you are just uncomfortable with conflict. You just don’t like -or don’t engage in- shrill, polarizing conflict.

Maybe you passionately, devotedly oppose hate and intolerance. Hurray. But maybe you are just not that angry with, or hateful toward, others. 

Maybe you are uncomfortable about some of what “extremists” and “extremism” produce. Or maybe you have complete conviction about the unethical and moral wrongs that some extremisms produce.

Maybe you are just- UNCOMFORTABLE. But not an activist.

But does this discomfort distract and obstruct us from having real convictions about what might discomfit us most? Discomfort may push you away from positions of real conviction- about racism, about sexuality, about violence. This is not neutrality, or even reason. Often, it is not even very complicated.

Our greatest discomfort should be at failed convictions, and failed resistance to racism, oppression and violence of all sorts. We should honor, and embrace, this sort of discomfort.

Only a strongly polarized moral compass will allow us to navigate surely.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about men having sex with other men, or women having sex with other women. But… maybe you are anti-gay.

Or maybe you just don’t want to have sex with other men, or women. Maybe you’re just altogether a bit uncomfortable about sex. Shouldn’t we be? It’s fun, but it is really quite an abyss, isn’t it? But maybe you are truly intolerant.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about wholesale violence undertaken abroad by your country. Maybe you are uncomfortable -but just a bit- that it is undertaken in your name.  Maybe you are also uncomfortable with people openly opposing and condemning that violence. You may be afraid to resist it yourself. You may be uncomfortable that you may be a victim of violence. But… maybe you are an ultarnationalist warmonger and advocate, nay embrace it. We don’t know.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about black people starving in Africa, and the oppression and killing there. Maybe you are uncomfortable about black people approaching your car. Maybe you are racist, and oppose the enfranchisement of others. Dunno.

Does discomfort ”pull” you diametrically into the center of a spectrum of beliefs? No. This is repulsion, not attraction. There is nothing “attractive” about it. The only thing “attractive” about the center is that the instinctively craven feel more secure when surrounded by the like-minded (-or the similarly un-minded). The “center” o(of a herd) is a matter of perceived reproductive advantage (for those of us who “believe” in evolution). There is an evolutionarily conferred reduction in the statistical likelihood that one will be eaten- especially by one’s own kind. (Please see our Essay on herd-opinioning, titled “EXTREMISM IS SAFE: How Is Radical Extremism Reassuring?” and dated 05 September 2008 (http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=174 . It is quite funny).

Could the following be true? If you are a “centrist:

This is not pallid neutrality.

You are not Neutral.

You are not Sober. 

You are not Responsible.

You are not Moral.

You are not “Moderate.”

You are not a “Centrist.”

You are not in the “Center” of anything.

You are Nowheresville, man.

You are not in a safe, secure and comfortable place.

You are not a political “actor,” or an “actor” in the world at all. You are not an “agent” and you are not a civic participant.

Centrism and moderation are not a moral stance.

Maybe there is no such thing as responsible moderation.

Try this: If you are a “centrist:”

You are at the margin.

You are at the sideline.

You are “on the bubble.”

You are at the junction of Apathy, Inaction and Passivity.

But you are not safe. You are at risk. You are in danger. You expose us all to extremisms.

You are next.

This is the absence of a moral or ethical stance.

You have an absence of conviction.

An absence of belief.

Maybe this is not really the opposite of taking a stance. That would be taking a stance, wouldn’t it? Maybe it isn’t Anti-stance. But it is an absence of stance, a failure of stance. It may not be the opposite of conviction, but it is an absence or failure of conviction. Not anti-conviction but a-conviction.  It may not be opposed to morals and mores, but it may be a-moral. Actually, it is anything but amoral. We assert that it is immoral, especially because it disguises itself as principalled and gives protective cover to evil. That is not amoral, is it? But let’s not lose sight: does it do wholesale damage to the operations of morals and mores in the world? Does it pretend to morality? Does it do violence to shared meaning, and to language itself?

Maybe you just don’t give a shit. You are still not a “centrist.”

But it may be that these are really horrible failures. Our proposition is that to fail to believe, to commit and to act may in fact be immoral. It may admit and abet the spread of extremisms and destruction. When there is nothing moderate about the beliefs and practices (and horrors) that you oppose, how can you be a “moderate?”

Is there no such thing as responsible moderation?

We argue that what we describe here far worse than irresponsible. Worse than merely sanctimonious, self-righteous and craven.

“Centrism” paints itself as reasoned, sound, grounded, and pragmatic. A sympathetic, accepting understanding of multiple dimensions and nuanced perspectives. It propounds to be knowledgeable and tolerant and honoring -perhaps embracing- of positions that it situates as, well, extreme. Relative to itself.

