A rant on leftist naivity - Paul Gilroy

Am reading Paul Gilroy's Postcolonial Melancholia at the moment. I am tempted to say that Gilroy has a brilliant ability to make the debates about multiculturalism break open and reveal their underbelly. However, I find him to be a bit naive when he starts to critique the "civilizationism" of the US. This is because Gilroy celebrates the communitarianism of "ethnic groups" vis-a-vis the individualism of "skin heads" in the example he gives*, while critiquing the products of communitarianism in US - nationalism, global arrogance, etc. I can't figure out how we can celebrate friends without having enemies? This is the Schmitt problem. I think Gilroy sees it. I think his answer is to have nonnational group formations, the first taste of which were feminist and proletariat internationalisms. I find it difficult not to see Christianity and Islam as just older versions of such internationalisms. Which leads me to believe that he is working within a paradigm of civilizationalism without recognizing, or theorizing the way to stunt the growth of such civilazations before they try to take over the world. But don't we need the world to be taken over? I think the only way to keep multinationals at bay is to find some way to take over the world. I don't want some evil leader to do this, but we certainly need to extend the rule of law so far that one cannot evade it by hiring sweatshop workers to make whatevers for horrible pay only to ship this back to a place where their relative economy permits exploitation legally!. Legally. Legal illegality! That is what we have now. Clearly I am juxtaposing small L national law with some type of metaphysical Law, but mustn't we appeal to this? Otherwise we will have exploitation in the name of fashion ad infinitum (indeed we already have it). Communitarianism is the answer but writ large it involves nationalism, defense, civilization. We must face it that when we project ourselves collectively, which we cannot avoid (no one lives in a nameless town), it has the potential to get either ugly or beautiful, but it is the nature of the ethos of the communitas that will fix this. Not a denial of the very species of community. We will never avoid collective identity. If we do we are entirely atomistic, having minimal commonality with our neighbour. I don't want that place. I think I lived in it in Ottawa, the hell-hole of the entire world, where the Canadian apartheid of rich and poor is the Queensway: north of it lies little Italy and China town, as well as dirt poor white land (at least until you get to down town - the desert of capitalism); south of it lies the Glebe where houses sell for multiple millions. People drive beemers and VWs and Suvs. People recycle. Still - Still - this is the inequality of our capital (pun intended) and our liberal vision. Apartheid divides along race, liberalism divides on money and race. Is that any better?

* Gilroy's example:
One man interviewed by the Daily Mirror challenged the civilizationist folklore about the sources of the conflict [between skin-heads and Englishmen of Asian descent] with an important and neglected explanation of how the hatred directed by whites against Asians had come about: "'I'll give you an example of why they [the whites] dislike us so much,' he said, fingering a top-of-the-range Nokia mobile phone. 'It's jealousy. See, we start working young - I started helping my dad at 11 - and whenever we buy anything we pay cash. At 17 we have saved enough for our first car. It might cost two thousand pounds. A coupe of years later we sell it and buy one for five thousand, and by twenty one we've got a brand new BMW.'" (Postcolonial Melancholy 25).

I applaud the communitarianism, but I stick to my objections above.

Here are some lectures on the Canadian Economy by James Laxer.

Liberal Democracy Made Strange

If you are like me you were brought up eating, sleeping and breathing liberal democracy. I didn't know this at the time. Lib dem is the ideology that we practice on a daily basis. But I want to make it strange for a moment, so that we might see what it is.

Open Google Earth. You are far away from the planet. You zoom in, coming closer to a land formation, the middle east, Turkey to Saudi Arabia. On this land are multiple people groups, some of whom follow Islam, some Christianity, some Judaism, others secular. If you hold that your allegiance is to a version of the good shared by a collectivity you see yourself as part of a people group. As a group you occupy land. This land may also be shared by people of other groups. Lib dem tells us that the only way to live in peace with these people of other groups is to privatize our particularities, and live a public life that is difference blind. Thus we sell what we make to people regardless of their group allegiances. The groups we are a part of tell us that the only way we can live at peace with other members is to privatize those things that are publicly contentious. In the broader shared space, I should privatize my religion so that I can live at peace with others of other groups. [Religions invert this: I should privatize my political opinion, so that I may share more with my friends.]

Lib dem is a group that holds a good. The good is that those other groups are a problem because they conflict with the making of a broader group - humanity. In this respect lib dem must make us over as equals (the privatization impulse) so as to extend the group affiliation as far as it can go. The problem here is that lib dem must extend globally, because the members of the species - humanity - extends globally. What falls victim to this broad extension of governance? Particularity. Do people like to have their particularities taken away? No. Consider NY in the 1800s as Scorsese portrays it: the town was a dutch settlement taken over by Brits. Irish, Italian, German and Jewish settlers decided to move in, not to mention African slaves. Did any of these people want to give up their ethnicities, their cultures, their religions? Not entirely. They may have given up one thing or another, but not their entire particularity. NY must be an identity that reflects the particularities of each subgroup. And the groups must not be put into play by the city ID, but rather, held coextensively.

But lib dem likes to limit difference, so it says, especially after the race riots of the 1960s, you can hold on to your ethnicity, but don't make a big deal about your religion. Religion is a particularity that we can do without, because, afterall, it is a "belief", an ideology, which is subscribed. Ethnicity is not, it is natural. Of course this notion of ethnicity has died away, and now ethnicity is little more than an ideology along with religion. All we have left is "difference" - not ethnic difference, not religious difference, not linguistic difference - just homogeneous difference.

The problem with lib dem is that empty difference may be good for keeping peace, but it isn't good for the soul. It isn't good for the mind. It isn't good for liesure. Empty difference is what you encounter when you can't tell the difference between a pepsi and a coke. It is fast food. Lib dem's chief product is fast food. Walmart is the symbol of lib dem governance, because it is a broad shelter under which all people can come and buy anything they want. It collects everything and assimilates it to nothing. Everything is relativized as a commodity, an ideology (ethnicity, religion, sexuality).

So I'm a bit fed up with lib dem, and it is not because I don't like negative freedom, or public agency, or peace, or broadly extended law, or "multiculturalism". It is that I don't like being made in the image of fast food.

Ultimately, lib dem must erase region, localities of all kinds, nations, land demarcations. This is because the ultimate vision of lib dem is to have a borderless globe over which all can travel as nomads. Lib dem is about being unfettered. The problem is that I like to be a bit fettered. I like my linguistic distinctions, my religious views and practices, my local water with its specific minerals. I like things that are rooted, and I like having roots.

Can lib dem be delimited such that it ceases to promote "difference" and begins to allow roots?