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?

The mulitiple Individual

"It is necessary to theorize the individual, not as a monad, an ‘unencumbered’ self that exists prior to and independently of society, but rather as a site constituted by an ensemble of ‘subject positions’, inscribed in a multiplicity of social relations, the member of many communities and participant in a plurality of collective forms of identification." (Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 97)

So, I have realized that how the subject is conceived determines the political form it will support. The subject is the metonymic polis. This means that if the subject is multiple, it will support a pluralist framework; however, if the subject is singular, it will support a state that is unified on the questions of the Good, and the Will.

From a Christian perspective, our trouble with liberal-democracy (that it creates homogeneous subjects and supports empire), and the trouble with dictatorship (while it has the power to police the market, the sovereign itself is unpolicable), stems from our inability (the impossibility) to "think" trinitarian forms of government and subjectivity that can articulate singularity and plurality without mystery. Because the acceptance of mystery is conversion. Thus to have a state that is both multiple and plural is to have a Christian state, otherwise, you are stuck with mediocrity, or genocide.

This is to say that I don't think that Radical Orthodoxy can sincerely support pluralism (religious), as their teleology of politics results in trinitarian ends under which "genuine subjectivity" is only available through conversion.

Ding an Sich as Eucharist, infinitizing mater

I just finally put two and two together and realized that in Catholicism, the thing in itself is the Eucharist*, which is itself, infinitely deep, such that going into the eucharist takes us into the Logos spoken before time. Like Alice, travelling through a worm hole (or whatever she does), that is always already with us, the Eucharist comes in us from "outside" so that we are more fully part of Logos, Shalom, Love.

It is true though that a Christian goes into the body, while the body comes into her. There are some interesting border issues, or a-border issues, that have to do with spirit as infinitizing our mater.

Somehow though, this idea of the eternal pre-lapsarian body, which I in no way think ever existed other then as Christ, is in tension with this idea of a seed falling into the ground so that it might birth a plant. I know that by retaining the word body, we resist splitting the Christic body into spirit and body (we retain a unity), but sometimes, the idea of spirit as divorced from body (somewhat Cartesian, somewhat Gnostic), is canonical in Christianity. I was just reading about an interval between esse and essentia in Aquinas (around 250 in Pickstock's After Writing). Paul continually talks about putting to death flesh and living in spirit (but he also talks about putting on the body of Christ, or exhaling his self, that he might inhale Christ 1 Col...) God, the father 'exists' not as a body but as a spirit, as nothingness, yet what do we do with the body of Christ, which is itself spiritual. Do we just conflate spirit and body? It's like Hellenism and Hebraism have had a front on collision, and bodies and spirits are flying every which way. I don't know what to think.

* it is a misnomer to say that the Eucharist is a "thing" because it is a relation to the Trinity through the Son. Thus, the Eucharist as ideal ding an sich, redefines ding as Sein (being). Being as itself.
What bothers me about the discourse of being is that we have psychologized it so that being is only there for us if we attend to it. But being is not like that; it is aready there, whether we think it or not. We may have a heightened experience of being, but being is not just a state of consciousness. Ontology is regardless of psychological flux, not that we could do without psyche, but that psyche cannot erase being's persistence without dieing.
If, when we are in "the cloud of unknowing," "the dark night of the soul", the via negativa, we are close to the Father, it would seem that a psychological reading of this experience would side for non-being (perhaps this is true if the Father is nothingness). But God is the pure act of love, and action does not happen outside of a context. Understandably, God is the context for His act.
When we fold "context" and "act" together like that we open language to God. I guess this is how God is impossible.

Milbank on Islam, the West and Secularity from Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror

Milbank, John
Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 2, Spring 2002, pp. 305-323

Revived Islamic civilization is in some ways a challenge to the Western secular state, but it is also much more like a rival twin than we care to imagine. Recent scholarship is showing just how Islamic the West itself has been. When the University of Oxford was founded in the late twelfth century, some scholars there took over an essentially Islamic project for the experimental control of nature that was at first to do with optics and alchemy. The Cartesian turn to the subject, the idea of knowledge as detached representation of spatialized objects, the exposition of being as univocal, all have their long-term origin in ironically the Oriental thought of Avicenna (ibn Sina).To say, as many do, that Islam was only accidentally, and for a time, the bearer of a Mediterranean civilization to which it was essentially alien is quite untrue. Even though philosophy was less easily assimilated within Islam than
in Christendom, Avicenna and other philosophers were still concerned with ‘‘prophetology,’’ or the nature of inspiration, and this profoundly inflected their rendering of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic understandings of the soul. In this crucible, protomodern ideas concerning subjectivity were forged and then handed over to the West.

