I have been one of those people who has been politically adrift for most of my life (to say nothing of being socially out of place). By the right-wing I have always been called 'naive' and by the left I have often been considered cynical. This is fine, I guess, it is probably a good thing to be made up of a healthy dose of idealism and cynicism.

I have been occasionally guilty of referring to some people as naive who don't necessarily deserve it, like one of my readers and occasional commentators, Leo (sorry about that leo). Naive is the wrong word for what many of my political opponents are. I think many people in our society simply fail to see their own life in a proper historical context. Many like to believe that somehow the age in which we live is 'different' from all other ages. These are the people who think that Trade Unions have outlived their usefulness, as though without constant diligence capitalists wouldn't regress right back to the 19th century techniques of controlling and abusing employees, a condition so well illustrated by Engels in his Condition of the Working-Class in England. These are people who, because they were born white in a prosperous Western nation that they have what they have because of personal merit or don't realistically understand that the majority of people in the world continue to live in abject poverty. These are people who fail to understand the degree to which the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling and that capitalists effectively control not just our political agenda but have colonized huge swaths of our social structure a well.

While some of these people are, of course, naive, many of them have just understandably bought most of the ideology into which they were born and raised. And when we consider that almost every part of the media we see is owned and controlled by wealthy individuals who have a vested interest in the capitalist status quo, it is not surprising that more people don't have a better sense of how the power structure of our society is working. Capitalist ideology controls our society much the way ideologies have always dominated societies, by standing in (in most people's minds) for the 'natural' order of things. This is why revolutions in history have been relatively rare; because it is a significant leap for people to question what they have been raised to believe is 'natural.' People have a tough time imagining how this order which appears to grow organically out of human affairs, could ever be really challenged and replaced with something else. It is also why revolutions are often so bloody; because the powerful are fighting for their lives and their defenders are fighting for 'god' or 'nature' or some ideological equivalent, and on the other side of this change they see nothing but chaos.

And while I don't defend violent revolutions per se, they are often historically inevitable. This is just the nature of the social dynamic. The irony is that while the real dreamers often inspire revolutions and revolutionaries, they are often not in favor of the violent overthrow of the prevailing system. This is very true of people like Voltaire, Rousseau, William Godwin, and even Thomas Paine. Paine, who was so violently hated for so long by so many, was a genuine inspiration for the American and French revolutions but when he fled England and found himself in Revolutionary France, he was one of the people that argued against beheading the King.

I am decidedly not naive. I think probably the human race will fail and regress back into a state of barbarism from whence we came. This is because there are many people (and our own Prime Minister is one) who would prefer barbarism and the destruction of the human race than to see an enlightened system of cooperation. Their identity is so wrapped up in the machismo of power and so-called individualism and materialism that they can't imagine a system in which we actually help each other. But society has often progress despite, in in spite of, people like this. The dreamers work to undermine the use and abuse of power and to create a society in which cooperation is the real motive, while the others entrench power in the hands of the few, the privileged, and the abusive.

So I wonder if I am a cynic.

A new Year a new level of Hypocrisy.. . . .

A new year and there is a gloom over the future of our race and our country. Capitalism sawa a major crisis but the reaction was not really to change it for the better but to give more money to the very people who have corrupted the system and are gradually destroying our humanity. CHarles Lamb dedicated the publication of his Works to his friend Samuel Coleridge and in this dedication he said that as we grow older 'life loses much of its poetry.' And perhaps the world itself is growing old and losing much of its poetry. Certainly we live in an age of cynicism and hypocrisy. And perhaps the greatest act of hypocrisy this year was the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama just as he was expanding a neo-colonial military conflict that has little or nothing to do with the defense of his realm. 

I suppose the simple definition of political hypocrisy is vehemently criticizing others for what you would fully support if your party undertook the same actions. And this has certainly become the normal process of things today. Bit it seems that we have gone a step beyond simple hypocrisy to a world of bizarre Owellian madness. Here in our country the Prime Minister has once again prorogued parliament specifically to gain a political advantage and to avoid difficult and pressing questions concerning a serious issue of War Crimes. Now if another party was doing this very same thing we wouldn't be able to hear ourselves think over the din of Conservatives telling us of abuse of power and the downfall of democracy. Indeed in 1997 Stephen Harper even wrote an article criticizing such things and  suggesting that successive government abuse of power has left us with little more than a benign dictatorship. Now the very thing the Conservatives claim to have despised are the very thing they have become. This is a grand demonstration of the level of hypocrisy to which we have reached. And the proof of the cynicism that we have embraced is demonstrated in the number of people who just don't care that we are watching democracy slowly corrode from within. 

