Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "baldwin"
Your own personal Machiavelli
Machiavelli is one of those writers whose name has totally eclipsed his body of work. One need not have read The Prince to understand what the narrator of a documentary means, for instance, when he says, “The gangster’s rise from the rough streets to the boardroom was one of Machiavellian intrigues and double-crosses.”
Very few people have offered interesting, or counter-cliched insights about Machiavelli. One of the few I can think of off the top of my head is James Burnham. It’s true James Burnham was a much better stylist and more learned man than most of his conservative cohorts these days, but it’s almost unfair to point that out. The contemporary analog of any of the past’s great men and women usually sits in deep shade. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a sixth-rate James Baldwin who sleeps in Spider-Man pajamas.
Mr. Burnham’s great insight (or argument) about Machiavelli was that his recognition of Man’s intrinsic inability to stop conniving and pursuing selfish ends was not something that needed to be sanctioned or classified (as psychologists might do), or celebrated in a materialist quasi-religion, like flat-out greed or Randian objectivism. But one needed, at a minimum, an awareness of their own constant selfish desires and those of the people around them, in conflict and in dialogue with the other (more positive) impulses that humans also carry in them, like altruism.
Most people aren’t really willing to take this first step, to even examine their own supposedly noble impulses to see what lurks behind them. Some of this is just the social intuitionism that Jonathan Haidt re-popularized with his book, The Righteous Mind. In brief, deeper impulses are like an elephant, and our rational mind is like a rider, and we have a lot less control than we think we do, and we’re also in some senses a lot less reasonable than we think we are.
If something is bad for us personally, and good for many other people, there are a whole buffet of rationales (and political philosophies) made-to-order to explain that why getting what we want is not just a utilitarian gain, but a moral good, or maybe even a necessity.
It is very rare, but sometimes and in some instances, people are totally honest with themselves and with others (even their enemies). Here’s a quote by the aforementioned James Baldwin: “The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power.”
This is a lean, ulterior-motive free statement on the most Machiavellian of subjects, power.
Such honesty, however, while the prerogative of a lone, brilliant artist, might not be the best way to win a war, psychological or otherwise.
In a book about the subject of lying in public in order to survive brutal regimes (or lighter sanctions meted out like social ostracism) the economist Timur Kuran quoted a French intellectual to the effect that, “He who does not know how to dissimulate does not know how to live.” Something, I believe, was lost in translation (like the difference in German between leben and uberleben). We are not talking about “living” as in “living it up” but surviving. One must lie to survive, and also to gain power.
Where or how, then, would Machiavelli enter into the struggle for power between a minority and a majority? The by-now long-forgotten and always cantankerous Elizabeth Wright offered up this insight at the heights of the delirium that was Obama Fever (remember, those pre-populist salad days when we were not only going to get Fukuyama’s End of History, but we were going to see the end of racism, soon, too?):
“It's not about ‘social justice,’ it's about power. It's not about doing what's morally right for the underdog, it's about power.
“Wherever two or more groups live in proximity to one another, the men are going to jockey and compete for power. The bunch on the bottom of the social-economic ladder will seek ways to usurp power from those at the top. The prevailing conditions will be unique in every instance, but it's still the same old story.
“The less powerful men will work at devising whatever tools or methods they can, to defeat the dominant men, who usually are the ones with greater weaponry and manpower. For the black man in this country… the endless ramifications that could be derived from his degraded past history, became the weapon of choice.”
The question that comes to me, after reading that, is if the person trying to manipulate their foe into thinking their grievances can be redressed (or even that the two can become friends) knows what they are engaged in; in this case, namely the grab for power under the ruse of a silver tongue rather than a sharpened sword. If the answer is “Yes,” then they are only deceiving the other party. If their quest for power is, however, conceived of even by them as one for justice, then they are also doing a number on themselves.
Which brings us back to Machiavelli, or at least Machiavelli by way of James Burnham. Not recognizing the reality of the way humans in the political sphere operate, and deluding oneself about what they themselves are doing, can have dangerous consequences, much more dangerous than just being honest about the desire to increase one’s own power.
