Sunday, August 26, 2012

The Election: Way Worse


O.K. Time to talk about the election... sort of.  I wish I could say that the Romney/Ryan ticket is just not to my liking, since I am most definitely liberal-inclined.  However, my take on it is that it is worse than that, way worse.
Bringing me to that conclusion is an article by Jacques Derrida I read that really affected me, as his work is wont to do.

[The article is entitled, "No Apocalypse, Not Now," ( in Psyche:  The Inventions of the Other, V. I. -- a volume that contains several seminal essays of his that he wrote during his "mature" period, when he was beyond paying obeisance to the academic/philosophical establishment. ]

This article, was written in the mid-nineteen-eighties, in response to Reaganesque fantasies of Star Wars and winnable (prevailing through) nuclear wars. Derrida  makes the point (in his convoluted way) that "Nuclear War," is a fable.  It has never happened.  And so, all our policies and preparations are all done as matters of belief:  what we believe will happen;  what we believe people will do in dire situations;  what we believe our national powers can accomplish;  what we believe is important for our very humanity.

And so, for me it raises the question:  What is the state of "belief" today?  My answer, it is not good.

Here's the concern:  with the degeneration of belief in the world, or the de-coupling of belief from Reason, science, documented evidence, etc., what does that say about our vulnerability to nuclear war? It says we are more vulnerable than we ever have been.

The status of belief today is a shit pile of fundamentalism (including that of the Prime Minister of Israel, and the ayatollahs of Iran), fabulous promises of salvation (including those of Mormons), a raging denial of science as to the facts of everything from global climate change to basic female reproductive processes, to vicious, nasty, greedy and self-absorbed (Texas-style) egotism (culminating in an inability to ban assault weapons, for example, or the refusal to expand Medicaid).

My concern is that the Romney/Ryan ticket is completely held captive by those in the furthest backwaters and detritus of these vicious, nihilistic, cruel and atavistic beliefs, and they are even enthusiastic representatives of their own bizarre or failed belief systems: Mormonism and reactionary Catholicism ( and don't give me crap about freedom of religion, I am an atheist, decidedly lacking in the department of religion-based or institutionally dictated belief altogether, I am a philosopher, after all).

As far for the nuclear situation?  It merely dramatizes the stakes here across a range of issues that have expanded immensely since Derrida wrote that paper.  Economic debacles (based on the belief in the all-powerful marketplace), denial of climate change (based on utter ignorance fired by greedy corporate interests), famine or water shortages (used as political weapons by ideologues who subscribe to the beliefs we have indicated) could all accomplish disaster on a scale of nuclear cataclysm.

My concern is that people with beliefs that Eisenhower or George Kennan or JFK held are long gone. People with their beliefs -- that knowledge and a respect for human dignity were uppermost -- are being shifted to one of the two political parties; one of those parties, the Republican one, is nearly completely bereft of people with beliefs such as theirs, that ended wars, that kept us from nuclear ones; and, incredibly, the election is supposedly (I can't believe this), in a dead heat.

The Republican party is now filled with fundamentalists, birthers, climate change deniers, rape deniers, worshippers of the free market and utter disdain, if not down right hatred of people who need some help in our country or others (I can't help but feel that the austerity regimes imposed by the world's bankers and some nations, isn't part of the same resentment and hatred), and they claim the allegiance of half the country!!! Unbelievable.

What kind of a country is this?  If these are the beliefs that are represented by one major political force,  and we possess the power to unleash nuclear war and we contribute substantially and maybe decisively to the likelihood of other modes of disasters, how close are we to having these disasters actually become quite real and actually take place?

My answer:  When we consider how those beliefs, for instance, have stalled national legislation on climate change, and we see record temperatures being set all over the globe, it seems we are quite close.

Then, just to throw a little spice into the mix, in the most recent issue of Playboy, Richard Dawkins, the outspoken atheist, claims that the belief in an afterlife caused Sept 11.  How so?  He argues that people who believe that a better life awaits them in heaven -- 70 virgins or God's forgiveness, who cares -- are more likely to be more than obliging when asked to end their own lives for the "cause."  That seems plausible to me, and a stratagem applied by fanatical rulers to get people to die for them from time immemorial.

So, once again,  if Romney/Ryan is a viable electoral choice, how close are we to a cataclysm of the "fabulous" scale, the unimagined and so far unexperienced scale, of nuclear war?  Seriously, how close?

Derrida makes it striking clear:  Beliefs matter, and maybe matter more than facts, especially about things like nuclear war-level disasters.  My concern is that since we can combat and confront only when we have the beliefs that support measures that address and counter these dire trends, we are close to, or are actually in these disasters right now.  And so, it's way worse than I thought.

And no, I am not going to stop reading Derrida and go to the mall.  I am going to continue to advocate for the Breakout Creatives.  What does that mean?