“Moderation” may seek to materialize and validate “solid” ground simply by finding a sort of “middle” ground among competing claims and calling it some sort of “common” ground. It is defined, manifested, and located in the world only by the coordinates of the “grounds” around it, however unfounded and spurious the claims thereto may be. It is “ungrounded,” and unfounded in the way that colonies and settlements may be unfounded.

It then (perfidiously) presumes to define all else, all that lies around it as far as the eye can see, as “extreme.” It paints all that is “extreme” as fundamentally immature. As lacking its multi-perspectival maturity.

Here: the premise is false that “centrism” is a measured, calculated response to real, complex and consequential situations. It is not measured, calculated or real. By positing other positions as extreme, relative to itself, IT POSITS EXACTLY NOTHING. It is vacuous.

Without inherent substance, “moderation” nonetheless endorses -even requires- the rejection, without serious consideration, analysis or understanding, of anything that another extremist might call “extreme.” 

“…With a renewed esteem, it may be the scholarly equivalent of the general public’s weariness with ideological polarizations that has sanctioned not only the demonization of opponents but the trivialization of all opposing positions.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason: Pp xvi

It endorses the rejection of … -everything. Every conviction, every conclusion, every assertion and every truth. In fact, as a false epistemology, it requires the negation of every real (grounded) position or epistemological stance that matters.

It cloaks such rejection and intolerance in smug sanctimoniousness.

It glorifies knuckleheaded ignorance. More, it makes ignorance more powerful than reason or ethical conviction or truth. It evades them, trivializes them, infantilizes them and then eradicates them.

“As both dumbness and smartness are defined downward -among intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike- it becomes much easier to convince people of the validity of extreme positions. Not only basic knowledge but the ability to think critically are required to understand the factual errors (as distinct from differences of opinion) that generally provide the foundation for policies at the far ends of the political spectrum.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason: pp. 298

We assert that it is intellectual sloppiness, moral weakness, and worse to mistake this “centrism” for a “stance” or position on any sort of issue.

But is it worse? Does it cosign, endorse, legitimize, in very fact give manifestation to, radical extremism? By putting all claims on some sort of “equal ground?”

It is far beyond sloppiness and weakness to mistake this for an ethos or creed. This is a comprehensive tautological error. It is the absence of any such things.

“Most” of us are not “somewhere in the center.” “Most” of us are chickenshit, or lazy.

 We ask: Are there solid, substantial, reasoned and reasonable policy positions, ethically supported and credible, somewhere around the region of space we fondly and fuzzily call “the Center?”

Centrism may not really exist. Moderation may be an illusion. What do you think?

(End)

“HITLERIAN REVELS IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN:” William Goldston

“Organizations such as William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (SS) attracted thousands of members with a program of frank Fascism and anti-semitism. Father Coughlin… had organized the Christian Front as a Jew-baiting fascist group whose members held rifle practice weekly at their camp in New Jersey. Fritz Kuhn’s German-America Bund was able to attract 20,000 people to its Hitlerian revels in Madison Square Garden.”

Robert Goldston, The Great Depression: The United States In The Thirties (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). pp 237

“HOW SHOULD WE JUDGE THE POTPOURRI OF XENOPHOBIC, RACIST, AND HYPERNATIONALIST MOVEMENTS NOW IN THE NEWS?” William Brustein

“Could another racist, xenophobic party come to power today? The logic of the argument presented here leads me to answer yes: evil may be the horrifying outcome of rational politics. If average Germans had known in 1932 what they new in 1945 about the consequences, of Nazism, the Nazi Party would never have attracted a mass following. The Nazi Party skillfully cloaked its aims until it had achieved power. Many present and future demagogues may similarly masque their message of hate. It is unlikely that we can always detect evil before it reveals itself. How should we judge the potpourri of xenophobic, racist, and hypernationalist movements and parties that are now in the news?”

William Brustein, The Social Origins Of The Nazi Party, 1925-1933 (Yale University: New Haven 1996) pp 182

(Advertisement appeared on rear cover of National Geographic in 2008)

“Pity Is A Rebel Passion.” Gilbert Murray

“Pity is a rebel passion. Its hand is against the strong, against the organised forces of society, against conventional sanctions and accepted Gods. It is the Kingdom of Heaven within us fighting against the brute powers of the world; and it is apt to have those qualities of unreason, of contempt for the counting of costs and the balancing of sacrifices, of recklessness, and even, in the last resort, of ruthlessness, which so often mark the paths of heavenly things and the doings of the children of light. It brings not peace, but a sword.”

Gilbert Murray. From The Introduction: The Trojan Women Of Euripedes. Gilbert Murray, Translator and Editor. New York: Oxford 1915.