Let's hope the new year brings a change. 

A cycle of Cynicism

For a few days now I have not written anything on my blog. Somehow it just seems superfluous. I feel like the young Alvy Singer character from Woody Allan’s Annie Hall. His mother takes him to the doctor because he’s depressed and won’t do anything. When the doctor asks the boy what’s wrong he replies that “the universe is expanding . . . and if the universe is expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.” When the mother exclaims in a worried and angry voice that “He has stopped doing his homework,” the boy says blandly “what’s the point?”

This is how I feel lately. Everything seems rather pointless. Politics most of all. With ‘sexy’ isotope shortages and nasty and crude incompetences everywhere, it all just seems ridiculous. In the next year or so I believe that the Conservatives will finally be pushed from office and it will be a satisfying day when it finally comes. But the ones who lose their seats will have big fat pensions and good jobs in the private sector. Harper will be prosperous and will live to be an old man and die in bed. And others will take the place of the present government, and though they will be the lesser of evils, the same pattern will begin all over again with the regularity of the change of seasons.

I still believe, of course, that things can change for the better. But most of them change so slowly that it is difficult to even notice. Thus cynicism is an easy disease to succumb to. But cynicism is a chronic disease which goes through cycles of extremity. Sometimes one is laid up in bed and at other times you can almost function normally. The Rota Fortunae revolves continually and my cycle is down at the moment. 

Our Amusing Selves...

In Book Two of The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes –

At times we need to have a rest from ourselves by looking at and down at ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves or crying at ourselves, we have to discover the hero no less thn the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must now and then be pleased about our folly in order to be able to stay pleased about our wisdom! And precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings and more weights than human beings, nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves – we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our ideal demands of us.

I very useful insight in this, an age of cynicism, wouldn’t you say? 

Romanticism and cynicism

We have allowed technical-rationalism and capitalism to degenerate our ideology until many people have just accepted that human development has come to a stand-still. Peter Sloterdijk chronicaled this degeneration in his remarkable book entitled Critique of Cynical Reason. In this book Sloterdijk illustrates how most comprehend, to a substantial degree, what he refers to, if I properly recall, as ‘enlightened false consciousness.’ But it is easy to forget that in the 19th century people still existed in a state of pre-cynicism. There was a time when utopia was a place still worth looking for. Here is part of a letter written by Shelley to his friend Elizabeth Hitchner in which he reminds her that even if perfection is not entirely attainable, it is something for which we should constantly strive. “You say that equality is unattainable: so, will I observe, is perfection; yet they both symbolize in their nature, they both demand that an unremitting tendency towards themselves should be made; and, the nearer society approaches towards this point the happier will it be. No one has yet been found resolute enough in dogmatizing to deny that Nature made man equal; that society has destroyed this equality is a truth not more incontrovertible. It is found that the vilest cottager is often happier than the proud lord of his manorial rights. It is fit that the most frightful passions of human nature should be let loose, by an unnatural compact of society, upon this unhappy aristocrat? Is he not to be pitied when by an hereditary possession of a fortune which if divided would have very different effects, he is as it were predestined to dissipation, ennui, self-reproach, and to crown the climax, a deathbed of despairing inutility? It is often found that the peasant’s life is embittered by the commissions of crime … (yet can we call it crime? certainly when we compare the seizure of a few shillings from the purse of a nobleman to preserve a beloved family from starving , to the destruction which the unrestrained propensities of this nobleman scatter around him, we may almost call it virtue). To what cause are we to refer this? The noble has too much, therefore he is wretched and wicked, the peasant has too little … Are not then the consequences the same from causes which nothing but equality can annihilate? and, altho’ you may consider equality as impossible, yet, admitting this a strenuous tendency towards it appears recommended by the consequent diminution of wickedness and misery which my system holds out … is this to be denied?”