In the year 1277, the Christian West reached its crisis: certain drastic edicts issued by the archbishops of Paris and Canterbury meant that it decided more or less to outlaw the common Hellenistic legacy of Aristotle fused with Neoplatonism, and blended with allegorical readings of the Hebrew Bible, which it shared with Islam, Judaism, and Byzantium. A common culture of mystical philosophy and theology, focused around analogy and ontological participation—which has also tended to favor social participation— was rendered impossible. TheWest went in one direction and Islam in another, since Islam, too, inclined in this period to outlaw this perspective. Islam became a doctrinally orthodox, scriptural, and legalistic civilization to the exclusion of dialectics and mystical theology (apart from newly enhanced Sufistic tendencies).

The conventional view is that from that point forward, the West became secular and Islam became theocratic. But that seems to me to be a half-truth. In fact, by bandoning the shared mystical outlook, Western Christian theology started to look more and more itself like Islamic orthodoxy; it started to read the Bible more like the Qur’an, allowing only the literal meaning and construing that meaning more narrowly than it had. The new stress in the fourteenth century, that only God’s will makes things true and right, echoed earlier Islamic Kalam theology and some of the ideas of Al-Ghazali.

The West’s attitude toward evil, with ironically the Cathars safely defeated, started to become more Manichean, again taking over the unfortunate Iranian contamination of Islam by the primordial Zoroastrian tradition. But, above all, in the political domain, the Islamic alliance of the absolute will of the Caliph linked to the will of Allah, and with the right to fight holy wars, was taken over by Christian thought. As earlier in Islam, so now also in the West, a merely de facto grounding of state sovereignty in absolute right to do what it likes is linked to its mediation of the will of God. Thus the early Western nation-state started to fight holy wars within Christendom itself. Modern Islam and Christianity are not after all so dissimilar in certain ways. What I am wanting to suggest here is that theocratic notions of sovereignty are not simply something archaic within Islam that stands over against our Western modernity. In many ways theocratic notions are specifically modern in their positivity and formality (as Carl Schmitt indicated). Bush in a crisis has appealed to the supposed divine destiny of America, and it is modern Judaism that has lapsed into a statist, Zionist form.

There is now a terrible symbiosis arising between Zionism and the American Protestant and un-Christian literalistic reading of the Old Testament in the Puritan tradition, which equates Anglo-Saxondom with Israel. Both ascribe to an idolatrously non typological and non eschatological reading of God’s ‘‘free election of Israel,’’ as if really and truly God’s ‘‘oneness’’ meant that he arbitrarily prefers one lot of people to another (as opposed to working providentially for a time through one people’s advanced insight— as Maimonides rightly understood Jewish election); and as if he really and truly appoints to them, not just for a period, but for all time, one piece of land to the exclusion of others. (Regina Schwartz’s The Curse of Cain, which tries to distinguish true from idolatrous monotheism in the Hebrew Bible, is highly relevant here.) There is also an unfortunate tendency within contemporary theology to play down the Christian ‘‘going beyond the law,’’ which incoherently and anachronistically seeks a kind of alignment with post-Biblical Rabbinic law, as if this somehow had obviouslymore status for Christianity than Islamic law (even if we may well often find the former to be nearer to Christian charity).

Meanwhile, the Islamic Wahhabi, to whom bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda belong, are themselves in some ways very modern. They are opposed to all iconic images, all auratic manifestations of religion; they are urban, middleclass, fanatically puritanical. They are prepared to compromise the Islamic tradition insofar as it stands firmly against usury. And they are thoroughly in love with technology. Bin Laden in the desert with his gun is surely an American antihero: perhaps a sectarian first cousin to Joseph Smith. For it is not an accident that the Mormons—that archetypical American sect, according to Harold Bloom—express such explicit kinship with Islam.

But of course the West and Islam have construed the legacy of theocratic sovereignty in very different ways. The West has invented a secular sphere that is neutral and unmystical: the sphere of a pure balance of power whose control is still nevertheless, in the last analysis, divinely sanctioned. Strict Islam knows only an expression of sovereignty through sacred laws. One may not much care for either variant. But on what basis can one decide that an Islamic sacral state, especially if it took a more sophisticated form than that envisaged by the Taliban, is not permissible? In reality our apparent concern for women and others persecuted by these unpleasant people is fantastically hypocritical: as recently as 1998 the Californian oil giant UNOCAL, with the backing of the United States, was trying to enlist Taliban support in building an oil pipeline through Afghanistan from the former Soviet territories to the north. Meanwhile, the manifestations of asharia law in Saudi
Arabia have not appeared troublesome to Western economic interests. The only possible basis for refusing the legitimacy of an Islamic state would be if Islamic men, and especially Islamic women, themselves decided that they no longer wanted such a thing. This decision would amount though to a new construal of Islam, and a redefinition of Islamic community apart from the sanction of coercive law. Islam would then have to proceed in a more Sufistic direction. It is certainly not in principle up to the West
to decide, but I do not think that the West as it is presently constituted can tolerate this forbearance and all its implications.

Yet properly speaking, this is a debate that Islam should be able to conduct with itself without external impediment. Such a debate could even help us in the West to realize that genuine religious pluralism and tolerance means far more than merely respecting the private beliefs of the individual. Communities also are collective realities that we should respect, within certain bounds of discrimination.

A perpetual war against terrorism can be seen as an effort to resolve the crisis of state sovereignty in the face of globalization. Since in a real sense both the Western and the different Islamic state forms face the same crisis, one can go further and say that both terrorism and counterterrorism, which will quickly become commingled and indistinguishable, are attempts to resolve this crisis. To see globalization on one side and anti-globalization on the other (as Baudrillard perhaps tends to do) is too simple.
(312 - 315)

U.S. and indeed European domestic democracy is a kind of harmless theatrical indulgence for the globally privileged. And this circumstance reveals to us that the trouble is not ‘‘totalitarianism’’ pure and simple, but the emptiness of the secular as such, and its consequent disguised sacralization of violence. There is a desperate need for the United States to reach behind its current Machiavellian,Hobbesian, and Lockean norms for its deeper and more truly radical legacy of Christian (and at times Jewish) associative agrarian and civic Republicanism, which has truly to do with just distribution and the inculcation of social virtue .Among much of the American populace, the spirit of this legacy is still extraordinarily and creatively alive, as anyone who has lived in the United States can testify. Yet it is today rarely able to achieve any conscious political articulation.
(321)

Both empty secular power and arbitrary theocratic power, in their secret complicity, show us no way forward. Neither enlightenment nor ‘‘fundamentalism’’ can assist us in our new plight. Instead we need to consider again the Biblical and Platonico-
Aristotelian metaphysical legacy common to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We should ponder ways in which this legacy may provide us with a certain area of common vision and practice, while at the same time respecting social and cultural spaces for exercised difference.

Such a common vision would eschew all idolizations of formal power, whether in the case of individual ‘‘rights’’ or of absolute state sovereignty. Instead it would trust that human wisdom can intimate, imperfectly but truly, something of an eternal order of justice: the divine rapports of Malebranche and Cudworth. A shared overarching global polity would embody this intimation in continuously revisable structures dedicated to promoting the common good insofar as this can be agreed upon. It would also embody this imperfection through the maximum possible dispersal and deflection of human power.

Perhaps then the noble and at times heroic perpetuation of the local and embedded also could be a proffered gift to the whole globe, which would reciprocate with a measured influence and support, instead of an obliterating equivalence. Perhaps then we would cease to sacrifice the substantively particular to the generally vacuous, ensuring that there was no need for the particular to incite in response the suicidal sacrifice of everything, forever.
(322-3)

Quote of the Evening - John Donne

This is the xxiii stanza of John Donne's "A Litany". I'm interested in the doubled action of prayer in the last line.

Hear us, O hear us, Lord; to Thee
A sinner is more music, when he prays,
Than spheres' or angels' praises be,
In panegyric alleluias ;
Hear us, for till Thou hear us, Lord,
We know not what to say ;
Thine ear to our sighs, tears, thoughts, gives voice and word;
O Thou, who Satan heard'st in Job's sick day,
Hear Thyself now, for Thou in us dost pray.

Quote of the Morning

"In the Roman Rite, as we have just seen, the worshipping "I" is both designated and realized by self-dispossessing acts of doxological impersonation which displace any sense of enclosed autonomy in the subject in favour of that which is impersonated. However, this does not result in a radically discontinuous subject, but rather intensifies his continuity to reside in God. This liturgical impersonation is not a matter of arbitrary mimicry across a lateral plain of untimely interchangeable identities, but an altogether more radical and redemptive mimesis which transgresses the hierarchical boundaries between the worldly and the other worldly. Unlike the random mimetic arts with Socrates expels form the city the transcendence of that which is imitated in the Roman Rite ensures that mimesis does not remain a purely extrinsic act. By impersonating angelic voices or the Trinitarian persons, the worshipping impersonator cannot but participate in that which he emulates, and so, to travel in another's name becomes the nomination of the traveller himself. In consequence, he does not ashamedly conceal his inadequate and stammering voice by assuming divine voices, in the cover manner of ventriloquist substitution, but boldly asserts that he acts "In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti." He borrows this name not in order to deny its own speaking, or to silence its declaration, but in order to disseminate it still further. For, the borrower of the name is also that name's ambassador." (Catherine Pickstock, After Writing, p 208-9)

Stranger than Fiction

I just finished watching Stranger than Fiction, which I really enjoyed. Talk about realism! Anyway, I noticed one of my comp books on the shelf of Dustin Hoffman's office - After Virtue, with a "used" sticker on it. I'm not sure if you can see it in this picture, but I do have to say, the TV in corner office is a nice touch.