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Tag Archives: property rights

Canadian Values

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Gender culture, Hierarchy, Narrative

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Christendom, conservatism, Enlightenment, Greco-European philosophy, History, Islam, literacy, monotheism, politics, property rights, spirituality

Posting 105

Tags: politics, history, Greco-European philosophy, spirituality, Enlightenment, literacy, Christendom, Islam, monotheism, property rights, conservatism

There certainly was a long history of conflict and animosity between European Christendom and the ‘empire’ of Islam. That history of conflict included the Christian crusades beginning in the eleventh century, as well as both the Islamic Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the “reconquest” of Spain by Christian armies in the fifteenth century. Christendom’s fear of being encircled by Islam at that time inspired its push westward across the Atlantic, and so in part, inspired its subsequent global imperialism. However, since then, an historical singularity has occurred, and almost incredibly, the western cultural system has moved beyond its Judeo-Christian cultural heritage, so that the twenty-first century situation is nothing like a replay of the pre-modern “clash of civilizations”.

It is simply not true, for example, that gender equality is a Judeo-Christian value. Neither Jewish nor Christian culture treats women as equal to men, and that is a glaring dystopian feature of the patriarchal legacy of father-god monotheism. Democracy isn’t a Judeo-Christian idea either, but rather an idea from ancient Greece, long before the Christian era and independent of ancient Judaic influence. The Greek idea of democracy was associated with a concept of political equality with strict limitations but with potential for expansion. That potential had to wait a long time as a weak minority report within Christendom, in remnants of a Stoic, humanist influence, sometimes buried in monastic libraries. It was given some significant boosts in a number of subsequent European cultural developments: the movement for universal literacy in vernacular languages from around the time of Wycliffe (1380’s), violently resisted by the Church; again, in the context of the Renaissance fascination with ancient Greco-Roman paganism came the launch of the printing press in the fifteenth century; and once again in the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on mass literacy, and the subsequent development of the Republic of Letters outside the reach of institutions. It was dissident philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment who built on all that deep groundwork and used philosophical ideas of innate rationality, equality, individual human dignity and rights, secularism, cosmopolitanism, and representative democracy to launch a world-changing critique of their Christian society, until then dominated by dynastic monarchies in alliance with hierarchies of Christian clergy and military aristocracy already well along in looting the world in their brutal imperialism. So, the Enlightenment did not appear out of nothing, like a bolt from the blue, but was another step in an enduring dance entangling cultural legacies with the emerging experience of new generations of humans. The values of modern urban democracies (often still aspirational) should be described as radical Enlightenment values, not Judeo-Christian values. The Enlightenment assertion of equality, based on the universal dignity merited by inherent rationality (related to linguistic competence and literacy), was in dramatic opposition to the prevailing Christian norms based on the dark myth of inherent evil, original sin. Given this history, the cultural conflict we are living through now features remnants of the monotheist religions of the Middle East, all adorations of patriarchal inequality, on one side, against more recent developments of an individualistic humanism from ancient Greek philosophy on the other. This isn’t just a clash between Greco-Roman vs Judaic cultural legacies. This goes deeper. The ancient Greek rationalist philosophers found the portal beyond culture into elemental spirituality, which turned out to be individual as defined by the individual human body, so these different ideas cannot dovetail into a symbiotic coexistence. They are fundamentally incompatible and opposed to one another, founding the unbridgeable cultural divide between conservative and progressive political forces.

Conservatism and Property

Proponents of political conservatism, heirs of patriarchal monotheism, claim to champion individualism, but in conservative ideology, property rights take the place of individual human rights. Ownership of property, frequently including people made into property by being entirely deprived of rights, was the crucial marker of value and status in the hierarchical social order of pre-Enlightenment Christendom. Individuals with the most property have the most rights in the patriarchal worldview, and distribution of the world’s property was mostly completed long ago, establishing “facts on the ground” that conservatives strive to preserve. Property possession brings with it not only an obsession with guns and protection by violence, but also the “us against them” package of emotional triggers. The conservative claim to individualism comes down to placing supreme value on ownership of property, which has an inherent male bias from the long history of patriarchal dominance. Property rights are so dominant in conservative ideology that the holding of legal title to property by corporations confers on them the status of individual persons. This whole property rights focus creates an entirely bogus individualism because holding possession of property is absolutely dependant on a vast organizational support of laws, courts, lawyers, and weaponized enforcement. Conservatism is mainly about preventing or at least minimizing redistribution of property (wealth) by sovereign institutions. Sovereign institutions are otherwise very dear to the hearts of property hoarders because such institutions have the armed power to protect and defend property possession. However, there is a vulnerability in that sovereign power because if it falls under certain influences and ideas of justice, it also has the innate potential to enforce the redistribution of property. When sovereign governments come under the influence of people and ideologies in favour of material equality, then the forces of conservatism push for the limitation of sovereign power.

Andrew Coyne, for example (in the National Post, November 6, 2015), has claimed that the essence of conservatism is the limitation of power, but such a claim is true only in the context of cultural pressures for enhancing material equality. The reality is that property rights are so central to conservatism that on that view the institutions of sovereignty must be restrained when exposed to democracy, because broadly based electorates might not be unreservedly dedicated to protecting property rights. In this context, the conservative rhetoric of limiting the power of elites is also misleading. Conservatives have no problems with lethal military elites (special forces), with sporting elites glorifying masculinity, investor elites symbolizing success, religious elites policing conformity, or elites of heroic patriots as universal role models. The rhetoric against “elites” is mainly resistance to the rationally based individualism accomplished by education, and as such a form of nostalgia for the pre-Enlightenment world ruled by religious supervision, fervent nationalism, and patriarchal family culture. The adulation of pretty much all elites is core conservatism, called “celebrating excellence” or “appreciating exceptional success”. It is practically the state religion of the U.S.A., although actualized in such a way as not to disrupt the traditional hierarchy of wealth and power. Conservative adulation of excellence and exceptional success excludes only those founded on advanced literacy and education, and that is a crucial lens for seeing into the heart of conservatism. Intellectual achievement is the portal to the spirituality beneath Enlightenment individualism, emphasizing spiritual qualities and competencies inherent in every individual, independent of possession of trophy properties, and as such tending toward a universal sociability in conflict with the “us against them” essentials of conservatism.

The current mass displacements of people from wars visited upon mainly Muslim countries by the Euro-American military/ political system is providing a pretext for anti-Enlightenment movements in the west to launch campaigns invoking the pre-modern “clash of civilizations” based on false claims that western culture is still Judeo-Christian and as such threatened by Muslim migration. This historical falsehood is presumably intended to resuscitate the appearance of relevance in outmoded Judeo-Christian beliefs, and inspire a resurgence of loyalty to the Christian legacy of authoritarian patriarchal society, fervent patriotism as a surrogate religion, communal adulation of warlike masculine virtues such as strength, competitive spirit, and kinetic action, restoring females as property, and reverting to attitudes that are anti-abortion and anti-gay. Such is conservatism. However, in the modern urban community such values are all widely and deeply contested by the legacies of Greek and European philosophical Enlightenment. The philosophic revolution, the rising prestige and urban spread of the kind of secular spiritual autonomy modelled in ancient philosophical thinking, is still advancing. Although the commanding heights, the institutions which structure the society, are all bastions of patriarchal culture, and we still live within that nexus of social supervision, we have less fear of, less trust in, and less emotional reliance on authorities of all kinds. Very slowly the historical singularity of Enlightenment individualism, and the kind of freedom and equality it carries, is dissolving the cultures inclined to be anti-Enlightenment. There is no reason to doubt that it will continue to dissolve the legacy cultures of any immigrant proponents of patriarchy. An irony of the current anti-Muslim campaign by conservative groups is that they share many core values with this culture they purport to oppose, because both are remnants of the patriarchal monotheist religions of the Middle East. Conservative groups are despising their own mirror image.

Copyright © 2017 Sandy MacDonald.

Anarchist vs Libertarian

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by Sandy MacDonald in Class War, Culture, Equality, Freedom, Hierarchy, Political Power, Subjectivity

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anarchism, capitalism, competitive materialism, creativity, freedom, individualism, libertarianism, meritocracy, Power, property rights, spirituality

Varieties of Individualism

Tags: spirituality, individualism, freedom, power, anarchism, creativity, competitive materialism, property rights, meritocracy, libertarianism, capitalism

There are two conflicting concepts of individualism, one with a material focus called libertarianism, and the other with a spiritual focus called anarchism. The spiritualist orientation conceives the individual as a gusher of inventive creativity, a fountain from which good things flow. On this view, power is not something that originates from the barrel of a gun, nor is it created by institutional customs and habits of stratification, authority, and subordination. Power originates in the creative freedom of individual spirituality. Emphasis on this spirituality creates a picture in which you want as much originality and sharing as possible, and the best political system is one which enables and enhances that power at the individual level. Tapping into the personally interior gusher of spirituality (intelligence), and bringing spontaneous creations into the world from personal interiority is identified as the way to fulfillment for both individuals and human collectives.

Spirituality, Sociability, Interconnectedness, Equality

Anarchism is an assertion of individual autonomy founded on a vision of human equality. It comes from a history of anti-oppression, and grows organically from the radical enlightenment in European history. Anarchism does not denigrate the importance of human interconnectedness, but makes an effort to remove injustice and top-down human-on-human macro-parasitism from relationships. It is espoused mainly by people who have little property and who live with a history of top-down authoritarian oppression. Anarchism is an assertion of autonomy as a counterforce to lethal violence from historically entrenched factions practicing exploitative repression in the name of some supposedly sovereign community or transcendent civilization.

