Off to see the Don. _Don Givanni_, that is, in Santa Fe. Back in town Thursday.
Carrol
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Chuck Grimes wrote:
No one can _evoke_ that existential turn. That does not mean that it won't happen, it just means that we have to have an understanding which is both materialist and historical of how such qualitative leaps occur.
Carrol
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CG: I agree with just about all of this, but still there is a role for supportive persuasion. I just don't understand why it doesn't work better. The rest of this post is mostly a rambling re-elaboration of agreement, with occasional provisions.
How did you or I or anyone on the left ever become involved in fighting the prevailing order? Part of the answer is someone, somewhere, somehow moved us in that direction. Sure I was primed for it by various experiences, but people, particularly writers and art moved me into a different view. -----
CBC: I've spent much time thinking about this for almost 40 years, and I'm not all sure of the correct explanation. Roughly, I believe the process usually begins with a contradiction in the ideology, leading to a practice which doesn't make sense except within a wider framework than one brought to the practice. That's very general, but I think one needs a very general explanation to account for the huge variety of personal histories (or, if you will, "psychological types") represented in any political movement. -----
CG: Punctuated equilibrium. The parallel with human history is pretty stunning, and pretty difficult to give a coherent meaning to. -----
CBC: Yes. A warning here. Chuck0 wrote, "Analogies from biology and evolution are useful to some extent, because human behavior is reflects biology to some extent." I would disagree. Human behavior of course does not "reflect" biology but is part of biology. But one cannot base analogies to biological theory on that fact. Both crabs and elm trees are biological, but that doesn't offer much ground for analogies between them. If we want to push the metaphor into a basis of social theory we must abstract from biology and demonstrate that in some sense punctuated equilibrium exists in all systems in which qualitative change occurs, biological or non-biological. Then we can proceed to examine how it works, if it does work, in social sytems. And a second warning. We may be dealing with a tautology. Perhaps the appearance of punctuated equilibrium in social systems is an artifact of our perception (our sense of time), not a material dynamic operating in them. -----
CG: I don't know what the connection is, even if there certainly appears to be one. Perturbations in superficially stable systems that gyro out of stability in the absence of internal or external driving causative forces---the configuration of the system itself generates them. -----
CBC: I would like to think that, if punctuated equilibrium exists in social systems that causes internal to social relations can be identified which generate the rhythm. One possibility, off the top of my head and sloppily stated. And it is a possibility which brings in both biology and agency.
Humans (individually and collectively) do try to maintain stability, consciously and spontaneously. The organism prefers what is, as shown by the fact that life changes (whether positive or negative) almost always damage the immune system. If 10 wonderful changes happen in your life in the next 6 months, watch out, you may be in for a whole slew of physical illnesses until your system adapts to the new and wonderful conditions. Those wonderful changes might even kill you if in the midst of them you are exposed to a contagious illness for which no treatment exists. And this brings us back to what, for me, was the point of departure for this thread: I don't think we should 'blame' the mass of citizens for trusting their leaders and for resisting doubt. Such trust is part, in fact, of avoiding death by pneumonia or inattention at a railroad crossing. Change is, all else being equal, evil and destructive. Even when it is necessary and desirable, it is still always destructive in many ways to human well-being. And so: -----
CG: But there is a philosophical problem in this parallel. In the non-human physical world, including the biological world, there is nothing like `intentionality' or `will'. There are only material systems, forces and interactions. In the human world by contrast there is almost no human activity that isn't completely saturated with `intentionality', or people who are out to do something with all the `intention' they can muster. The collisions either in the small one to one level or on the mass level are all driven by intentions, ideas, dreams, emotion (the reigning ideology of the system itself) and so on. -----
CBC: I think my preceding note offers a response to this. One might claim, in fact, that it is precisely the existence of "intentionality" or "will" that tends to protect "equilibrium" in human affairs. In ANY social order it probably makes rough sense for individuals and small groups to "get along," to accept and trust things as they are. And within capitalism this tendency would (ordinarily) be strengthened. One frequently runs into questions of "Why the left hasn't done better?" "Why hasn't socialism been achieved?" It seems to me that the shoe is on the other foot. Given (a) the way in which capitalism, through its ceaseless generation of destabilizing change and (b) its systemic capapcity to regenerate itself, what is amazing is that popular forces have achieved as much as they have over the last 160 years.
[End of comment. Perhaps to be cont]
Carrol --------- ---------
[Remainder of Chuck's Post. It seems to me that all of it deserves more response than it's gotten. One thing about Chuck's posts whether one agrees with them or not is that they neither engage in nor invite point-scoring. -cbc]
CG: In the atomic world of Brownian motion, gas molecules never suddenly migrate over to one corner of the box. In the human world, that is exactly what goes on all time. It is almost impossible not to pattern behavior.
Now it might be that in the large scale or global view, people do become like systems of material particles. Locally they seem to be saturated with will, intention, and coherent organized behavior. But given sufficient time, globally they behave like material systems under perturbation or periods of punctation to these mechanical systems under evolution or phase changes between equilibrium. Hence the parallel. And hence the dismissal of free will or a causative history of human intention.
If I buy this, and I do to a limited extent, then what is the purpose of arguing and trying to organize? This is Doug's perennial (or perineal?) antagonism with you, isn't it?
Anyway, to answer that question, it is possible to have both worlds. Which you point out under `manure the ground...' (Hey, I only worked in horse stables once and didn't like it.)
In some of the programs for chaos theory graphics, there is what is known as the seed. I think (but don't know) this seed is related to the fact that many of the equations used, have some built-in contradiction, a point or region of singularity where they fail, where they are not well behaved. They fail the classic test for differentiable functions at these points, yet they are otherwise orderly.
Unfortunately, I don't known enough to talk about this correctly. But I think it comes down to either you start with a fucked up equation and use a `good' interval, or you fuck up the interval and use a `good' equation--both approaches require a contradiction.
You can take a well behaved function (continuous, differentiable) and set it up to evaluate an improper interval. One way to do this is to make the function re-evaluate its own previous value, in effect set up a recursive loop. The inverse way to do a similar thing is to pre-process the interval by recursion and use the resulting set as the interval to evaluate.
So the parallel or metaphor with historical points of punctuation is this. If you feed the contradictions back to the system, you should eventually get something like chaos. One way to feed the contradictions is to scream about them over and over (in politics, economics, art, rhetoric, even terrorism). Maybe it will work. Maybe that is the seed. Who knows. In the Marxist view, Capital is supposed to do all this recursion work on its own.
I just assume that the people in charge of Kapital are not that stupid and will correct the system, so it needs much more perturbation than a classical mechanical system.... in the form of the rhetoric of outrage coupled with activist anarchy, protest, strikes, and so forth.
But it would sure be easier if most people just looked at their predicaments. It doesn't take genius to subtract your bills from your paycheck and understand something doesn't add up.
Anyway, despite all this, and given forty years of patience, it seems to me, we in the US are actually at a threshold, just at the boundary of going asymptotic. Personally I can barely contain myself in a kind of hyperactive kid way of twisting around on my seat waiting for the god damn recess bell. What are we waiting for? The other metaphor I use (with myself) is sitting at a dinner table with relatives who all hate each other and are politely snipping at one another other. The tension just get tightened up with each round of insults, put downs, and petty bickering.
I realize that the political economy is not a psychological entity, but it sure feels like one.