A few months back I was reading a blog written by my professor. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll just say that I found him viscerally repugnant, apart from whatever other issues I had with him, and these issues got severe enough that I almost didn’t receive my master’s degree, and even he himself was reprimanded in our academic headbutting that required the intervention of the department head.
This professor is, like a large cohort of those in the Humanities at my alma mater, an avowed Marxist-Leninist.
In this blog entry of his that I was reading, he made two things clear: that college should be free to all who have the aptitude and desire to go, and that professors were severely underpaid. He was already tenure-track at this point, and he said nothing about adjunct faculty, so presumably he was talking about himself.
There’s no question that tuition fees in America are a scam, and that administrative glut and predatory lending are more responsible for this problem than Marxist-Leninist professors. But what, in essence, was this professor asking for?
He was asking firstly, that the only impediment to having more people for him to indoctrinate (tuition) should be removed. He is in the Language Department and aside from in an elective course, he could not directly indoctrinate the students sitting before him in his causes and politics de jure, but anyone who has been on a campus knows that the medium is very much the message, and that attaining a host of beliefs and ideologies that have nothing to do with one’s field is probably more important than the subject one is nominally there to learn. One goes to a state college to marinate in the ideology of the powerful, in order to become some kind of midlevel functionary in the grinding gears. One goes to an ivy or near-ivy to potentially gain entrance into the ruling caste.
Returning to my professor’s wants or demands, he wants a larger captive audience (self-replicating now that they see that his ideology was partially responsible for them not having to pay any tuition, unlike the suckers who came before them) and he also wants a larger salary for himself.
It could be said that what my professor wants is more social justice for the youth of America, and that he also wants more of that justice for himself. Put another way, however, and just as accurately (or arguably more accurately) what he wants is more money and power.
All fine and well, since the people he is (rightly) railing against already pursue their own interests with sociopathic abandon, and some pushback wouldn’t be unreasonable. But that my professor can’t even conceive of his demands or desires in these terms (even in a lightly-trafficked and therefore pretty much private blog) means that, not only does he have his own personal Machiavelli that calls the tune, but it is deeply enough lodged in his unconscious to do some serious monkeywrenching, to him and to those around him, if he ever really gets his chance. And he just might.
Very few people have offered interesting, or counter-cliched insights about Machiavelli. One of the few I can think of off the top of my head is James Burnham. It’s true James Burnham was a much better stylist and more learned man than most of his conservative cohorts these days, but it’s almost unfair to point that out. The contemporary analog of any of the past’s great men and women usually sits in deep shade. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a sixth-rate James Baldwin who sleeps in Spider-Man pajamas.
Mr. Burnham’s great insight (or argument) about Machiavelli was that his recognition of Man’s intrinsic inability to stop conniving and pursuing selfish ends was not something that needed to be sanctioned or classified (as psychologists might do), or celebrated in a materialist quasi-religion, like flat-out greed or Randian objectivism. But one needed, at a minimum, an awareness of their own constant selfish desires and those of the people around them, in conflict and in dialogue with the other (more positive) impulses that humans also carry in them, like altruism.
Most people aren’t really willing to take this first step, to even examine their own supposedly noble impulses to see what lurks behind them. Some of this is just the social intuitionism that Jonathan Haidt re-popularized with his book, The Righteous Mind. In brief, deeper impulses are like an elephant, and our rational mind is like a rider, and we have a lot less control than we think we do, and we’re also in some senses a lot less reasonable than we think we are.
If something is bad for us personally, and good for many other people, there are a whole buffet of rationales (and political philosophies) made-to-order to explain that why getting what we want is not just a utilitarian gain, but a moral good, or maybe even a necessity.
It is very rare, but sometimes and in some instances, people are totally honest with themselves and with others (even their enemies). Here’s a quote by the aforementioned James Baldwin: “The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power.”
This is a lean, ulterior-motive free statement on the most Machiavellian of subjects, power.
Such honesty, however, while the prerogative of a lone, brilliant artist, might not be the best way to win a war, psychological or otherwise.