Competitive Materialism

In the contrasting, and far more common, materialist orientation the individual is conceived as a hollow pit, a kind of black hole, which inherently strives to fill itself by sucking in, taking possession of, and consuming as much as possible of the goods from its environment. Such activity inevitably brings it into conflict with the other black holes in its vicinity. The sucking and the conflict determine the essential character of human existence on the competitive materialist view, which is the matrix of American libertarianism. Libertarians embrace the myth of the free market: competitive self-interest as fundamental and unalterable human nature. On this materialist interpretation of individualism, life is pervasively and inescapably competitive because human nature glimpses fulfillment only by continuous consumption and by winning the conflicts necessary to take the most desirable consumables. Competitions inevitably produce inequality, hierarchy, subordination, and macro-parasitism. The concept “meritocracy” reveals how apparent individualism is meant to morph into an institutionalized power structure, a mechanism of top-down supervision and control. People who win a lot of trophies for themselves are somehow supposed to have shown by that activity that others should be subordinate to them. It is a short slide from libertarianism to fascism.

Given its conception of human nature and motivation, the worldview of American-style libertarians is focused on property rights and ownership of property. The libertarian stance is a declaration of self-identification in terms of trophy-properties and the personal determination to exercise with jealous possessiveness any and all advantages that arise from ownership of property and wealth. It is a rejection of any empathic (ethical) impulse to bond and share, especially with people of colour, again expressing a stratified conception of human relations which is perfectly compatible with racism and xenophobia. This competitive materialism of capitalist free-market libertarianism is a vision of human inequality as essentially good (matrix of magnificent accumulators and their spectacular accumulations), generally espoused by persons who expect to be among those who have plenty. However, embedded in this conception is also an urgent justification for human nature to be controlled because, as an aggressively competitive sucking pit, it is innately unstable and de-stabilizing for social relationships. Since no person is actually viable in complete isolation, even a libertarian expects to have some enduring human relationships. As an expression of political conservatism, the expected relationships of libertarians are hardly matters of speculation, they will be hierarchical and privileging to the masculine as traditionally conceived in the alpha-trophy-looting culture of masculinity.

What makes the possession of property so vital is that it enables living from ownership rather than from labour, which is to say, it enables living on the labour of others. The normal picture of libertarian autonomy assumes ownership of sufficient property to support a profound self-sufficiency. Only a scant few can ever really have such a concentration of resources. Libertarian assumptions are an idealized and sanitized nostalgia for the autonomy of medieval crime family estate owners. Because of that materialist value focus, libertarians are not, and can never be, against strong government (in spite of claims to the contrary). It was those antique medieval versions of libertarians, people dedicated to the strategy of living from property ownership rather than from labour, who conceived and established sovereign governments in the first place, even though they also kept private armies. Owners of property always want the most powerful protection possible against any risk of losing their property, which means they depend on the machinery of armed violence in the form of personal weapons, police, and military organizations, as much of it as can be arranged. Protection of property absolutely requires the “right hand” of sovereign government, the power that comes from the barrel of a gun: armed forces, spies, assassins, and a sovereign who represents property owners, as traditional sovereigns always do. Such sovereignty implies the whole apparatus of class macro-parasitism, and a general culture of top-down orientation, the mass subordination to sovereign power. The propertied minority did not seriously want to restrict sovereign power until governments began to be influenced by people who make a living by labour. Conservative emphasis on the limitation of government became prominent when sovereign governments became, to some extent, an expression of popular choice, chosen by elections with broad enfranchisement.

The Romantic Idealism of Conservative Morality

When individual spirituality is defined as inherently competitive then empathy is ruled out as the basis of morality, since it would always be overridden by anti-other impulses. Without empathy, morality has to be based on the primacy and enforcement of top-down commandments, rules, edicts, proclamations, sometimes presented as metaphysical principles. Right-wing morality is conceived as obedience to a proclaimed list of such virtues and duties: the code of honour, hard work, and self-reliance. (Accepting charity is a moral failing on that view.) Normally, conservative ideology ridicules idealism and conflates it with romanticism as unrealistic and impractical, a cowardly evasion of realism. However, nothing is more romantic and idealistic than promoting authoritarian society based on the ideal of the masculine hero, combined with the idealism of metaphysical virtues and duties. If social arrangements are not constructed on the basis of empathy then they have to be based on enforcement of such metaphysics, and supposing that anyone is qualified to police the commandments requires pure romantic hero romanticism.

Although the purest form of American libertarianism is officially rejected by political parties in the ideological ‘centre’ during election campaigns, some degree of this attitude pervades American culture and capitalist culture generally, so when people like Barack Obama, George Bush, or Ronald Reagan (Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, or David Cameron in the UK), use the word “freedom”, they don’t mean anarchism, they mean the freedom of people with great accumulations to do whatever they like with the vast majority of that wealth, no matter how much publicly created goods such as roads, general literacy, and norms of civility and security of person have contributed to the possibility and production of that wealth. They mean American libertarianism, a freedom for the investor class. That’s all that freedom can mean in capitalism. Other than in anarchism, the political left has no coherent model of an alternative to capitalism nor a philosophically bottom-up or horizontal system of reality, and so, no conception of how to advance beyond capitalism.

Recommended source on anarchism:

The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936, written by Murray Bookchin, published by AK Press (1998), ISBN 1-873176-04-X.

Copyright © 2016 Sandy MacDonald.

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