roachboy

a few things...first off politics is a type of philosophy. so there's no point in moving any threads around.

human nature.
the debate that is happening around this is in a sense a very old....for example, the notion of human nature is kind of platonic. plato opposed athenian democracy because he understood its de facto rejection of human nature as a category to be a problem, a violation: he thought that meanings were reflections of forms that did not change, were eternal---so it would follow that for plato, human subjective attributes--meanings--are also reflections of forms and so are not simply subjective. so democracy, which put all this into continual play, violated human dignity somehow. hierarchy is natural for plato. democracy, with its revocable hierarchies, seemed not to be so. people forget this about plato when they repeat his arguments.

aristotle moved in the same directions: based on a notion of "human nature" he understood that human communities that were good were those which reflected a "natural hierarchy" that would unfold within ANY human community. each human being has a telos or end--a good community would allow each telos to unfold. but the trick is that notion of telos: you define the "proper" space occupied by a person, or allowed within a community by the fact that the space exists. the end defines the process. that's fine if you're reading aristotle's politics and want to understand what is happening--but if you actually start thinking about human beings and social formations they create, you quickly realize that using an end point to define a trajectory is (1) circular and (2) at the very best reductive.

this notion of human nature--some grid of fixed qualities or attributes (or actions which are then explained with reference to this grid--which is closer to what human nature is, a cheap and easy explanatory category that you apply to particular types of actions ex post facto, but which says nothing about the potentials for action a priori)----derives from a long tradition of anti-democratic thinking. like it or not.

i am not sure there is such a thing as human nature--avoidance of pain, a preference for stasis apart. the categories that are being tossed around to either list features of this "nature" or to talk about what it is are all very abstract--presumably they come from narratives--o i dunno, say biblical narratives which deal with cardboard cutout figures doing Exemplary Things--by which i mean doing things that "demonstrate" claims about "human nature" that are built into the narratives themselves because they function to demonstrate the powerlessness of human beings without some divine agent. so this kind of story will tell you "human beings are greedy" and then trot out a nice little story that demonstrates the point and will conclude with something like "see? human beings are greedy. they need Rules and those Rules ought to come from god. who needs democracy when you have god? in a democracy, people just fuck up. a nice centralized Authority is what is required. a nice centralized Arbitrary Authority."...

which is quaint, dont you think?

problem with these claims is that they are all abstract--they are not theories of subjective dispositions--they do not tell you what this "greed" tendency might be, what it might mean for any particular individual, what associations come to be bundled around it, what triggers it, what desires are associated with it, what actions might follow. none of it. the category is not predictive.

i mean if "greed" really is subjective, then it can be figured in any number of ways, mean any number of things, respond to any number of stimulii, prompt any number of reactions---but all of this follows from the assumption that the social order within which folk operate is netural, and so desire for a different arrangements are not legitimate---so you could even argue that the notion of "greed" serves to paper over objections against a given social arrangement by pushing the issue back onto the mental universe of a particular agent.

in other words, i do not see how you can say anything about deep subjective dispositions by way of a general theory of "human nature"--it seems that you are playing a circular game.

power follows from control over narratives about action more than from actions themselves.

if you want to talk about controlling people: what could be more controlling than erasing space for responsibility for one's own actions by crushing their motives back into some eternal grid or some hydraulic system that animates them but over which they have no influence (except via some god who knows the deal and tells you what to do thank you sir may i have another?) using these cheap devices, one gets to sit on the sidelines and say "i told you so" NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS because the categories you are using are built around a circular logic.

so there is no point in considering alternate social arrangements because i know, armed with my magic grid, that any such experiment will simply fail because the magic grid tells me that social arrangements are superficial, that socialization is not fundamental, that politics is like frosting on a cake.

i know what "reality" is--my magic grid tells me that "reality" is simply a set of occaisons that allow individual subjective attriubutes to be triggered and the same old story to play out as always plays out: nothing ever changes, nothing can ever change.

my magic grid tells me that where we are now in the best of all possible worlds. but all magic grids always say that, the same thing: that's the point of having such a grid. my magic grid of the seven deadly sins, key to explaining everything about human beings when you strip away all information that could potentially contradict that explanation--which is easy peasy when you control the story---tells me what margaret thatcher once said--"when i look around me, i do not see society: i see individuals."

so collective action is like frosting on a cake is a kind of delusion because we all know that reality is solitary, that we have no particular meaningful will because when things get tight the magic grid will assert itself and we will once again become puppets that demonstrate to someone (who?) that political action is a waste of time, that trying to build an alternate order is goofy because in the end we are nothing but this magic grid and we spend most of our time fucking about trying to pretend otherwise--but in the end, the magic grid of the 7 deadly sins always wins.

so why bother?

and the fact that in repeating the human nature routine you are also repeating a component of the ideology you live under which in a sense presupposes that you would understand your own powerlessness first and foremost in order to assure your ongoing gratitude to and for the existing order--not relevant.

the magic grid is outside of history, outside of politics.
god sez so.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite