I was hoping that we would begin to draw some connections between the discussions we've had here on the death penalty, genocide, revolutionary violence, and the school shootings. so: I'm still asking the question: what is an understanding of justice which is not a repetition of the capitalist reduction of everything to that which can be measured?
Angela -----------
I've been reading through various sections of Niccolo Machiavelli's _Discourses on Livy_, which I left off last year. The idea of dividing out the moral from the the political comes from Machiavelli, and the blizzard of morality over Littleton, NATO, Yugo, Monica, Welfare, Education, and of course the last three decades of this crap.
But I am also thinking about the Left and its fascination with self-determination, nationalism, ethnicity, identity, and race. Very few discussions develop out of a concrete political realm. Instead, the arena is moral. For example, consider the idea of evil. Compelled by some concept of the good, the moral act is to exterminate evil. Since there is no such thing as concrete evil, we exterminate people instead.
The way I am thinking these days is, the question of what is an understanding of justice which is not a repetition of a capitalist system of reduction, would have to be framed as a political question and not a moral one.
What does that mean? I am not sure. Assume social justice is un-attainable. Then what? How about fairness? How about a level battle ground? These are slightly different than justice, and in my mind don't bring with them the sort of skewing of discourse and material interest that the endless pursuit of moral rectitude entails.
I also think the Left in its pursuit of justice in the name of the dispossessed has lost its political dimension and critical edge. So, we get bogged down in which among mutually compelling atrocities is the greater or lesser evil--the measure of justice.
It gets worse. The whole religious or apocalyptic tone to Marxism and the Left derives, I think, from the intense concentration on social justice and the assignment of moral privilege to the underdawg. This amounts to a sales pitch, a moral appeal to right the wrongs of existing conditions.
I am trying to consider a different direction. The motivation is partly tactical. I want to undercut the Right and Neo-liberalism, so that at least in argument, they are stripped a priori. I think the Left in its use of moral justification reveals its own origin as a disaffected bourgeoisie. Disaffection is the origin of its critique, but then that edge is blunted by its bourgeois center, a moral purpose. I want to fight the good fight, but I want to win for a change and only way I can see is by changing the nature of the fight.
In any event, here is a passage from Hanna Arendt, _The Human Condition_, Uni Chicago Press, 1958, that sets up a starting point:
Goodness, therefore, as a consistent way of life, is not only impossible within the confines of the public realm, it is even destructive of it. Nobody perhaps has been more sharply aware of this ruinous quality of doing good than Machiavelli, who, in a famous passage, dared to teach men "how not to be good." .... To him, the alternative posed by the problem of religious rule over the secular realm was inescapably this: either the public realm corrupted the religious body and thereby became itself corrupt, or the religious body remained uncorrupt and destroyed the public realm altogether. A reformed Church therefore was even more dangerous in Machiavelli's eyes, and he looked with great respect but greater apprehension upon the religious revival of his time, the "new orders" which, by "saving religion from being destroyed by the licentiousness of the prelates and heads of the Church," teach people to be good and not "to resist evil"--with the result that "wicked rulers do as much evil as they please." (77-8p)
The references to Machiavelli are from Principe 15c and Discorsi, III, 1.
This needs some translation into current terms. What it amounts to here in the US is the Right and its religious revival has pushed to moralize all aspects of the public realm, what Arendt called the vita activa. The result has twisted up the frame of government and law to resemble a reformed Church bureaucracy that ministers over its lost lambs in the name of a higher good. In other words, the church and state are rejoined. The Left in an attempt to mediate this good, has tried to re-define it in terms of social justice, which is merely a differently constructed good. Or to turn Machiavelli around, we have a reformed public realm corrupted in the name of a greater good.
The simple way to put it is, I want the government back nosing around the boardroom and shop floor, and out of the bedroom and bathroom.
More later,
Chuck Grimes