In a book about the subject of lying in public in order to survive brutal regimes (or lighter sanctions meted out like social ostracism) the economist Timur Kuran quoted a French intellectual to the effect that, “He who does not know how to dissimulate does not know how to live.” Something, I believe, was lost in translation (like the difference in German between leben and uberleben). We are not talking about “living” as in “living it up” but surviving. One must lie to survive, and also to gain power.
Where or how, then, would Machiavelli enter into the struggle for power between a minority and a majority? The by-now long-forgotten and always cantankerous Elizabeth Wright offered up this insight at the heights of the delirium that was Obama Fever (remember, those pre-populist salad days when we were not only going to get Fukuyama’s End of History, but we were going to see the end of racism, soon, too?):
“It's not about ‘social justice,’ it's about power. It's not about doing what's morally right for the underdog, it's about power.
“Wherever two or more groups live in proximity to one another, the men are going to jockey and compete for power. The bunch on the bottom of the social-economic ladder will seek ways to usurp power from those at the top. The prevailing conditions will be unique in every instance, but it's still the same old story.
“The less powerful men will work at devising whatever tools or methods they can, to defeat the dominant men, who usually are the ones with greater weaponry and manpower. For the black man in this country… the endless ramifications that could be derived from his degraded past history, became the weapon of choice.”
The question that comes to me, after reading that, is if the person trying to manipulate their foe into thinking their grievances can be redressed (or even that the two can become friends) knows what they are engaged in; in this case, namely the grab for power under the ruse of a silver tongue rather than a sharpened sword. If the answer is “Yes,” then they are only deceiving the other party. If their quest for power is, however, conceived of even by them as one for justice, then they are also doing a number on themselves.
Which brings us back to Machiavelli, or at least Machiavelli by way of James Burnham. Not recognizing the reality of the way humans in the political sphere operate, and deluding oneself about what they themselves are doing, can have dangerous consequences, much more dangerous than just being honest about the desire to increase one’s own power.
A few months back I was reading a blog written by my professor. In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll just say that I found him viscerally repugnant, apart from whatever other issues I had with him, and these issues got severe enough that I almost didn’t receive my master’s degree, and even he himself was reprimanded in our academic headbutting that required the intervention of the department head.
This professor is, like a large cohort of those in the Humanities at my alma mater, an avowed Marxist-Leninist.
In this blog entry of his that I was reading, he made two things clear: that college should be free to all who have the aptitude and desire to go, and that professors were severely underpaid. He was already tenure-track at this point, and he said nothing about adjunct faculty, so presumably he was talking about himself.
There’s no question that tuition fees in America are a scam, and that administrative glut and predatory lending are more responsible for this problem than Marxist-Leninist professors. But what, in essence, was this professor asking for?
He was asking firstly, that the only impediment to having more people for him to indoctrinate (tuition) should be removed. He is in the Language Department and aside from in an elective course, he could not directly indoctrinate the students sitting before him in his causes and politics de jure, but anyone who has been on a campus knows that the medium is very much the message, and that attaining a host of beliefs and ideologies that have nothing to do with one’s field is probably more important than the subject one is nominally there to learn. One goes to a state college to marinate in the ideology of the powerful, in order to become some kind of midlevel functionary in the grinding gears. One goes to an ivy or near-ivy to potentially gain entrance into the ruling caste.
Returning to my professor’s wants or demands, he wants a larger captive audience (self-replicating now that they see that his ideology was partially responsible for them not having to pay any tuition, unlike the suckers who came before them) and he also wants a larger salary for himself.
It could be said that what my professor wants is more social justice for the youth of America, and that he also wants more of that justice for himself. Put another way, however, and just as accurately (or arguably more accurately) what he wants is more money and power.
All fine and well, since the people he is (rightly) railing against already pursue their own interests with sociopathic abandon, and some pushback wouldn’t be unreasonable. But that my professor can’t even conceive of his demands or desires in these terms (even in a lightly-trafficked and therefore pretty much private blog) means that, not only does he have his own personal Machiavelli that calls the tune, but it is deeply enough lodged in his unconscious to do some serious monkeywrenching, to him and to those around him, if he ever really gets his chance. And he just might.