 First, defeat Romney/Ryan and their Aikin-like, Tea Party fundamentalist deniers.  Then press the arguments on a more reasonable government to articulate a viable belief system through education and constant communication.  Then, press the beliefs that include new philosophy (including Derrida's "deconstruction"), science, fact, respect for humanity and the responsibility for enacting a viable future in every conversation -- don't take it anymore.  And then, hope for the best -- affirm the belief in a viable humanity and a livable earth still occupied by a rich variety of species.  After all, we did get "Curiosity" on Mars.  To do that people believed in something solid (science), workable (engineering and collaboration), worthwhile (aspiration) and inspring (a vision of the future) to do that.  So....???

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Against Ethics or Just Confused?

Comments Spurred by Reading Against Ethics, by John D. Caputo

I like John D. Caputo, I really do.  I like him the way he claims to "love" Levinas or Heidegger: he cites them, uses their work and then nimbly criticizes their excesses.  All to the good, with respect and gentleness.

I like John D. Caputo because he gets so much of what Deconstruction is about, and he wrote a really important book on Derrida (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida) and also other really important and good books about being on the front (?) lines of philosophy as it attempts to cut a new regime of thinking into our discourse.  What could be a more difficult mission than that?

And so these comments, that claim my differences with John (he writes in a way that serves to minimize the propriety of a name, even his own name), are offered in the spirit of a fellow traveler who is out groping into the ....  well, that's the issue.

At issue in the contemporary scene, as I understand it, is what does a post-metaphysical engagement  entail, and what are the parameters (a what?  a how? a call or promise?) with, in and by means of which that engagement transpires?  And then, what does that engagement demand of us in terms of a disposition, a commitment, a construction of a world, and then, an ethic, and even a faculty or method?

John proclaims that our engagements occur in and with the abyssal.  In this vacuum, as I picture it, currents cross and mix and generate ephemeral events on which our sensibility can alight.  Those events, of themselves yield the flesh, which as a surging forth of this eventuation, obligates us to its dimensions, but prescribes nothing to us as to how to enact such an obligation.  "Love and do what you will," he proclaims. "Dilge  [from which the word "diligent" comes] and let events happen," he says. (p. 121)  "We are... all disasters, lost stars, lost in space," he says (p. 233).  And the flesh that obligates us is the eye that doesn't see, the tortured and diseased flesh of the ones who do not even rise to the law.  And then, "Beware of philosophers: they are too much occupied withy strong or healthy people, with autonomous agents and aggressive freedoms.  They miss the disasters." (p. 233-4).

To my ears this sounds like the atheist who clings to the powers of ego to get him through -- even if that ego offers the most ardent sympathy for and empathy with the weak and ill and despised among us.  We alone supply the love, we alone supply the notions and images that elucidate the obligations that rise up through the abyssal muck. It is a picture of the lone human in the dark and forbidding universe, the pre-established and spontaneously arisen creature of mind that conceives and constructs a habitat for himself.  And, yes, it is a very masculine image in my reading.  "Flesh clings to flesh in the anonymity of the night." (p. 247).  Say it ain't so, John.

So I, hardly a philosopher, but loving of the endeavor, offer this notion: The Breakout Creatives: what notion enshrines a greater strength than that?  They present experiments and venture new constellations into which we can follow.  What could be less dis-astrous than that?  So if I am a philosopher -- to beware of -- so be it.  I do not see that the human endeavor rises like a blister on the surface of a fleshed-over abyss.

I see it as a gathering, a singularization out of great and alive cosmic potencies (a la Schelling) that teem with energies that have been left in the wake of the great onwarding that expands the universe and opens new spaces, time/spaces that invites the singular, the events -- of all kinds, and everywhere -- to surge forth.  Some of them stick and organize;  some of these continue their own onwarding and insist on individuating, opening singularization to more expansive and more encompassing modes of engagement with that surging forth of occurrences into the expanses opened by pure cosmic onwarding.

Some of what occurs, as individuated moments -- reaching and groping in order to become more expansive and more encompassing -- are indeed of the flesh.  And this flesh is sometimes glorious and beautiful, and sensate and able to generate organization on scales never before imagined.  Yes, it is obligated flesh to flesh, but it is also response-able to response-able and so, thereby it promises to any occurrence that it will give way to what must needs occur for the event to unfold, for the happening to release and generate in an individuation of its own... and so forth.

Maybe John was in a mood inspired by a quantum vacuum or a Schrodingerian phase shift of superposition -- that was all the rage in the 90's when he wrote this book.  I suspect he has moved on, since he can write so clearly about a Derridian promise, which is anything but abyssally devastated flesh festered on a disaster.

But let me be clear:  the Breakout Creative Project envisions a universe teeming with self-organizing potencies and longings to individuate the spurts of singularities that bode forth in that great spatiation.  Our notion is an ethic, to be sure:  one of generativity, one that promises giving way for a "there" to arise, take and give affect, to rise as flesh and respond as the living boding forth.  Of this stuff, this great star dust, this great astral pleroma we are born and give way to what comes.  Yes, yes.

John, you must hear that by now.